“Every once in a while a product stands out not only because it is innovative but because it just makes sense. It fills some space that has not previously been filled. I’m certain that you will agree that Knoppix — a live Linux-On-CD Distribution — is one of those products.” Read the article at LinuxAndMain.
Knoppix to the Rescue!
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Don’t forget ( http://morphix.sourceforge.net/modules/news ) Morphix – based on Knoppix, but Gnome 2.2 instead of KDE. Hmmm…me likey!
Amazing distro. I downloaded, burned, booted, connected and am now writing this using it. It contains everything that I can think of incl. dev tools and the very latest of it. Too much to list. And all on only 1 CD. The fonts are a little fuzzy and scrolling using the 3rd button wheel doesn’t work for me. Besides from that I’m starting to wonder why I should bother upgrading from RH7.3 to 9 or to SuSE8.2 both to be released shortly. This distro appears to already have it all – except for the online updates.
The fastest linux distro I have ever used and it runs from a CD.
Can’t download anything…
The LightGUI sounds interesting though.
I have Knoppix 3.1 and 3.2, and I’m very impressed. I was surprised at its performance, especially boot time; I was expecting a painfully-slow OS, but it wasen’t that bad at all. Boot time was comparable to Mandrake 9.0 on my Athlon box.
But like claus, wheel mouse scrolling doesn’t work for me either (I use a cheap Microsoft Trekker mouse).
The author of this article should check out the new 3.2, if s/he asn’t already. As for 3.2, I’ve found only one aesthetic flaw (so far.. I’m nitpicky, but knoppix is really great:))… KWrite’s fonts are extremely thin and tall, making it terribly difficult to read. Easy to fix, but every time? No problem if you use a floppyconfig or did a hdinstall, but *shrug*. Everything else looks superb. I loaded knoppix on my ‘linux evaluator’ partition. Worked great, but I still have a load of trouble with ReiserFS installs and no luck at all with XFS ones. It just locks up. The EXT3 install works flawlessly, however. Just like in 3.1, it’s sources.list includes the debian testing & unstable branches… I left that be, just to see how well it worked when I apt-get update && apt-get upgrade… held back a load of packages and installed fine. No troubles with stability… but I’m still a bit concerned about it.
Fonts look great though, as does the UI. I covered it up with the new Mandrake… And, well… while mandrake is nice, it just doesn’t seem to work as well. Mind you, I’m just going by how many snags I pick up in the first week, and Mandrake runs great – but didn’t like the proprietary Yahoo Instant Messenger install, but gaim works great. Knoppix runs YIM fine though, and I haven’t had a single problem with APT yet with the knoppix 3.2 install… but they’re bound to come.
Still, it’s actually becoming my favorite distro. And it’s nice to take around a single CD and be able to show people what I run at home – right on their own computers… While I fix them:P Knoppix is great for everything, saved my computer at least a dozen times, and several friends computers as well. It’s got a nice UI with polished graphics (I really wasn’t expecting to see a custom load screen for KDE 3.2 – it looked great though).
The only thing I can say for Mandrake over Knoppix is that I had a hell of a time getting Java to work in Mozilla with knoppix, wheras Mandrake was easy as pie… On the other hand, in knoppix, Java runs alright in Konqueror – and I never managed to get that to work in Mandrake. Still a strike for Knoppix though – I use Mozilla:P
Anyhow, I’m writing too much, as usual. Bleh. Hope any of this helped;P
Just type ‘Knoppix wheelmouse’ at the bootscreen to enable the use of the wheel on mouses. Works like a charm. There’s some reason why they don’t enable it by default, but I can’t remember what it is right now.
ALL THE NUMBERS GET CONFUSING. Anyway, sorry for the spam post:P Nitpicky.
If you donwload this, there are some (all?) mirrors that have a ‘3.2b’ English ISO dated 3-21 where the OpenOffice menus (and some other things) are in Germine. I downloaded the ISO dates 3-24 and now it works, cept for the ‘LinuxSelf’ icon on the desktop is still in German.
Thanks for the wheelmouse tip. How can I improve the fonts?
Thanks for the tip, Anonymous.
I just downloaded Morphix too. I’ll give it a try as soon as I burn it.
As a full blown distro on a cd its neat and its cool.
As a a demonstration disk, something to share with others or have some fun by going to a computer store and dropping in and rebooting and walking away it ROCKS!.
But as a TOOL its the best. I have rescued several linux machines, and just today I fixed an old laptop that had a stubborn boot record that fdisk froma win 98 machine could not fix.
Heres what I did:
Booted machine with a win98 cd. (Can NOT boot from CD).
Insert Knoppix
cd d:
Make floppy boot disk of knoppix
Reboot.
Boots knoppix. sudo (root) fdisk /dev/hda1
repair harddrive with fdisk (linux fdisk)
reboot with win98cd, fdisk, format , install win98.
For the future: Have a old laptop. Boot with bootdisk (knoppix boot disk) make a harddrive partition for files and one for swap. Boot windowmaker, use old laptop as a computer with knoppix CD as the “hard drive” for apps, use the real harddrive for storage and swap.
May not work: knoppix is not for older pentium machines. Gonna give it a shot anyways.
Can you say Dillo?
is there a way to use SB Audigy with Knoppix?
I tend to use Mandrake’s first disk as a recovery disk. Thanks to the excellent DiskDrake, it does a far better job than Knoppix.
Apart from running demos of GNU/Linux, I don’t personally have any use for Knoppix. And even then, its use is limited. On all the machines I’ve tried it on it runs excruciatingly slow, but those may be because I’m primarily running it on Pentium II/III-era machines, not 3+ GHz PIVs. I’d rather convince someone to lend me a few hundred megs of hard disk space so I can install Mandrake, Debian, or a BSD and have a fast, expandable system that leaves a better impression.
I haven’t *had* to use Knoppix yet, but it’s really fun to use!
Darius, thanks for th tip on 3.2b!
Actually, KNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-03-28-EN is available on some of the German mirror sites. It’s working goo for me!
Type “knoppix wheelmouse” at the boot prompt to have your wheelmouse working properly.
To do a Hard Drive install of Knoppix:
1. Press Ctrl-Alt-F1 after you have booted to the KDE desktop.
2. Type “knx-hdinstall” at the command prompt.
3. Follow the prompts, and reboot into your new Debian based system!
Will it run on Pentium I? I want to make an install on a P I without X that serves as a router. (It already runs as a router at my front door, but with a floppy Linux only) The main reason is that I want to run my desktop without HD and I heared you can run Knoppix off a LAN without a HD. My Desktop already runs without active CPU cooling, so I would have 100% silence without the HD.
[i]Actually, KNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-03-28-EN is available on some of the German mirror sites. It’s working goo for me!
Where can I find out what’s new in these builds? Is it worth going from the 3-24 build to the 3-28 build ?
This is directly from the changelog:
* V3.2-2003-03-28 (quick but possibly important bugfixes)
– myconfig=scan bootoption should work now as expected
– Default for “Use entire partition?” in mkpersistenthome is now “NO”
– Fixed two small ‘break’ errors in autoconfig
– Changed one now Xfree4.3-supported Savage graphics card in pcitable
– Re-added linneighborhood (another SMB browser, now we have 4)
– Default NL keyboard is now en_US in KDE, with option to change to nl_NL
– Fixed wrong dates in CHANGELOG. 😉
* V3.2-2003-03-26 (more small updates)
– mknbi bugfix (Caution: mknbi 1.2.12-1 in debian-testing is currently broken)
etherboot network bootwing with knoppix-terminalserver should work again
– scribus update 0.9.7 (thanks to Fabian Franz for the hint)
– Re-enabled >= 32GB support for some old IDE controllers in kernel
– Recompile linux-wlan-ng modules with gcc-2.95
– New knoblind.bat blind-friendly bootfloppy generator by Osvaldo La Rosa
– Support for lang=be in knoppix-autoconfig
– cdrtools update 2.01+a06
– atitvout
– aumix is now started as background task in knoppix-autoconfig
(some broken soundcards seem to block on mixer-ioctls, preventing
the init script to continue).
* V3.2-2003-03-24 (small updates)
– new PCMCIA wireless card entries
– wavelan-ng-modules is back (forgot that in the previous release)
– removed some older/unneeded gnome libraries
– kdevelop seems to create KDE applications again after updating
some KDE-packages from unstable.
* V3.2-2003-03-23 (Experimental release)
– KDE 3.1.1 from Debian/unstable
– XFree 4.3
– Language bugfixes for english version
– Autosetup and online-help updates for OpenOffice
– ptrace security fix for kernel 2.4.20
– Blackdown Java-RE 1.4.1 update
* V3.2-2003-03-21
– samba, mozilla update
– icewm, larswm update
– kismet update
– evolution, fontconfig update
– gnomemeeting downgrade (gnome2 is broken)
– gnome-pilot
– cpuburn
– dvd+rw-tools
The list of mirrors ar located here:
http://www.knoppix.net/get.php
of course it is slow. It is being loaded from a disc. The cd reader’s speed will directly affect its performance.
Still and I can not stress this enough, knoppix is a great tool. Yes you might have made a Mandrake disk, or some other distro disk, but this is a step above and beyond. Almost any computer can be made to load Linux and then you can do what you want with it.
Jason
I said I had a laptop that could not boot from CD then I said booted with a win98 cd. That should have read booted from a win98 Disk. Sorry about the confusion. That was my point. It could not boot from CD. But knoppix lets you make a floppy boot disk, and then you can run the CD.