Linked by Binh Nguyen on Wed 7th Jan 2004 18:08 UTC
When Knoppix was first released it was heralded as revolutionary in the Linux world. Its autodetection and configuration capabilities were unsurpassed. Many of my colleagues remarked that if 'KNOPPIX can't do it, Linux can't do it'. Theoretically, one would be able to get a Knoppix CD, pop it into an arbitrary system, run it, save one's data to a partition, USB stick, etc....), reboot and the existing system would be left completely as it was before the CD was placed in the system.
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I ask if the reviewer was fair for a few reasons:
1> He used an old beta version, 11-19 is out, and NOT beta. Has been available since 11-19-2003
2> 5 min to boot to a KDE screen from a CD on a P233 with a 2mb video card, and he complains? That is an impressive speed - Windows 2000 would not boot any faster from the hard drive.
3> The Trident card and its shortcomings have been mentioned before, so I won't re-hash it.
4> posting the website with a comment about it being for those 'in the know', as if some effort had been made to hide it. Try knoppix.net - works fine. knoppix.com is another knoppix site, with links to the .net one.
5> His comments about memory - that the specs needed to be more conservative because it used all the memory. Ever try it on a machine with 128mb of memory? Same thing. It uses it all because it uses ramdisk and swapping. If there is a LOT of memory, like 1gb+, you may have some physical left, but this is not a performance issue.
6> Claiming that lack of memory caused black icons and artifacts in widgets? Please. Look to the crappy Trident card for that cause.
7> Complaining about having too many virtual desktops, etc. These take virtually no memory unless used. Why not have four?
8> Complaints about security. How would you handle it? It's read-only, after all. It mounts your existing drives read-only as well. You have to manually enable RW in order to affect them, and if you left any other OS sitting around booted and logged in, you could do the same damage far easier.
9> Complaints about office choices. If you don't want OpenOffice on there, then customize the CD. It's easy when you follow the directions. I created a CD without OOo just because it saved enough space on the CD to put a TGZ copy of a vital computer's boot partition on it for recovery purposes.
10> More complaints about artifacts, performance, and the like when running very intensive programs on this system. Run the same level of programs on W2K when installed on this laptop. You need to compare apples to apples, not make observations without comparisons.
Now then - Was the review fair? I think not. The reviewer used an older beta version when a newer version was available. This in itself would lead me to think he was up to something. Then all the railing about speed and video problems when the selected system is ancient and has an extremely temperamental video card. I believe this reviewer started out biased and chose his hardware and software accordingly - to produce the worst experience possible.
I challenge you to run the latest version on a decent machine - one with 1gb of ram and a 2+ghz processor.
Then compare it to an older machine that has a decent video card - a mainstream one, if you please. Perhaps a 400mhz, 128mb panasonic CF28 toughbook? I run it on that quite often, and can play Frozen Bubble or use any of the apps I wish, with no appreciable problems.
I have a P240 MMX system with 128mb EDO ram - I have run it on there with very good response time as well.