Slashdot Mirror

When i am doing a fresh install of WIN2K and REDHAT on my comps (a once-in-6-months exercise) i make sure the machine is not even physically hooked up to the net untill i have a software firewall configured, up and running. I keep the firewall packages on CDs, along with config files, and ONLY AFTER these are setup, i go online to install other things, update drivers, etc (usually, only for win2k, not for redhat, which is trivial to bring back to my customized setup)...

having TCP/IP built into the bios, with no firewalling support, and no possibility of frequent/safe upating, no easy way to check for "being" owned is a very bad idea. Also, Phoenix being a popular bios manufacturer, there will be a lot of worms targetting this bios tcp/ip stack.

I dont see a single genuine advantage of having all this crap in the BIOS anyway. I mean, if u hose ur drive, and need to go online for some critical information/software before u can bring ur comp back up, just keep a KNOPPIX cd handy. I personally think BIOS shud be thinning down even further, given none of the modern OSes really use most of the services, and the BIOS mostly just gets in their way. All the bios shud be capable of, is to bring up the OS, and then let the OS configure everything. It wud be so neat to have the OS kernel setup all the hardware, the powersaving policies, everything when it starts up. Of course, the best is to just have the OS kernel as the bios!! just throw this anachronism completely out. (yeah for ppl whos fav os is not linux, sumthing else might need to be worked out ;) ...

Ghoul

Brief terminology refresher: "volatile memory" refers to computer storage that is erased when power is lost.

This could be the basis for a beautifully secure public workstation (hardware security aside). Imagine a machine with maybe 1 GB of RAM instead of a hard drive. Upon boot, a static image of everything could be transferred to RAM.

So everything the user does is in RAM, and most importantly: rebooting is a guaranteed fresh start. Not only would this workstation be tremendously fast, but also relatively secure.

Early last month, I burned a copy of Knoppix, a Debian based Linux distro that can run without installation from the CD. It doesn't modify your computer whatsoever. Perfect for seeing what Linux has to offer.

Not only that, but Knoppix can be installed to your harddrive like a traditional distro.

Back to my story. I burned a copy of Knoppix because my Windows 2000/NTFS laptop crapped itself. Of course, the laptop didn't come with any tools capable of extracting the data from my harddisks. I remembered a Slashdot article about using Knoppix as a rescue disk, so I gave it a shot.

I put the CD in the CD drive, and powerup up my laptop. Within about 30 seconds I was looking at a complete KDE desktop. I had desktop icons for my harddrive, dvd drive, etc... I had access to office software, web browsers, multimedia players, everything! There was even an icon on my taskbar telling me my battery was at 100% charge.

Then I asked myself: "Wait, it didn't ask me any setup questions, but it works"?

Internet access, audio, video, usb, etc... were all automatically detected and setup correctly!

So I played around with the various apps, and then I began to rescue the data on the NTFS formatted harddrives, which was the original purpose for burning this Knoppix CD, after all.

After that successful use of Knoppix, I went to my parent's house and tried it on their computer. Everything worked except for their USB printer. Again, Knoppix booted straight to a KDE desktop in under 1 minute!

Then I tried it on my wife's computer, friends' computers, etc... Knoppix works! Knoppix even works on the computers in the school computer lab, which is 100% Windows 2000.

The beauty of Knoppix is that you can give copies to your friends, so that they can experiment with Linux, and if they really like it and want to switch, they can tell Knoppix to install to their harddisk. Otherwise, if they don't install to their harddrive, Knoppix doesn't change anything, as it runs from a ramdisk by default!

EVERYONE SHOULD TRY Knoppix!

Early last month, I burned a copy of Knoppix, a Debian based Linux distro that can run without installation from the CD. It doesn't modify your computer whatsoever. Perfect for seeing what Linux has to offer.

Not only that, but Knoppix can be installed to your harddrive like a traditional distro.

Back to my story. I burned a copy of Knoppix because my Windows 2000/NTFS laptop crapped itself. Of course, the laptop didn't come with any tools capable of extracting the data from my harddisks. I remembered a Slashdot article about using Knoppix as a rescue disk, so I gave it a shot.

I put the CD in the CD drive, and powerup up my laptop. Within about 30 seconds I was looking at a complete KDE desktop. I had desktop icons for my harddrive, dvd drive, etc... I had access to office software, web browsers, multimedia players, everything! There was even an icon on my taskbar telling me my battery was at 100% charge.

Then I asked myself: "Wait, it didn't ask me any setup questions, but it works"?

Internet access, audio, video, usb, etc... were all automatically detected and setup correctly!

So I played around with the various apps, and then I began to rescue the data on the NTFS formatted harddrives, which was the original purpose for burning this Knoppix CD, after all.

After that successful use of Knoppix, I went to my parent's house and tried it on their computer. Everything worked except for their USB printer. Again, Knoppix booted straight to a KDE desktop in under 1 minute!

Then I tried it on my wife's computer, friends' computers, etc... Knoppix works! Knoppix even works on the computers in the school computer lab, which is 100% Windows 2000.

The beauty of Knoppix is that you can give copies to your friends, so that they can experiment with Linux, and if they really like it and want to switch, they can tell Knoppix to install to their harddisk. Otherwise, if they don't install to their harddrive, Knoppix doesn't change anything, as it runs from a ramdisk by default!

EVERYONE SHOULD TRY Knoppix!

I was pleasantly suprised to find there was a Windows port, so I could finally wrestle my Linux box back from them, although they keep insisting on playing Frozen Bubble, but mostly Rocks and Diamonds.

One of the great things about Rogue (read: NetHack) was that it gave *nix a unified way of talking with various and diverse terminals.

It's not much, but it's a sig.

Lan Pipe is cool, but what about a simple to use Music Server?
Someone please tweak Knoppix boot CD OS into a music server!

PC with, bootable CD drive, as well as Nic and sound cards. Hardisk with digital audio files, normally mounted read only, so hardpower off is no problem.

Samba and Netatalk for music via file sharing and play list creation, and LAN Pipe. Xmms with RF wireless remote and relevant plug in. Also use a webinterface to control the sound card on the server via Xmms command line tool and Web Control interface

LanPipe is nice, but FM Broadcast is MUCH cheaper. It uses existing home radios, and 1 piece serves all, and no pulling cables, with this $39.95 FM solution, or that $189 FM solution.

First person to say "Knoppix" on slashdot?
Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux wanna be

Umm, with regard to number 2...? Have you installed Windows lately???

As in, if I *ever* reinstall that PoS *one* *more* *time* (any incarnation!) I swear I am going to go postal. I call it the Driver Disk Shuffle:

Pop in the Windows CD-ROM, boot to it. Pop in a previous version to prove I'm legal. Once it's done its magic, pop it out and boot up. Then dig around in closets for an hour finding drivers for the sound, network, video, mouse, keyboard, etc. ad nauseum. Linux has, in my experience, better native-on-the-disk hardware support than Windows, and I have less trouble with its installation. Problem of course being that if the drivers *aren't* on the disk, they probably don't exist or won't work without blood sacrifices. (*cough*ALSA*cough*) That's another post, though.

If you want totally no-intervention installation (as in no installation at all) may I suggest Knoppix?

You can't really give somebody new to unix or linux any idea of what it's all about without giving them a real hands-on experience. The best safe way to do that is with a Live CD. Knoppix is one which actually works. Demonstrate it on your show.

For a TV demonstration, try CD Burning.
I installed knoppix on my IBM thinkpad, default install (which may be the only way with knoppix) and plugged in my USB CD/RW drive, it was automatically detected as a SCSI device. Launch CDBakeOven as root (also already installed), drag and drop, and done.

It's as simple as using Roxio/Nero under windows, which means it's come a long way from writing bash scripts for mkisofs and cdrecord.

As it's something that people do regularly, it would be nice to show off that linux can be user friendly for day to day tasks.

Also, OpenOffice.org is quite impressive, intuitive, and visual.

In my (humble) opinion, the programmes included with the knoppix distro are a good general selection for showing off. (:

www.knoppix.com, go ahead and check out http://www.knoppix.com/ and get a cdrom iso image .

This was you can try before you buy and see how 'cool' it is. No need to format your hard disk, no need to know linux.

Knoppix lets you put in the cd, and reboot and SEE AND TOUCH AND FEEL linux before you ever make a change to your system. Although you may need to enter your BIOS and make your CD-ROM a bootable device prior to your harddisk...

While this is not what he wanted, a book, it is better, because you can run linux without having to commit to it, which is what I bet many people stumble on.

I run Knoppix off the cd and off of my harddisk on an older system (p-300) and it is worth trying if you are a newbee.

-mod me up, i need the karma, please!

I haven't tried this yet, but I've heard the Knoppix is capable of installing Debian and autoconfigures most things. A painless Debian installation from what I've read. It does set your default Language to German, but that is pretty easy to fix.

Personally, I used LordSutch.com ISOLINUX mini-ISO image and had no problems.

I think Debian got thinking of the popular GUI installer cdrom from knoppix which uses debian. I think the FreeBSD installer is for babies in comparison to debian's.

So this is a welcome change.

After about 10 hours of this I just lost it. I have wiped the disk, and am now in the process of installing windows on both machines. I will probably never use linux again.

You spent only 10 hours and already lost your patience? I have spent few weeks for few hours every day (with more than 10 hours in some of those days) before I installed my first working Debian system (it was few years ago and now I don't use anything but Debian), so I would say that your 10 hours is nothing!

But seriously, what you should do with your brand new CD burner, is to burn this. You are not going to give Debian a try any easier than that. Check out also this /. story.

And don't give up with Debian. I'm sorry to say it, it's something that doesn't make me any more "31337," but after you install Debian it's actually extremely easy to maintain. And you only have to install it once -- even upgrading the whole distro to next version doesn't need reinstallation, just changing version in your /etc/apt/sources.list and writing apt-get dist-upgrade from your shell. Just remember that APT (Advanced Package Tool) is your best friend. Good luck.

1. Do they need to know how to install the OS first, or should I let them look that up on their own while I make them power-users?
2. What distributions of Linux and BSD should they be first introduced to? (I'm only familiar with Debian, and I know virtually nil about *BSD.)
3. Initially, do they need to be more adept at the GUI, or do they first need to know how to use the shell?
4. Should I give away Debian CDs no-questions-asked, or should I talk with the almighty Parents so little Daniel doesn't install Linux over Dad's 'work computer.'
5. Are there any other key issue I need to think about?

Overall, emphasise how they can get answers themselves. Show them how they can get fish themselves.

1. Nope. Give them Knoppix. Installation isn't hard if you don't mind nuking what's already there . Introduce them to Linux and open source but do not give them reasons not to try it themselves later.

If they aren't knowledgeable yet, they need hands-on experience. One week of telling them the wonders of open source won't make that so.

2. Going with #1...no specific distribution. Offer to give them CDs of other distributions if they ask.

3. Shell or GUI? Neither. Show them the Unix-way; everything is a file and this translates to both the GUI and the shell. On the shell end, show them /dev and /proc and then go back to the GUI and show that some (not all) of the same information is there as well.

4. Knoppix fixes these issues in the short term.

Long term, mention disk partitioning. Unfortunately, that means them buying Partition Magic, getting Mandrake or another distro that bundles PM, or learning a hell of a lot about disk partitioning and backup. When in doubt, suggest easy options but mention how to learn more.

5. Too broad. I'll let others handle that.

You should give away Knoppix

Knoppix is a Debian based LiveCD distribution. It runs directly from the cd. No worries about dads computer getting it's partition table wiped. You could hand these out to the kids day one with no worries.

It contains KDE, OpenOffice, KDevelop, xmms, Mozilla... The list goes on and on. IIRC there is 1.6 gigs on the CD.

Knoppix is excellent as a demo distro, as an easy way to install Debian, but it's also a wonderful survival kit. When you're at a relative's (or friend's) house, you can take your Knoppix CD and a floppy (for the data). You can then hack&compile your projects, write documents (w/docbook or LaTeX). No need to ask them to install Emacs or anything else in their box.
And the nice part is that it's customizable! You can change the packages that go in the CD using apt-get (but you'll need 3 Gb of disk space for that!) I think I'll compile and include the PCTEL driver... It's one thing I'll really need! :-)

But do as the article says: modify it after booting from the KNOPPIX CD. It uses a special compressed-loop module (available from knoppix.net); the problem is that its stability seems to depend on which modules were compiled into the kernel, and the kernel from the CD is known to work fine. I've tried to compile the cloop module for my kernel, but things didn't work (cp -a stalls).

1. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/steven.obrien2/index. html

   http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=gnome&m=1010157075 21446&w=2

   http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley/1596/en/c ygwin.html

Unfortunately, I don't see any new efforts at a port of Evolution to Windows, but as it improves folks will start to demand it everywhere they are.

Mac OSX users are much more lucky -- they can get Evolution right now. Fink lists it as a ported app.

It would be nice to have a Windows CD with all X apps so that folks can see that *nix systems aren't usually text-based or some ugly form of CDE. Till then, I've found the boot CD and full Debian distributionKnoppix to be an ideal introduction. Blew the socks off of a admin I showed it to who didn't know it was possible, and impressed others who like the idea of Linux but can't be bothered with actually learning anything (kids, job, wife, do the math).

Yes, Knoppix is much friendlier, although it requires a full-size CD, not a business card.

1) businesses cancel deals all the time
2) for every deal like this that sinks ms will probably ink three more
3) there is NO way we are going to get the open source boat any further by talking about the supposed evil of the competition, it takes ACTION
4) the best way you can take action is probably by taking one of the toy applications that are currently available for the 'free' os's and turn it into something real, it's a level playingfield out there.
5) nobody stops you from attacking redmond on their own turf by say working all out on a competitor for office, which is much more of a stronghold than the os will ever be.

Case in point, I just downloaded knoppix, and the msword viewer/editor that comes with it can not even properly display the simplest word documents.

And in the past lack of openness from manufacturers was no deterrent to developing applications compatible with their products, reverse assembly is perfectly acceptable.

So, stop whining and start working.

I loved Knoppix the first time I used it. No more partition choices, distributions choices, updates, etc...

I just download the ISO every week or so! Instant upgrade!

The problem is that it doesn't support my language and keyboard on the boot loader (PT).

I tried searching for the source code in the knoppix site so that i could change it, but didn't find any source code for the boot loader options!!!

Maybe i just don't know how to search the web...

Does anybody know how to change the bootup screen?

I loved Knoppix the first time I used it. No more partition choices, distributions choices, updates, etc...

I just download the ISO every week or so! Instant upgrade!

The problem is that it doesn't support my language and keyboard on the boot loader (PT).

I tried searching for the source code in the knoppix site so that i could change it, but didn't find any source code for the boot loader options!!!

Maybe i just don't know how to search the web...

Does anybody know how to change the bootup screen?

The best of those I have seen is KNOPPIX http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html.

After boot autodetection will take care of hardware setup. I have tried it on three computers with different hardware, including one notebook (with pcmcia network card) and it worked well. Network settings is autodetected from DHCP. I did not tested winmodem support (I presume it does not work though). KNOPPIX worth trying.

For the Google impaired: http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Check out Knoppix . Put in at least 128MB of memory (it runs on a ramdisk, ditch the hard drives, and boot them up on CDs. It comes with amazing auto-hardware-detection, and has Mozilla, OpenOffice, and many other programs. I use this currently on a discless machine to play MP3s through my stereo. It really is a nice distro. I think you can even mod the distro, but I haven't tried it yet.

Knoppix essentially does what you're saying.

It's a distro that doesn't use the hard drive at all. It boots from a cd, detects your hardware, and loads up KDE3. It's does a pretty good job at hardware detection, although saving your settings (and files) for the next time is kind of a pain. However, for trying Linux out without screwing up your machine, Knoppix does a pretty good job.

Not to begrudge Gentoo (an excellent distribution IMHO) anything I figure I'd mention a full featured (takes up the whole CD) live CD distribution which offers a good generalized suite of applications: office, technical, programming, game, educational... called KNOPPIX. It works really well as a demo and is even quite usable as a portable linux for regular use.

Many of the criticisms of off-site electronic voting systems, while completely valid in general, are moot in Oregon. We have vote-by-mail here. Thus, most of the putative problems with electronic off-site voting are already here, but at least folks mis-mark ballots and the post office loses things.

I have always thought that putting a properly-written open-source voting package on a Knoppix CD and instructing voters to boot their PC off it would solve most of the problems. The advantages would be automatic tabulation of a large percentage of the vote, saving a bunch of p-mail, and clearer, easier-to-mark ballots. Those who couldn't make this solution work could always vote by mail as they do currently.

For state-run voting kiosks, this also seems a sensible solution. A printer could be added to the system to provide an audit trail.

What am I missing here? None of this seems hard, and the security risks seem less severe than those of the current non-electronic systems, which as we know suffer from frequent failures and occasional serious fraud. Is it just a question of insufficient experience with "new-fangled" systems? Or is there something deeper?

Sounds like Knoppix

But your one sounds interesting too. Is it specific to running gnutella? Why do you see that as a primary use for in memory filesystems?

Gnutellas been sucking lateley though,...

I'd rather have everything I need at once, rather than having to switch floppies and reboot for a different function.

For me a bootable CD solution like Knoppix is a much better choice for a recovery disk.

Your only problem would be people swiping the discs, but you could also offer them for sale.

Whoa, now there's a post from the wayback machine! When was the last time you installed Linux? 1999?

Most distros configure X pretty much automaticaly. Do you want to see how easy it is for X to autoconfigure w/o doing a full install? Burn thisand reboot.

Knoppix is what you need.

It is a big deal if you do it like Klaus Knopper, the author, did it: He uses cloop to transparently decompress the CD-ROM image. Thus he can stuff 1.8GB on a 700MB disk.

Actually, I think it's redhat based.

However, the website also states that:

The following Highlights are available in version 3.1 of this Debian-based (www.debian.org) CD:

A case of schizophrenia, perhaps?

There are many linux floppy only distros, or CD-Rom with floppy storage distros, that are VERY useful.

Linux Embedded Application Firewall (LEAF), which evolved from Linux Router Project (LRP) are floppy based firewalls. No hard-disk, no monitor, no keyboard, 2 Nics, 16Mb ram, and doorstop, ummm... actually I meant a 486, or even a 386. Some LEAF firewalls use a CD-Roms, but need the floppy for settings storage, or kernal bootstraping to run the CD drive on old hardware.

Knoppix is a full desktop linux distro, XMMS, OpenOffice and so much more. Knoppix has a powerful auto-configuration script that recognizes correctly many many sound, video and nic card correctly. But Knoppix sometimes needs configurations for difficult hardware, which are stored on a floppy.

-Nathaniel
Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux Wannabe

This one blew me away.

Germans never cease to amaze me! :)

So go try knoppix now!

It's autodetection is incredible, you can save state/prefs to floppy between boots, and it's very VERY up-to-date.

There is a system that boots from cd called Knoppix.
I never used it, but it seems to be quite mature and usable. It even uses swap partitions on the hdd, if there are any.

Regards,
mgk

Knoppix owns them all. It boots straight into KDE without asking questions, detects most other hardware automatically aswell and comes with an incredible amount of software ready to use.

This is slightly offtopic, but if it doesn't have to be a BSD, Knoppix is a great Linux distribution on a live filesystem CD. It detects most hardware automatically during a very quick boot and gives you an unbelievable choice of ready-to-use software, all selectable from the KDE menu, including OpenOffice, Wine, KOffice, GIMP, XMMS, KDevelop ...

Plan ahead. Change MS Office default file formats to friendly open formats now. Setup all servers to linux. Test users interest with Knoppix bootCD-OS. If Knoppix goes well with users install Win32 versions of favorite Open Source apps. Run your own audit of the company's win32 systems. Duplicate and convert propietary data files to open files (e.g., .doc to .rtf) by hand if you have to, but some folks may have automated it. Find special case win32 software needs, and see if wine will support. Then convert several users at a time, starting with the tech savy, and see if you can avoid mutiny. People have invested a lot of time learning one way, they hate upgrades, (remember the last of many Microsoft and Adobe upgrades?) so be patient when you upgrade your users to Linux desktop.

Changing MS Word users default Save file format to .rtf is easy. It will make all upgrades to OpenOffice much easier, and allow several version of MS Office to play nice, even if you don't upgrade. Years later you will be able to read old MS Office files, hooray!

As many have said:
Setup servers for windows file and print, web hosting, DNS, DHCP, and SMTP (samba, apache, bind, DHCPd and sendmail) in the back office. LEAF, LRP and CoyoteLinux firewalls are an easy place to start the conversion.

Try Knoppix BootCD-OS (debian) on every box, see if users can deal. It is complete Desktop with OpenOffice, Xmms, ogg-vorbis, Gimp, FreeCiv, and tons more on 700Mb CD-R. It auto-detects a ton of hardware, such as sound at each boot, and does not get installed to harddisk. It needs 128Mb Ram, or pagefile/swapfile/scratch disk on a box with less ram. If the user can't deal, eject the CD, and reboot back to MS Windows.

Setup each Win32 computers to run a script stored on a central server, at each boot. It saves a ton of work later.

Getting Win32 users into the OpenSource thing by installing Win32 OpenOffice and Mozilla on your current MS Windows install base. See how that goes with the users.

Convert your existing data from .rtf to .doc is critical. The user is a tease, no email or code! But it is an idea that should be packaged.

Run an audit on your Win32 systems. Get a file dump e.g., "dir /AH /ON /S > m:\filetreedump\box2tree.txt" on Win98, and goto to regedit and dump the registry to text file e.g., m:\filetreedump\box2reg.txt. Someone needs to write a nice perl based evaluation tool to audit what apps and software keys everyone in the Windows network is running.

Converting data is essential. Collecting data from users computer and registry, and inserting it into new email client, and Office apps should be automated, but no one has done it yet.

Wine testing for special apps is important.

After careful planning start rolling out conversions. This way you can convert data, support all the apps, and not loose users.

-Nathaniel

In my (university) environment I noticed that most start with Mandrake, Red Hat or SuSE and sooner or later realize that RPM is a nightmare for keeping a system up-to-date. Then they try Debian and are blown away by its ease of use (me included).

Ok, it's not a mini-distro, but it's a Linux you can carry around with you and can start it without installation:Knoppix.
Knoppix boots from CD and brings up a complete KDE including Koffice, OpenOffice, Kdevelop, Mozilla, many tools for recovery and security. Last but not least your CDRW is supported too. All this is done by having a compressed image on CD with approximatly 2GB of size. As there are still about 20MB free space you can add some of your own stuff to the image - very call for, say, presentation and the like.
You can download a bootable disc-image here.
Unfortunately the whole site is german only and I'm afraid all of the documentation too. But as it is really easy to use just give it a try!

Ok, it's not a mini-distro, but it's a Linux you can carry around with you and can start it without installation:Knoppix.
Knoppix boots from CD and brings up a complete KDE including Koffice, OpenOffice, Kdevelop, Mozilla, many tools for recovery and security. Last but not least your CDRW is supported too. All this is done by having a compressed image on CD with approximatly 2GB of size. As there are still about 20MB free space you can add some of your own stuff to the image - very call for, say, presentation and the like.
You can download a bootable disc-image here.
Unfortunately the whole site is german only and I'm afraid all of the documentation too. But as it is really easy to use just give it a try!

Maybe he could try the Knoppix cdrom first... He can download the iso from here