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Knoppix for Rapid Desktop Deployment
heretic108 writes "From first boot to full desktop in 20 minutes! Knoppix has shot into the spotlight as a GNU/Linux distro suitable for demonstrating quality Open Source Software, standing out for its ability to self-configure itself into a vast range of hardware, and to run entirely off a CD boot without interfering with any existing system setup. That, plus its fat catalogue of pre-installed desktop software. But OSS enthusiast David McNab has poked a bit deeper, and found that Knoppix can install itself to disk, resulting in a completely configured GNU/Linux desktop system, ready to use, in 20 minutes, hassle free. CD no longer needed! Best of both worlds - use as a GNU/Linux demo disk, and if the user likes it, it's a snap to install permanently. I can't think of any distro that comes close to this, for ease and speed of setup. I found McNab's short Knoppix Installation Howto which gives a very brief and easy guide. With this rapid setup ability, Debian-based Knoppix makes a great contribution to the catalogue."
No Blue Screen of Death? No individual user licenses? No aborted installs? No minesweeper? Who actually would use this newfangled thing?
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
if it is so wonderful, how come other distributions not use similar hardware detection? we have seen linux distros go in and out, people complain and complain about hardware detection, but we have yet to see one of the bigger distributions adopt a system similar to what knoppix is doing. i mean the worst thing that could happen is could detect the wrong hardware (tough, but possible) and you will have to remove the modules. but otherwise, seems like a win win situation.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
one exception ofcourse is mandrake, but i have tried it, and well, it doesn't seem to work that well. perhaps the newer versions are better.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
This might be a bit off-topic, but hey, at least I'm not wasting your time with an Ask Slashdot:
Can someone point me towards a live-CD that includes Flash, RealPlayer, and the ability to play as many multimedia files as possible? OpenOffice and some kind of Gecko browser are also required.
The reason is that Windows is just not cutting it on my girlfriend's computer. She's having all sorts of weird technical problems so I've decided something needs to be done. Unfortunately, my Debian is so wacked out and constantly tweaked into a semi-usable state that she doesn't trust Linux. So what I need is something she can use for a few weeks -- still accessing her docs on her Windows partition -- until she's sold.
How much is one of these frontpage /. ads? Please contact me, I may be interested in buying one.
Just my own little story how Knoppix helped me.. =)
My fiancee was volunteered to teach a class in algorithm design and c++ programming at the highschool she teaches at (for honors credit) -- the problems, though, were numerous.
She had to deal with:
1) NO funds available for purchasing of any programming utilities
2) Computer ADMIN not allowing her to install ANY programming software (borland freeware, DJGPP, etc) to disk
3) NOT allowing students to write (even temporary files) to the hard drive...
We looked at a LOT of different ways to handle these problems. Finally we decided that maybe using a linux livecd and having a disk with gcc/g++ for each student. Looked at a few different types that were mentioned on slashdot but NONE seemed to work well... until we saw a VERY old article that some user mentioned Knoppix.. went to it, d/l'ed it, burned to disk, popped it in and rebooted...
*WOW*
Knoppix comes fully loaded with office utilities, games (PLENTY of games), graphics software, but most importantly DEVELOPMENT software already on it. We were in love with it (in truth, my other box is still running it from cd just bc we liked it =) -- even more important was that it ran without the need for ANY files or ANY changes to the hard drive.
It discovered all devices hooked to my computer and actually had them working (AS WELL as the internet connection from "straight to cable modem" or "over network using ICS" setups we have at my house).
She took it to her school, popped it in, rebooted the computers (after fidgeting with bios to allow boot from cd, laugh) and QUICKLY came up with the Knoppix desktop. It certainly didnt take more than a min or so to bootup...
Most surprising thing was that for a "ran from cd" linux it was REMARKEBLY fast. Lets just say I was VERY impressed with Knoppix and recommend it for ANY new person. Without the threat of "ruining their computer," they can just pop in knoppix to try out linux... if they hate it, pop it out and its finished.
So in the end, fiancee's school didnt have to shell out money, didnt "screw up the computers" (sigh), have a setup for students to write and compile programs, and exposed students (and teachers) to Linux. I would say the entire situation was a big WIN =)
Knoppix is a GREAT distro. I regularly give it to people to try out Linux. It also makes a great recovery disk. I can go anywhere and pop it into a PC with a CD-ROM drive and it boots giving me all the tools I need.
/mnt/WINNT to /mnt/GoodDisk. Have a nice day.
What? Your Windows 2000 server's dynamic disk has crashed, again? No problem. Insert Knoppix. Copy
... is the sheer number of packages included on a *single* CD ROM. It's incredible. (Plus, they tend to be quite recent versions, and with some programs, like the excellent and promising Scribus, that's important because progress is rapid.)
Also, if you want to show someone the sheer variety of free and Free browsers available with Linux, Scribus has konqueror, mozilla, dillo, not to mention text-based ones as well.
It's an amazing distro -- demoware that really works. Anecdote: I have used Knoppix, from the CD, as my only OS for several days when using a borrowed laptop on which I could not politely do an OS swap. Except a slight slowness with the CD up-and-down-spinning, it was hard to tell I wasn't just using a recent Debian system installed normally.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Have you tried Knoppix? Did you read the article? I would think that Knoppix would fit your bill perfectly.
Did I just get trolled?
except it used the OSS sound system and the OSS module for my soundcard does not work...if it used ALSA I would be very happy.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Never having run Windows XP, could you tell me if it will run from the CD without touching my hard disk? I might be interested in trying it out, but I don't want to loose any data in the process.
-Rusty
You never know...
One really neat use of this would be to bundle VMWare into the CD dist so that you could actually drop the CD into a machine you don't trust (maybe your employer's?) to be free of keystroke loggers, etc.
Use Linux for any "private" work you want to do, use encryption tools (ssh, tunneling, etc.) to get out your corporate firewall to a trusted machine, and then simply run your other operating system inside VMWare for doing your work.
Does Knoppix make it easy to add new things into the cd image?
Yeah, but installing Windows XP is the equvalent of only installing the Linux kernel, XFree86 and the KDE packages. Once you add the time on to install all of the games, Office software, development tools, etc that Knoppix already comes with, that installation time doesn't look nearly as impressive.
I'm not normally a debian zealot, and by me using the term zealot, you can figure out what I think of people who constantly tell me that I'm wrong for using redhat and mandrake. That having been said, I've really got to respect this. Well done.
Personally, I don't care about having 10 different editors, but I'm sure some people do. I can almost live entirely off of the redhat 8.0 personal desktop (I have other machines to compile on), save for the lack of mp3-ability out of the box (freshrpms, I love you) and dvd-ability (again, go freshrpms). But the ability to do something like this, be able to just install it on to a hard drive, type a single command for updates, no registering or anything, and continue on, is very nice.
I think this years install fest will see a lot more debian installs than it will redhat or mandrake because of this.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
There's another Debian-based bootable distro, called LNX-BBC. It is only 50 megs, but you can still install Debian from it and apt-get all the packages you want.
http://www.lnx-bbc.org/
Wrongo buckaroo!
Read the knoppix documentation... it does not, by default, install ANYTHING to ANY hard drive.. you have the option to put a swap file ont he hard drive but you have to select it =)
Look down the page http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html and you will see about what it does and does not do. NO installation or modifying of the hard drives are necessary -- with computers without necessary ram it will run SLOWER but it will still run.
Besides, its a worthless argument =) Their computers most definately have 128 mb ram...
Is it only me who misread the article header?
A rapid desktop deployment for Debian system is not "news that matter", a working rapid desktop development system - a competitor to Kylix can be that news...
20 minutes? Bah. My old vintage 1975 Sol-20 boots SOLOS from ROM in under a second. I can install a new OS ROM in seconds, it is conveniently provided on a ROM cart that pops in and out of a slot in the back. I can load BASIC or ASM-80 from Cassette Tape in under 2 minutes.
Yeah, yeah, before you mod this down, just think a sec, I'm only trying to show how ludicrous this "time to first boot" is, as a measure of an OS.
It's come in handy a couple of times, like when my hard drive flaked out. I talked my non-techie wife through setting up KPPP and KMail over the phone so she had internet access. (Fortunately, it was just a loose cable)
I've used DemoLinux before that, as well as the SUSE demo CD, but Knoppix is much nicer. The only feature I miss is DemoLinux's ability to anchor part of the file system to the hard drive...
All in all, a very nice distribution.
I've just gotta say, thanks Slashdot. This is what I've been looking for.
One of the major reasons I was very reluctant to try Linux out (I'm a dedicated Win2K admin) was that it would require me to re-partition a disk for an ext3 filesystem.
Well, seeing as how each and every one of my drives are NTFS Dynamic Volumes, there's no chance in hell that Linux is going to be able to read (or even repartition) them, and neither will most other software. So, it's a total wipeout if I wanted to try it.
I'm downloading the ISO of this right now; I can get a chance to use Linux without *installing* Linux this way. In essence, what I've wanted for a long time.
Yeah, but it comes with 2GB of apps, boots into KDE, GNOME or WindowMaker, and even sets itself up as a PXE boot network server for diskless machines.
:v)
To be honest, it also impresses the pants off Windows users and is very likely to convert them to Open Source software. There they are used to Windows products and have been told Linux is too hard. Then along comes this CD, they insert it, boot, and a fully-fledged Linux app with OpenOffice, Mozilla, network, sound and lots of toys rises before them without them having to type or do *anything*.
That's why I put it on the NZ PC World cover disk.
Vik
Yes, Windows sucks. If it's having that many problems, see if you can roust up a copy of Win2000 or WinXP. But if you force your girlfriend to use Linux, she will probably end up frustrated and hating it (and maybe even hating you).
Then, in a few years, when Linux is ready for the desktop (if that happens) then she won't want to try it.
If you really think Windows sucks too much for her to use, maybe you should look into getting her a Mac. Forcing nontechnical people to use Linux is not the way to win friends, or spread good feelings for the operating system.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I got Knoppix onto the cover CD of PC World in New Zealand and I hear there is a possibility it may go on the Australian version - write encouragement to the Ed and ask if it can be had from the Kiwis (the answer will be yes, I guarantee it :).
:v)
We had to cut it down to 350MB to fit the sponsor's Windows games and so forth on the CD too (thanks Eaden at Opentech) so no OpenOffice, but the reader response we got was incredible. See this and search for "Knoppix" for the feedback.
Vik
There is KiX. You will find it in the contrib directory on the knoppix mirrors or somemore info in German (you might want to babelfish it ;-)
Live's to short - do another mile.
After reading the comments here Knoppix has just become my default Christmas gift to friends and family. The opportunity to quickly and easily expose new users to Linux without altering their current environment is a magnificent opportunity to "spread the gospel."
:)
I'm planning to bundle the CD with two sheets of paper, one showing how to start and use it and explaing that it won't interfere with the ordinary function of the computer concerned and the other David McNabb's HDD install HOWTO.
Then in January I'm going to apply for a position in the marketing department of AOL, I'll have all the required skills
No Knoppix does not require a hard drive at all. Inserting the CD and booting Knoppix creates a RAM disk for swap space and symlinks to the rest of the OS on CD. Knoppix runs entirely from RAM and the CD. Knoppix does not touch your hard disk!!!!
:(
However, Knoppix does a great job of detecting all present disks and sets up the FSTAB to allow you to access any of the disk partitions. This is read-only acess by default. Knoppix creates desktop icons for each of the disk partitions. Should you need to access data on the hard disk(read-only by default) simply click the icon and Knoppix auto-mounts the partition, ext2/3, fat, fat32, NTFS, what have you.
Knoppix is awesome and WELL worth the download! Although I suspect that the mirrors are being Slashdotted right now.
There is BOCHS, but it emulates every x86 instruction, rather than being optimized for specifically running an OS. The developers (in the FAQ) do not recommended for the purpose you intend. I have not tried it.
Plex86 touts itself as *the* free (as in speech and beer) alternative. I have not tried this either.
Connectix makes Virtual PC, which is not free. I have not tried it.
Gentoo is neat - but if you compile it all...
I'm on day three of install and config - Single 733MHz+ 1GB RAM and a 1.5Mb net connection!
Thought I'd finally dig into this guy, 'cos I was intrigued by out-of-the-box EVMS.
Looks like my next install will be Knoppix. Just to keepa broad perspective on things!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Some other stuff it does well - it'll store swap, config and home directory on files in the first windows harddisk with enough space it can find. That means you can in fact use it as your primary OS if you're happy with not being able to add new software and slow bootup times. You can reconfigure, write docs and so on, and it'll all be saved to disk.
Check out Knoppix. It has Galeon. It was up to Gnome 2.0, although KDE is the default desktop, but recently Knopper fell back to an earlier version of Gnome because he was having a lot of problems with 2.0. I would expect him to return to 2.x once the bugs are worked out.
The only thing it doesn't have is Flash and Real Player because of licensing issues with those products.
Oh yeah, schools teach children very carefully about saving everything to floppies. Unfortunately most teachers fail to mention that you should have your work saved to more than 1 floppy! I remember ScanDisking for mere sector scraps the floppies of many a future teacher while living in residence...
It would be really slick if computer magazines started including a free Knoppix CD. People could try out Linux for the first time without touching their current installation.
Yes, that's right. Remember that Knopppix was initially intended as a demo CD. The most important criteria was for it to not use a hard drive. But, Linux really likes to know that it has a swap partition even if it doesn't really need one. Knoppix fools Linux into thinking it has a swap partition by creating a small one in RAM. Knoppix also loopback mounts a crompressed file system tree which is accessed via symlinks in the / (root) tree but, the tree is a RAM disk. It is a beutiful piece of trickery to get Linux to run with NO HARD DRIVE AT ALL!
Dude, just try Libranet. Easiest Debian install you don't have to pay for. Download the 2.0 version for free, edit the /etc/apt/sources.list to testing or unstable, apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, apt-get dist-upgrade, and you're done.
This guy is way out there
I'm quite impressed at this distro, and I do realize how hard it is to autodetect the wide range of hardware that Linux supports. However, I still find it humerous that back in the day, the time it took to install BeOS was almost entirely determined by the speed of your CD-ROM drive :)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Knoppix doesn't mount the hard drive
Think again dildo. Have you ever used linux, or even knoppix for that matter? Just because there's no swap file, doesnt mean that it doesnt MOUNT the drives. It doesnt modify the hard drive but it DOES mount every volume it can. Precisely why it makes a good diagnostic tool and recovery agent. Try it some time, and see if you can read your hard drive.
-D
> Would it be possible to take a snapshot of memory just after a sucessful first time boot and just load it for "speed boots"?.
DEC was working on that for VMS over a decade ago. Don't know how it turned out, though, 'cause that's when I got out of the VMS environment.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
She works on the thesis both from home and the library. Maybe she's not paying attention when the format conversion boxes pop up but for whatever reason she's shown up at either place and realised that the latest copy is in a format that can be read at only one of the locations. As a result, she either has to merge diffs or find something else to do until she can get back to a converter.
I've personally used Knoppix off and on in my C++ class at school. All the computers run Win98 along with Borland something, anti-virus, and some sort of lock down software. With everything they have on there it takes an extensive amount of time to even compile a simple program. I seem to make everyone a little jealous since I can compile any program in a fraction of a time it takes them, besides a screen/vim/gcc setup without X is much more productive then the Borland crap. On another note, when I got braver, I used parted on the knoppix cd to resize the windows partition and installed a copy of debian. I didn't install and bootloader and just use a floppy to boot it up. When the school year is over i just resize the partition back and no one will ever know. :)
~ j campbell
Unfortunately, that's correct.
It will allow you to save some of your settings to floppy. For example, I can save my network settings. However, I have to run the network setup tool (under the Knoppix menu) to get them to work.
I think so, although you can ckeck Knoppix forum for a definitive answer. The people have been quite helpful there.
Excellent question... I will hope you still read this but its a bit after this was posted so shrug...
Students each have a disk that they have their source code on (they write the code to the disk). We compile onto the disk and the executable remains on the disk. Students turn in their disks (along with algorithms (ie their funny little flowcharts)) to be graded.
It was a good question... we STILL have to have a disk even though now we dont have to put the development apps on there... I say it was a very good trade. =)
A bootable Linux CD like Knoppix can be very handy when you are stranded out of reach of a Linux box.
.cab and setup.exe files lying around in c:\windows\options, so I reinstalled Win98 from that. That is how I am able to post this message to Slashdot.
Case in point: I went away this weekend to a fairly remote part of the north Devon countryside, armed only with a Win98-powered Toshiba laptop with built-in modem (and an external modem). I hoped that I'd be able to dial up to my ISP (handy emergency ISP for those in Britain: 0845 206 6050, username totalserve, password totalserve), download the Putty ssh client and read my mail. I was expecting some maybe-important messages.
In one of the bizarre screwups that occasionally reminds me why I normally use Linux and not Windows, I could dial up and ping things but not make HTTP connections to any host. I tried to investigate but there wasn't much I could do. Definitely a software problem (like I said, DNS and pinging were fine), and hard to investigate with only vanilla Win98 tools.
Realizing this I remembered the Knoppix CD I had at home. If only I had brought it with me! So I telephoned home and spoke to my brother, asked him to find the CD ('what? you don't keep it in a case? won't it get scratched?' - no, CD cases are AFAICT superfluous) and post it to me. 'Stick it to a bit of card', I said, 'and post it to me first class'.
That was on Thursday evening and I knew that the CD could not arrive until Saturday - that's today. I thought it had failed to arrive, but it eventually got here late in the morning. Sure enough the disc was stuck on to an octogon of cut-out cardboard using a single strip of masking tape across the diameter. (That's the kind of rough yellow tape that doesn't stick on very hard.)
I eagerly peeled off the masking tape, it was a bit harder to remove than I had expected but I peeled off the tape up to the hole at the centre of the disc. Then I peeled from the centre towards the other edge - and instantly the tape ripped off and with it the silver backing of about a quarter of the CD. I'm left with just transparent plastic where the silver has peeled away. I know that CDs have insane levels of error correction, but of course it would be futile to try sticking the tape back again in roughly the same place and seeing if the CD still works. (I tried it anyway.)
Like that story where the last man on earth's glasses get smashed when he enters the library. That's the cliche that came to mind.
So the moral of the story is: Debian and Knoppix may be very stable and robust Linux distributions. But the CDs on which they are distributed are quite literally 'flaky'. Don't try sticking them on to things with tape!
Epilogue - I found that the Windows installation sensibly had the original
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
To test the new computer i was buying (and getting), i took my Knoppix CD along.
:)
I bought the box which caused the least trouble!
Knoppix was more than helpful
Voltaire: God is dead.
God: Voltaire is dead!
Knoppix mentions that the system will run faster if it can create a swap partition on the drive of the computer it's installed on.
:-)
Why is it that swap space can't be used on an existing partition? It seems that it'd be to knoppix's advantage if it (optionally) allowed you to use an existsing FAT32/NTFS/EXT2 partition for temporary swap space while it runs.
I mean, Windows does this and look at how great it runs!
OK, I was just kidding with that last part, but I'd still like to know why this hasn't been done
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
Knoppix, on the other hand, rocks.
But like I said, I had this confused for the UT2K3 disc, so I was looking for that and couldn't find it. This is when I found out what probably most "avid" PC users experienced with Windows find out, and is probably the real #1 threat to Linux on the desktop - the fact that it's all very different, and compared to Windows, difficult. I mean, with a Mac versus Windows you of course know there are differences in things like interface and file system structure, but after some work you've got it down. The way Linux uses and organizes files befuddled me, and I can suddenly see why most people are turned off by Linux - it doesn't seem worth it to learn a whole new paradigm when the one you're most comfortable with is used by 90+% of the world and (from a business standpoint) is more profitbale anyway.
So perhaps what is needed next is a good "So you've only ever used Windows..." guide. (and if one already exists, feel free to point to it)
Schnapple
I was looking for the UT2K3 Demo LiveCD from Gentoo. I fired it up and ran it on my system. VERY impressive. Runs like a dream, and more importantly, it does what what Windows has done all along - it detected and used everything I had. I was online with DHCP, it knew my video card, everything.
Maybe I'm just a 'tard who didn't think of this earlier, but what a boon for game developers! "HERE you go! Just like your PS2, dump this CD (with live Linux filesystem & game of the week) in your PC and hit the power button..." Now, a REAL reason for game developers to develop for Linux! Control of the *PC* platform - no DLLs, MSIs, or DX crap to work with - THIS is the environment that your customer gets, every PC an Idrema with a live filesystem + app on CD. On the surface, it seems like a great leap back, but it appears that the benefits outweigh the fs overhead on each CD.
What a fsking GREAT idea! (Or am I missing something? Besides hardware, I mean, this is supposed to be somewhat tolerant in that regard, anyway.) It seems to work for Gentoo and Epic Games, anyway.
Carthago delenda est!
I just discovered Knoppix a few weeks ago, and I must say I'm impressed. I've never had a Linux distribution install so cleanly and easily, self-configuring everything. So many apps are included, and the KDE desktop looks great. Other distributions have a long way to go to catch up to this piece of work, which is even more impressive considering it runs live from a CD. Knoppix is the perfect introdution to Linux for someone who just wants to check it out, but you can get real work done with it too. I've been using it to run my favorite Linux apps on my Windows laptop. It's been really handy. Now I want to give a copy to all my friends who have been wondering about Linux. Great work!
Haven't had one of those for aaaaages (and always on dodgy hardware). But you've got to admit, it is a lot more exciting (and informative, even the dumbest user knows the system has a problem!) than a nicely centered F0AD:4C696C6C message.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Another auto-configuring live CD is Cool Linux CD. It's based on Red Hat 7.3 with XFS support, uses IceWM, and contains OpenOffice, Mozilla, Opera, Sylpheed, Pan, Xchat, Licq, mplayer, xmms, and VMWare.
I wouldn't just hand it to a Windows user and say "try this". The hardware auto-detection works well enough, but you still have to login and start X manually. Since it uses RH's configurator, it will initially display the standard RH desktop while setting up then it restarts into IceWM. But once you've got it running and explain that there is no "Explorer" or "Start" button, it's dead simple.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
Add its path to the plugins search list, click refresh, done.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I just grabbed the latest .iso, and it's not wanting to fit on the CD-R. (I figured those have a standard size...) Has anyone actually managed to burn one of those on a CD-R, and if so, how?
Perhaps a Windows install might have succeeded. Is that damaging enough for you? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
At the moment I am developing a tool for customizing KNOPPIX boot without remastering.
Here's the current development snapshot
Notice: The tool is still under development and far from complete, but it will already serve the advanced user.
Kester.I'm probably late to post in this thread, but if anybody knowledgeable reads this...
I tried Knoppix to see if Linux would work on an old laptop that I recently picked up. Very nice, though it didn't ge the sound going. But the hard drive install is intriguing. It's based on Debian, which is famously hard to install. Once Debian's in place, though, it's said to be very easy to maintain, using apt-get. I use Mandrake now and while urpmi is supposed to help, it's no apt-get! Indeed it still leaves me in dependency hell more often than not, when trying to install a package not included in the base distro.
So would Knoppix on HD be a nice shortcut to a working Debian system? If so, it could be a killer tool for the Debian world, and I could try it on my "spare" partition (where I last had Gentoo, a nice hack in is own right but talk about hard to install...).
This thing is fantastic. It's amazing the things you can fit into 50 megs - basically every command line program you'd want except Emacs and man pages, plus minimal X support.
Geez, only one more zero and they could have fit in emacs too....
We live, as we dream -- alone....
EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) is a vector graphics format: PNG, JPEG and BMP are pixel-based (raster?). They *aren't* the same!
No, but for a print document at a sufficiently high resoution, they might as well be. Except that the raster-based ones will work easier.
You would have to be pretty stupid to start saving graphs and so forth in PNG/JPEG in a a document.
No stupider than someone using EPS to do the same thing.
Office has native graphing features, that translate fairly well across versions--and if you're in doubt, you can just make a new one. And you can even update it natively!
There are patches that allow write but they are supposedly quite flakey. Anyway the question was being asked in a distribution specific way and so I answered that way though I agree this is more of a kernel thing than a distribution thing.
Can you make this run from/boot from a USB-keychain (those that has uptowards 1 GB of flash-RAM)? Okay, the ones I've seen are USB 1.1, so it's slow as hell, but at least you'd be able to have easy writable storage, and once you had it running you could store your preferences.
:-/
And why yes, I did submit this as an "ask slashdot" with a lot more detail, but it was rejected
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
For the classroom that was using Knoppix, the best bet is probably to have the students mount a NFS or SMB share, and put their programs there. Either that, ftp them to a file server, or upload them with a browser.
NFS isn't ideal, because every student has the same UID, and therefore could read what other students turned in. The best bet is probably to make a web page that requests your name and lets you upload (turn in) your program, and just hit it with Mozilla (already on Knoppix.)