Subject: Knoppix reviewed
Sent: 01/09/03 12:50 PM EST
By: tj1037
If you have ever heard of Knoppix you know that it is getting great reviews from everyone. You can use it as a demo to introduce others to Linux , or use it help you rescue those broken windows boxes.
What is knoppix?
Before I get into why decided to download knoppix, I guess I can give some insight into what it is. This is the definition from the knoppix site:
KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.
Getting & Installing Knoppix
There are a few different ways to get a hold of this distribution. The most obviouse of course for those with broadband would be to download it. Those who have dial-up and do not want to wait a couple days for it to download can purchase a copy from a list on the knoppix site. I downloaded my copy within about 2 hours, I burnt the .iso to CD and I was ready to go. Of course there`s really no installation ivolved seeing as the whole thing is on CD. So you only have to make sure you pop in the CD and restart the computer.
What do I do now?
After you restart your computer, you`re presented with a boot prompt. I read the help fle and found that knoppix lang=us would put me onto the english desktop, I also found that if you just leave it alone and let it do its thang you`ll get the same results. After that it goes through its configurations, autodetecting and autoconfiguring your devices on your machine. It bookts up into the KDE 3.0 desktop environment by default but if you read the cheatsheet you can figure out how to get Gnome or a different window manager if you like.
Need something to do
After booting into KDE, I was greeted by a very clean desktop. I was amazed by the great amount of software that came with knoppix, especially programs like The Gimp, OpenOffice, Bluefish HTML Editor, Ethereal...and a bunch of others. Everything runs at a decent speed but even better when you configure a swap partition on your hard drive. That`s right, did I mention it auto mounts your hard drive partitions, it even does NTFS. Your hard drive partitions however are configured as read-only by default, but a quick right click can change all of that...changing it from read-only to read and write. although it mounts ntfs so you can read, you`re not going to be able to write anything to it. I wanted to see if I could browse the internet. I have a network using DHCP so after checking everything in /etc/resolv.conf, I was ready to surf. There are a few plugins that you need to download to make sure you`re able to reach all your favorite sites.
Conclusion
Applications load up a little slower than usual, but thats to be expected for one its on a CD and two its compressed pretty well. I had a hard time printing, only because I selected the wrong driver. Other than that everything was great, an abundance of software, easy setup & configuration makes this a definite one to try. Best of all it does not interfere with your current system setup so when you`re done ..logout..take out the CD...reboot...and you`re back to your original setup. I have such a high opinion of it that I`m giving away CD`s to people I know. If you need a copy leave me a not or drop me an email and I`ll put one in the mail for you. So give it a try you`ll like it.
This review was brought to you by TJ on his new Knoppix CD using Mozilla
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