[tlug] Knoppix Distro Mini Review

["Jim O'Connell" <oconnell@example.com>]

After reading about the release of Knoppix 3.2 the other day on Slashdot, I downloaded it and burned it to a CD and have been enjoying it quite a bit.
I thought I'd subject you all to a mini review... 

If you're not familiar with it, it's a complete Debian distro with KDE 3.1.1 that runs off a bootable CD and doesn't require a hard disk, though of course, if you have one, it will use it without a problem.  (Perfect if you want to get real work done on a machine that has been hobbled with Windows.)

I thought it might be handy as a rescue/administration disc, but found myself running it on my big NT work machine almost exclusively for the last week.  Really impressive.

It has some pretty amazing hardware detection and boots very quickly.  The last version that I tried would not boot on my ThinkPad, but this one did without a hitch.  As a test, I plugged in my digital camera (usb) and got ready to type the mount command, but before I could, an icon appeared on the desktop for the camera.  I've never gotten Gnome on RedHat to do that.

Strangely, it boots into KDE without asking for a password.  (The user is 'Knoppix') It's not quite a root account, I think, but user knoppix is a sudoer, so there must be some risks.  Certainly I'd want to have a firewall in place between it and the net.  
Net configuration is automatically done with DHCP and worked.  I later changed the settings to my custom settings and was able to make them persistent.
OpenOffice is installed and worked well.  

LinNeighborhood automatically discovers Samba and Windows network shares. 
Soundcard was detected and appropriate music players were installed.
Wine is included.
Gimp works.
Mozilla is installed but would not open.  The machine had plenty of RAM, so I think it was some other problem.
Konqueror seemed a suitable replacement for Mozilla, though I was not fond of the keybindings.

It likes a lot of RAM, but can use a swap file on the HD.  Since I have lots of RAM, I haven't tried this. It reads from the CD drive a *lot* which was a bit annoying at first, but I got used to it.  (A quick test just now on a 400 with 64Mb of RAM had it asking to either add RAM or set up a swap file on the HD.)

After a couple of days, I discovered the utility for saving settings to disk.  You can use either the hard disk, (DOS is fine - it seems to use a dos file for the settings) or some other disk.  I may pick up one of those USB keychain hard disk thingies, just for that, or save everything to my camera.  Once I had saved the settings, I no longer had to reconfigure the network and proxy settings each time, though I now have to type 'knoppix myconfig=/mnt/sda1' at boot.

I haven't gotten Japanese input to work, but I think that's more from not knowing KDE than the fault of Knoppix.  I got it to display menus in Japanese, just using the KDE control panel.  Fonts were quite nice and readable. 

This would be a perfect disk to give to friends who are just getting into Linux.  It's probably goung to work right out of the box and give them a good impression of the Operating system. Certainly it removes the myth of Linux being hard to install.  It may show you a feature or two that you didn't know was available. (Having it automount my camera has inspired me to get that working on my RedHat box. )

Another place I could see it is on a shared workstation.  We have a couple of terminals in the office for outside staff to use to browse the web and check email.  They regularly get bogged down with spyware and crap.  It would be nice to be able to admin them just by cycling the power.

All in all, I think I'll be keeping a copy in my backpack, in case I ever need an instant Linux install.  Really nice product.

Anyway, you can get it here:
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Cheers, 
Jim

www.wirefarm.com


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Jim O'Connell
Global Dining System Support
jim at global-dining dot co dot jp
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