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GNOPPIX: Bootable GNOME CD
ubiquitin writes "While KNOPPIX has been around for some time, the GNOPPIX project has only recently made its first release. The main difference is that it lets you boot into the GNOME desktop environment. Usually forks are more trouble than they're worth, but given the limits of what you can compress onto a single CD, separate projects makes sense to me. Hopefully more widespread recognition will also bring about a few more mirrors."
shouldn't this be on freshmeat? maybe this site should be called freshdot, or slashmeat?
I prefer spooning with my software..
forking, you gotta stay the night, and feel awkward that morning at breakfast..
pm
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
This could be just the thing for checking a system for broken hardware and/or connectivity. A tech could walk up, insert their GNOPPIX CD, boot into a GUI environment, check things out and then go. The cost for this versus propietary alternatives would be VERY attractive.
In principio erat Verbum.
That's why I use chopsticks.
There are other knoppix remasters of gnome. See the full list, or try a few direct (morphix has had gnome for a while) links.
Then it gave up.
Too unstable, too unreliable, too much work to keep up. Meanwhile, KDE Just Worked.
Things might be better now, though.
--Dan
morphix.sourceforge.net
>Currently, iso's with XFCE4, Gnome2.2, KDE3.1 and a game iso are available for download! Morphix is an Open >Source/Free software project, based on Debian GNU/Linux and Knoppix. For more information, check the FAQ
Now had it been Gnome 2.4... that would have been news. :)
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Yet another linux live-cd with essentially the same spoken name.
"Hey, what are you running?"
"'noppix!"
"which one?"
(note: i know some people say it "gah-nome, gah-noo", but where i'm from the G is silent in front of an N. Same with the K in Knoppix)
do() || do_not();
Wouldn't those be pronounced the same way? Makes it a little confusing to talk about.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
This story posted for your enjoyment by a KDE Zealot who wanted to kill the Gnoppix project and melt it's webserver beore it had a chance to gain in popularity.
Beep beep.
OS on a CD can be very useful when you try to rescue a system. Having a fully working system with all the tools at hand and access to the broken one, can save hours of work.
You boot the CD and get everything including network access, I have sometimes attached a USB (v2!) harddisk and transferred data to that one, or maybe a partition(with partimage).
Live CDs are one of Linux's "killer apps". Considering the low numbers of Live CDs out there. This is one niche that's not being fully explored. How about an Astrix Knoppix? Or a Musicians Knoppix? Same with graphics. Knoppix for schools. Knoppix for someone into the engineering arts.
That's really the way to distribute things like this without getting Slashdotted...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Bootable Linux distros should not be looked at as standalone OSes. Instead, they should be used for some specific purpose. One could test hardware configurations, recover some aspect of an old Linux partition, or even do a complete forensic investigation. I really like how you can create your own bootable Linux distro using Eagle Linux . One example is the bootable Linux project, FIRE (on sourceforge).
I've handed out a number of copies of the CD, too, to friends & colleagues who aren't brave enough to go through the whole repartition shindig to put a dual boot installation on their Windows box but who are curious about Linux. Knoppix has raised more than a few eyebrows around here. While I'm not exactly a "Linux evangelist," I do enjoy watching people expand their horizons. KNOPPIX (and now GNOPPIX) can be useful tools for winning "converts," if that's important to you.
GNOPPIX means that now I can hand 'em two CDs & say, "This one brings up the KDE desktop & this one brings up GNOME, so you can see what all the brouhaha is about."
That is, I'll be able to do that after the GNOPPIX site recovers from being /.ed or puts up a few gazillion more mirrors ;-) It may be faster just to wait for the KNOPPIX folks to finish their DVD image...
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Off the top of me head, I know of Knoppix, Morphix, Damn Small Linux, and Puppy Linux.
There are a few others, but I don't remember them off the top of my head.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
for people interested in getting into Linux but are not ready for formatting and installing Linux themselves. It gives them a taster for what it could be like! Bravo!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
It would be really cool to take KNOPPIX to the next level: DVD-RW knoppix, where you can actually save your changes on the disk. (albeit slowness) Theoretically, you could write a certain amount of information to it, until you have filled up the disc, then have a mechanism to write a new clean DVD-RW with just the most modern information. That with a very driver heavy Linux kernel should allow for your "desktop" being exactly the same on any machine you insert the disc into!
Linux in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition
actually knoppix used to carry a half-hearted gnome desktop effort back in the day, until klaus understandably dropped it to make room for extra kDE eye candy. there are already plenty of essential gtk apps on the Knoppix cd today, just no desktop. the cool thing about kde 3.1 is it enforces KDE themes and colors onto gtk programs so you can hardly tell the difference apart from things like transparent snap-on menus, font rendering hints, and other (imo) unneccceesssary eye-candy. Eclipse running on knoppix manages to look like kde native which is no mean feat - tips hat to trolltech (and their evil canopy group overloards)
knoppix still includes the excellent fluxbox, which of all the current destop managers shows the most promise.
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
I hope this project got around the patent issues that are plaguing KNOPPIX. Good bootcds are wonderful and put bootfloppies to shame. KNOPPIX is currently closed - view their current page and not the old one that was /.ed.
Knoppix
DamnSmallLinux
Knoppix Mini Cd
OpenGroupware Live CD
Moppix
Gnoppix
Quantian Scientific Computing Environment
Freeduc
L.A.S.
BlueEyedOS
Oralux
and others I can't presently remember.
Knoppix used to have gnome on it (accessable via a cheat code
Such is my understanding anyway, I've never used a version with Gnome, but there's plenty about it on various messageboards (it got removed before the latest versions because it had "problems" - hopefully this version is what it seems to be on the site - a completely seperate distro, and not just a hack of knoppix that is plagued by the same problems)
Gentoo has live cd's for PPC (KDE & Gnome), but i'm not too sure about x86
I know a pile of guys that have essentially made thier own rescue disks with everything but X servers and X apps on it.
I prefer the text-only model for rescue.
On the other hand, you bring up another interesting point about "fitting it all on a CD".
Just a couple of years ago a CD was considered ENORMOUS. Hell, i remember several years ago when you could fit an entire OS on a floppy.
I think a lot of developers are getting complacent these days and are less efficient when writing code. I'm noticing a lot of bloat in software today compared to about 6 months ago. Even more from just a year ago.
I have video games where version 3 runs bishin on a 300mhz amd k6-II with 128mb of ram. Version 4 (which comes out 3 years later) is jittery and sluggish and struggles to run on my 1.533Ghz Athlon w/ 512mb of ram. Looking at the 2 games, the graphics aren't really that big a step, nor is the gameplay so much.
do() || do_not();
Actually one of the reasons I've played with Knoppix is because you can try out different window mangers very easily...
:-)
While booting up up you get the choose of going for help, and if you do that you will see the choose of different window managers to try.
Not sure about the need for another live distro (but I'll qualify that with a what ever scratches an iche) then again, anything that has the same quality as knoppix is sure to impress any on looking windows users
Just boot Knoppix with the "txt" option at the commandline you like so much to run a text only version of Linux.
It's as useful as Knoppix, or should be. The thing here isn't so much about usefulness, after all Knoppix already does the job, but about preferences. Some people will simply prefer Gnome. Gnoppix gives them that. All the usefulness of Knoppix with the interface they want.
Or someone just thought it'd be a neat idea and acted on it.
Either, there is no loss, only gain. And for the record, I do not use Gnome myself.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
*sings* "You say k-noppix, I say g-noppix"
Eh, let's call the whole thing off...
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
ISO9660 has nothing to do with being bootable, a bootable CDROM has what's analgous to a bootsector, a chunk outside of the filesystem that holds an image of the "boot floppy" that the bios emulates. (theres virtual hard drive mode).
It's basically a kludge - another session that contains the boot stuff.
DVDs just dont have this. DVDs arent multisession either. So they need an entirely different kludge.
You could carry a DVD and a floppy, or bootable CD around.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Support is included in the lates Knoppix 4.2 release.
Help fight continental drift.
To increase the relevance of SCO in the current IT market, they put out a new press release regarding this Gnoppix CD:
Dateline 9/12/2003 -- a day after the anniversary of a great tragedy, the terrorists have struck again by continuing to disrespect our Intellectual Property. The Gnoppix CD is in clear violation of everything we stand for. It should be stopped.
In response to Gnoppix and its predecessor Knoppix, our last programmer (since we've turned to a litigation-based business model) was asked to create SCOppix with which you could try our operating system without having to install it onto your hard drive, thus avoiding violating our IP. Users of SCOppix will not be targeted in any of our litigation.
All users will be required to click through our EULA which states that by clicking, they agree that SCO owns Linux, the user's computer, the user's house, the user's underpants (UNDERPANTS? isn't that just silly? Guess it hasn't stopped us before so why not), and all his base, and will thus be forced to become indentured servants of SCO. Furthermore, by accessing the CD with their computers, they will immediately be charged $699 anyway.
We are firm in our resolve that our Intellectual Property rights will be enforced to the far reaches of the planet. Every human, every penguin, every gnome (are you sure this is good to mention?) using our IP shall be charged until we can all sleep soundly at night knowing our children are safe from these terrorists. (and our bank accounts profit from this great pump-and-dump business model).
Hope this becomes a new trend; especially with DVDs. Then we can get rid of OS from hard drive entirely and just use a universally recognized file system on the HDD. You can boot whatever OS you want with the DVD and get the work done. Imagine four different people in your home using the same machine with four different OSs. The ultimate Virtual Machine!
For a good list of LiveCDs, check out Distrowatch.com list of run-from-cd distros.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
However, you still have X and KDE taking up space on the disc, where there may be other things you'd rather have on a true text-only disc. I, for one, would love to see a "Toppix."
This is now the easiest way of getting a debian system because the knoppix\morphix installer is so much better.
It creates a working system from the CDROM then gives you the option of installing to hard disk. Then with the setup version of APT the rest is childs play.
This should have happened to Debian ages ago -- it kicks the pants out of Redhat and its update proceedures. If you haven't tried it do....
see, in order for this confusion to occur, a slashdotter would actually have to interact with another person in real life. However, on the internet, where we slashdotter's reside, everying is pronounced with spelled-out. so you see, there isn't any problem after all.
I saw this posted on Debian Planet a few days ago and already downloaded a copy.
Unless you speak German, or are very familiar with the GNOME interface you're going to have a hard time using this. Booting with lang=en and setting your session type to en_US still won't switch the language to English. Now I have a nice coaster with "GNOPPIX 0.5" written with a Sharpie on it.
Too bad too. The only reason to get this over Knoppix or Lnx-BBC is for GNOME. Save your bandwidth for a few versions at least until the English support gets fixed. This is really a "too early to be slashdotted over" release, and they're going to lose a lot of potential users because of it's current condition.
It's also missing vital tools that all other live cds have, namely the ability to set up TCP/IP. The GNOME Network thingy didn't work, dhclient didn't work, there's no pump.
Gnoppix has potential to fill a nice little niche in the community, and when it's ready it'll be cool. But unless you're planning on helping out as a developer, wait on this one.
A little googling revealed this site that tells how to Boot KNOPPIX from an USB Memory Stick.
Gnome was removed from Knoppix for space reasons earlier this year, but yeah, before that you could put desktop=gnome at the boot prompt and run Gnome.
Ever since Gnome 2.4 was released, I have found more and more gnome zealots who MUST absolutely advocate GNOME at every possible moment. Here is a guide to some of their claims, and what they really mean.
/gnu/celeron gnu/packard gnu/bell gnu/box.
Unlike KDE, gnome is free
Translation : GPL is freerer than LGPL. LGPL allows corporations like Ximian and Sun to have propeitry forks and lock away their changes from the user. Now that novell has taken over ximan you can expect gnome to get put under corpirate lock.
Nautilus is much better than konqueror.
Wrong, if your using nautilus for anything more than a simple finder clone you can forget it. No split screen, no ioslaves and forget about being able to have a decent file dialog.
Gnome is easier to use
Yep, nothing like using gconf-editor to edit all except the most trivial of settings
Gnome has eye candy
Yes, my pirated Win32 fonts with the patent infringing font renderer. Bit stream vera sans looks like Tahoma put through a shreadder!
Gnome has a new web browser
Yawb! Along with Galeon, mozilla, thunderbird, konqueror, atlantis, lynx, netscape and w3m. Yes i need another browser! Not to mention that its got a religiously offensive name and it dosen't allow bookmark folders. It also crashes like a crazy! Apple chose khtml for a REASON! its stable and light!
Gnome is themeable
Yep, choose from High, low and medium contrast, default, and clean ice. Wan't to change the colour scheme? USE GCONF NOOB.
Gnome has multimedia framework
Its a kludge of esd combined with broken xine libraries. No wonder it crashes all the time and dosen't work on 95% of video files
Gnome allows mac like operatoin.
x86 compatible 1 button mice are almost impossible to find, and it dosen't copy the whole macbar concept. Not to even mention their auto apply implementation is broken and dangerous! Plus if they did actually come anywhere close to copying the mac the C&D letters would come flying up their asses!
Gnome is GNU software.
gnu/Yay, gnu/gnome gnu/for gnu/my gnu/debian gnu/linux gnu/500mhz
Inspired by the gentoo translate-o-matic.
Just checked out Knoppix on a new laptop and noticed there wasn't any APM (APCI) support built in the kernel. Does anyone work on a cd to be used for a basic working linux install on a laptop?
Bzzt wrong answer.
You can make a bootable DVD-ROM, I've done it, and booted a number of systems with DVD-Rs. We migrated a number of our system imaging CDs (which with Win2k were spanned) onto DVD-Rs, and its almost like the good ol' Win95 days again; multiple system images on a single bootable DVD-R.
We can realistically only fit about 3 of the newest images (which are pigged out with every application the desktop support crew can think of adding), but it kind of rox0rs, as kids are fond of saying these days.
I was about to moderate a comment in this thread but this pissed me off:
Having said that, I found this statement humorous: "but given the limits of what you can compress onto a single CD, separate projects makes sense to me.". Given the limits??? A CD has, what, 740MB? Yeah, they really had to push to fit into the tiny confines of a CD. I find it intriguing how the same community that endlessly used the term "bloat" to describe Microsoft software now can keep a straight face when describing the space on a CD as "limited".
Fella, if you think you can fit Windows, IIS, Office (twice over, Knoppix comes with OpenOffice as well as Koffice and several components from the Gnome office suite), MSSQL, several web browsers, email clients, development tools, network and security analysis tools, photoshop plus several graphics viewers, several multimedia suites, an advanced audio editor / mixer, games, etc. etc. etc onto one CD, you're smoking a more refined blend of crack cocaine than Darl.
Knoppix/Gnoppix showcase what you can get with Linux. I think it's astonishing what Klaus and the other developers have managed to fit on to this disk. The only "bloat" in Linux is in the choice department.
anyway, Gnoppix will be using Morphix's install/configuration tools. I've talked to Sven of the Gnoppix team, and it seems like they don't like inventing the wheel again, so we'll work on them together (now just to convince them on using our modular design, but we'll leave that for another day). You can read his notice here.
Currently we have the (gtk2) installer and a few configuration tools, but a (gtk2) partitioner is nearing completion which will replace cfdisk, together with a few new tools bundled together in a control-panel-thingy. Debian is too nice to be user-unfriendly :)
This sig is intentionally left blank
Ka-nop-ix
If that sounds too silly for you, like Disney's Tigger trying to say "ka-night" or "ka-nife", try whispering the schwa that you insert between the K and the N. After a few times of saying that, you'll fall into the correct pronunciation of a non-English KN cluster (which is incidentally how KN was pronounced in English before it lost initial stop-nasal clusters).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Nevertheless, a GUI can make life simpler, even when rescuing.
Knoppix does offer a failsafe boot option in case its fancy hardware detection program doesn't work, as well as the option to not start X, i.e. stay at the console. The fact that its CD-ROM based also means it can fit in a more rescue tools in comparison to 1.44 MB disks.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Some of us have crawled out of the primordial ooze and left our vestigal floppy drives behind.
Bootable rescue CDs are useful to me. Rescue CDs with a bunch of useful stuff on them are even more useful to me.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
because you can go into a university library and have full access to the machine. especially if you have network drive space. uhm.. theoretically.
How about "switch to linux"?
"ooh, I don't know... I don't have any HD space left..."
"Well, how about you give this (K|G)noppix CD a spin and see if you like it?"
And if you really like it... you can install it on you hard disk! I still don't know how to get a configured and up-to-date debian system running faster (that is, short of running a debian apt mirror yourself :D)
It's also great for installing Linux yourself, because it's got some of the best hardware detection capabilities around.
Yes. And over a year ago, I scrounged around the lab for a thrown-away PC just so I could try Knoppix, for the first time.
/dev/hda[1|2|3|4|5]' to save me! Well, that was my *first* impression. It melted into shocking admiration when I discovered no hard drive in the chassis (was a really scavenged box).
My impression: Piece of shit!!!!
Try as I may, I couldn't 'mount -t ext2
Been a loyal Knoppix fanatic ever since. [Gushes]
In fact I was at a customer's site, last week and the customer wanted to move their ACT! DB to a centralized server (I'm not making this up). They were running Windows 95 on a PC they had manually used as a "central" ACT! DB for years. The OS wouldn't configure the NIC card I gave it, so...
You guessed it: Knoppix to the rescue! I had that DB off the machine in less than an hour (rsync'ed to a Samba share on the main server).
Mike, you wanna pass the plate around?
With Knoppix you can just enter
at the boot prompt and it gives you a wonderfull Gnome2 desktop.
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
LUFS does what you want -- it will allow you to mount locally to/via ftp, ssh, gnutella, gnome vfs, memory cards, and CE devices.
Here's a discussion of people wanting to include it in the boot scripts for Knoppix.
What we really need is an Emacs live CD, forget Linux! Just boot into Emacs!
Knoppix already once saved my ass. At home, I use Linux, but I had to make a presentation (built with OpenOffice) the next day on my laptop, which runs Windows 2000 because I need some Windows apps there. I wanted to export the presentation as PDF, but that failed. So, just 2 hours before the presentation, I downloaded Knoppix. So I could start Linux from the CD, which includes OpenOffice and do my presentation.
Knoppix is also useful for marketing Linux. You can easily give Knoppix away and guarantee that it doesn't do any harm to the system. Most people actually are quite impressed by it.
Since Linux is all about choice, a Gnome Knoppix distribution is surely a thing that will be useful for a lot of uses.
I do run Linux on a P75, with 16Mhz of RAM.
It can do web browsing (graphical), play MP3s, read email (using mutt).
It even works as a mail server for use when disconnected (masqmail).
It has development packages (gcc), fancy text editors (fte).
It also has a 800MB disk.
It is a Toshiba Libretto 50ct.
Now, you may say, so what? Well, it's just as much a Linux as any other Linux. It's just not KDE or GNOME.
So yes, it is choice that makes Linux require a larger box. Because if you choose carefully, you can use a smaller one, too.
Here's the URL for how I did it:
http://www.pycs.net/lateral/stories/4.html
Knoppix is able to go beyond the 740MB-ish limit of the CD by using the cloop module.
:wq
What is cloop? Well, according to the README of the source file it is "a [k]ernel module to add support for filesystem-independent, transparently decompressed, read-only block devices".
Rusty Russel is listed as the original author. Klaus is listed as bug fixes and extensions.
cloop can be found here.
-- Phase 1: Collect under pants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit
Pretty much a "spoon man," eh?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
yeah my next door neighbour had her hard disk crash on her, and while waiting for her replacement disk she survived on my KNOPPIX cd for a week using mainly gaim and mozilla. the only thing she really needed that I couldn't get working was flash (the plugin needs to write to the mozilla directory which was on the cdrom)
I've used Knoppix to introduce many newbies to Linux.
:)
:)
:)
The most innovative way I've used Knoppix to bring more people to Linux was introducing the idea of using it as the demonstation OS for computers that are to be auctioned.
The place from where I usually buy my machines had a problem. Following a visitation by a flying goon squad from Australian's version of the BSA, this auction house suddenly discovered that they could not install a certain well known OS on computers to be auctioned. Previously, they did a minimal install to enable people to see that the machines were in good working order etc. Now, it was not possible to show that computer systems were in good working order.
I solved my problem of ensuring that machines were working prior to bidding by running Knoppix on them... In turn I introduced to the auction house the idea of using Knoppix to demo *all* their working systems. They took up the idea and solved their problem of demonstrating the machines working with a "legal" OS. It's a beautiful sight watching 50 Linux desktops running in the same room
The upshot of all this is that hundreds of "literate" and "semiliterate" computer buyers are getting their first ever hands-on exposure to Linux when they test machines prior to auction. The auctioneers tell me that they have been getting many enquiries about where to get Knoppix!! Incidently, the "killer app" on Knoppix appears to be the game "Frozen Bubble"
A more polished version of Gnoppix with the En lang items fixed will offer another choice for converting newbies over to Linux. More power to them