Ladislav writes: “Knoppix has taken the Linux world by storm. Barely known outside its borders only a few months ago, it has suddenly become the focus of Linux media as a great way of introducing anyone to Linux. This amazing product is a brainchild of Klaus Knopper. Klaus was kind enough to take time off his schedule and agreed to answer a few questions for the benefit of DistroWatch readers.”
Klaus Knopper, Creator of Knoppix Talks to DistroWatch
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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“…taken the world by storm..”?
I will be getting this as soon as I can. Hope more Linux distros follow suite.
MaCOS (<8.1 atleast) was always like this (well on Apple HW), always a life saver when the main HD install didn’t boot or needed surgery in the system folder.
I would wish every OS to be distributed this way, & if I liked it, I could enable the install. Further, the installer should allow a used customised install to be put back into another stand alone CD, so I could make various distros.
If Windows could be packaged into such a form I wouldn’t waste so much time installing it the hard way, but it would likely create problems for trialware software (never ending), so that will never happen.
Did I hear BeOS could be made do this trick?
Is there a Gnome version of Knoppix?
Check the sidebar on the interview page, there are a few links (including two Slashdot discussions) to recent articles and reviews about Knoppix.
The standard Knoppix offers options to boot into GNOME, as well as IceWM. Just enter “knoppix desktop=gnome” at boot prompt.
Knoppix is great but it includes a whole lot of network scanning/administration software like nmap or nessus and development libraries & compilers. I want to streamline it to remove all the plethora or packages & menu entries in hopes to be able to give it to a relativly newbie.
New KNOPPIX remastering HOWTO:
http://knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15
Offical Knoppix Forums:
http://www.linuxtag.org/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl
“I will be getting this as soon as I can. Hope more Linux distros follow suite.
MaCOS (<8.1 atleast) was always like this (well on Apple HW), always a life saver when the main HD install didn’t boot or needed surgery in the system folder.”
You can use the install discs of other distros as a rescue or boot disc too …
C.
This is alot more then a dos commands/linux cli boot disk tho.
“Did I hear BeOS could be made do this trick?”
Yes. Be used to sell a demo BeOS CD that would boot and run without installing to the hard drive. I know because I’ve got one.
IIRC http://www.betips.net/ has information and possibly instructions on creating these CD’s.
In my experience it loads and runs very slow. It might give you an idea of what BeOS looks like and possibly be a good diagnostic tool, but that’s all. BeOS’ speed and responsiveness are its greatest strengths. IMO the demo CD’s were a lousy sales tool. :/
I’m working on a much more streamlined version that is totally qt-free. I like the idea of KNOPPIX, I just don’t like KDE and the fact that he has filled it with all the software he can find.
I plan to have fluxbox and gnome2 as desktops and it’ll be based on Gentoo instead of Debian. I have an ISO up and running and will start to add the KNOPPIX hwsetup stuff now.
It’s really easy in Gentoo btw, just use the livecd package. It’s kind of broken but works well as a guide.
-J
Yes, KNOPPIX *does* include Gnome2 but it looks really horrible. And it uses WindowMaker (instead of metacity or atleast sawfish) as default wm for some reason. Maybe because Debian and Gnome2 does’nt live very happy together yet?
-J
This is the killer distro for Windows users who want to try Linux out without having to compile or configure anything. From the time I put the CD in the tray until I was surfing the internet was three minutes. Yes, you read it right – three minutes. And everything worked right – except for my sound card. Very highly recommended for anyone looking to try Linux without screwing their computer up or getting lost halfway through the install.