Slashdot Mirror
Knoppix Tips and Tricks
cosog writes "Robert Storey writes in a
thorough review about Knoppix: 'Some people even take a Knoppix disk with them when they go shopping for a new computer, a clever way to ensure that the hardware will be Linux compatible before you purchase it.' His article discusses things like: booting, rescuing, installing on HDD, tips'n'tricks, etc... A nice read for everyone interested in Linux (and Knoppix in particular ;)."
Knoppix + DD = ultimate way to mirror a drive from one to the other. Screw norton ghost.
I used a knoppix cd at best buy when looking for a new laptop. The salesman told me that I would not be able to run a linux distro on the toshiba Satelite p25-s607. I was happy to find out upon inserting the cd that I could indeed run linux. This was approx 3 months ago and the salesman said they wouldn't have drivers out for the video card for 6 months, of course he was wrong.
Here's where to get it quickly, via the official BitTorrent: http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de:6969/.
The torrents are pretty fast; faster than the mirrors in my personal experience.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
he's running whatever server this article is on off of one of those machines sitting on the store shelf, based on it responsiveness.
Now all we need is a Knoppix distro that loads automatically onto a demonstration Xbox at your nearest major retailer!
Oh the fun you could have especially if your playing on a big screen surrounded by huge Xbox signage!
(Slashdotted already?)
Well, knoppix CD is great, but with 256MB (and more?) USB keys out there, I wish more BIOS's would allow booting from USB, it'd be so nice to walk into a net cafe, pull linux out of my pocket or USB watch, and then read mail with mutt in X-Windows while surfing with my own damn bookmarks. And not having to close the last guy's chat session and assorted porn popups? Priceless.
I don't know if his top of the line, hyperthreaded P4 had a big impact, because I don't know hard it is to decompress the cloop compression knoppix uses. But if you have a computer with a gig or more of ram you should give it a try.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
Something For Everyone
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
-- Charles Duell, Commissioner of US Patent Office, 1899
In these modern times it seems that there is a product to suit every whim and fancy. Whether you need a miniature Statue of Liberty with a clock in her (its?) stomach or a stuffed alligator with a light bulb in its mouth, you can rest assured that somebody somewhere is marketing it.
When it comes to software, much the same situation prevails. There are applications that do everything from psychoanalysis (in Emacs hit M-x and type "doctor"), to helping you contact alien civilizations (SETI@Home).
Operating systems are not immune to this tendency towards specialization. Notepads, cell phones and perhaps your DVD player all have specialized operating systems. At the height of the dotcom bubble, there were pundits predicting that soon your online refrigerator would have an operating system, the purpose of which was allegedly to order milk when you needed it. Just why you couldn't buy your own damn milk was never explained to us.
And finally we come to Linux distributions. There are different distros for different purposes. Desktop Linux (in many flavors), server Linux, embedded Linux, Linux routers, Linux BIOS, Linux on the Halfshell. And every so often, somebody comes up with a whole new use for Linux that just makes everybody sort of just stop in their tracks and say, "Cool!" Which brings me (you are still with me, aren't you?) to the topic of this article - Knoppix.
Live From Germany
Knoppix is a "live CD" distro - just boot it and use it. You do need a CD drive of course, but you don't need a hard disk. The implications of this are significant. It means you have a portable Linux that you can take with you wherever you go. This can be used in a number of innovative ways - as a demo disk, as a rescue disk, as a way to use Linux at your local Windows-only Internet cafe. Some people even take a Knoppix disk with them when they go shopping for a new computer, a clever way to ensure that the hardware will be Linux compatible before you purchase it.
To be fair, Knoppix was not the first live CD ever created. Apple, for example, distributed MacOS (even before OSX) on a live CD. Linux has had DemoLinux, SUSE Live-Eval and Cool Linux, as well as some others. But none of these have come close to the functionality of Knoppix, which could justifiably claim the title as "first useful live CD." Even though Knoppix has inspired a number of clones (Gnoppix, Morphix, Freeduc, Quantian, to name a few), it still remains the most popular live CD distro by far.
Most people are just awe-struck the first time they see a Knoppix CD boot. Probably the thing that blows them away is the hardware auto-detection. There is really nothing to configure - just boot the CD, and two to three minutes later you have a beautiful desktop system. This is remarkable, given the lack of standards (and lack of driver documentation) that exists in the PC world.
Knoppix took the Linux world by storm in late 2002, but actually it's history is a little bit longer than that. Klaus Knopper of Germany started his experiment with "Knopper's *nix" about three years ago. As he tells the story, it wasn't his original intention to create a new Linux distro, but rather to learn how "el torito" (the booting mechanism on CDs) works, and how to get access to a whole CD from a minimal ramdisk system. However, his project soon attracted the attention of the LinuxTag association, which happily provided a mailing list and forum so that others could give their input. Though Klaus was (and still is) the solo developer of Knoppix, user feedback and bug-testing have helped make this distro the great success it is.
Deep Impact
Knoppix is one of the most up-to-date distros around. This is thanks to the fact that it is based on Sid, the "unstable" branch of Debian. Some people might be put off by the word "unstable," or the word "Sid" (the name of the mentally unstable kid in
Yeah, they've thought of that and built in a safety mechanism. On bootup, it asks the user whether they are Evil or not. If they say yes, it just powers down.
Knoppix is a great distro to pass on to students who need to work in a *IX shell environment to do course work. I recommend it to EE and IT students when they want to get their feet wet but don't want to use VMWARE or go through a potentially destructive HDD repartition. The KDE interface is friendly to the Windows crippled, the harware detection is fantastic and running from the CD, a user can't break it. Many of the derivative distros are also great in niche areas (eg ClusterKNOPPIX). A great piece of work to help make Linux better appreciated and understood.
The timing of this article is too funny, today my son, who is 6 (almost 7) grabbed my knoppix CD thinking it was a copy (legal backup:) of I game I had just made a copy of for him for him.
He put it in and after about 30 minutes after not hearing him ask for help with his game (which he ALWAYS does) I went in to see what he was doing, I almost had a heart attack, he was clicking away on Knoppix. It scared me becuase I forgot I had knoppix burned. and I thought he had rebooted my system into linux and changed from Gnome to KDE
But the more I think about it the more I like the idea of setting him loose on a live distro, I dont have to worry about him buggering up my work system (yes I have a spare system for him but its not fast enough for most of his games)
When I first started in computers I was his age and if I made a mistake I rebooted, no OS , MS basic in Rom and a 6502 on an OSI challener (the good 'ole days may date me a bit since that comp came out in 77 and I was 7:)but I got my feet wet in assy programming then. I didnt have to ask dear old dad for any help beyond well, everything, but I didnt have to worry about bonking an OS either.
When I found him on the system he was drawing cats on gimp, bestill my little code monkey....
ClusterKnoppix is Knoppix on steroids. Instant OpenMosix cluster using PXE network boot for clients.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Knoppix is excellent for data rescue and recovery work. This data recovery howto for Knoppix has proved invaluable for many of my friends. It has also been translated into Polish
and didn't notice until I tried to use it this afternoon that I only got 50 meg of it. I then went to a different site and was downloading it at about 120K per second. Being the idiot that I am, I accidently got the German version. Going back to the site, I can only get 25K per second tops. The Slashdot effect at work.
Forget about building a special distro just for the 800 meg CD's out there. It's not really that much more space for something that's not "standard" in the first place. Why doesn't somebody go ahead and make a Knoppix-type distro for DVDs? Most newer machines have them and with 4.7 gig of storage space you can put pretty much everything on them. With one of these properly configured and a decent sized USB memory drive, this is all somebody really needs for a truly portable computing experience. You could fit Gnome and KDE as well as a good installer on them. Forget about making a "Live" version of a distro. With one DVD containing a live version of Linux as well as a full installation environment running on it, it's a true one-stop-shop.
Does anybody make a credit-card form factor DVD +/-R like they do with the CD-Rs? If you could fit a full Knoppix distro onto something that size that you can fit into your wallet, that'd be really useful. While CD's aren't all that big, they're inconvenient to carry around all the time "just-in-case".
It's really too bad that you can't burn a distro to a CR-RW or a DVD +/-RW and use the unused space as a worm drive of your configuration or data. You'd have to refresh the disc every so often as your available space would dwindle, but you could get around even needing a USB key-fob. Unfortunately the common disc-formats in use make this very difficult, but it's something to think about...d