Knoppix v3.4 Hits The Mirrors

zxflash writes "SolidZ.com reports the latest update to KNOPPIX; the popular Linux based OS has just been released. Version 3.4 includes the version 2.6.5 Linux Kernel and improved hardware detection. It can be downloaded from one of the mirrors listed on the KNOPPIX homepage..." rduke15 adds "Koffice has been dropped for space reasons, as well as LaTex. From the forum: 'Download using bittorrent tracker at http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de:6969/. Remember: Leave your bittorrent client running after the download is finished!' And this is the complete list of included packages."

Comments

May bring me back to linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I have not used Linux in about 9 months. Why? Games. Resume needs to be in .doc format that can be read by MS Word, as well as some hardware I have that just works in Windows.

I had used linux for about 5 years prior to that. I was becoming disenchanted for a bit. But knoppix has impressed me with this run-from-cd. I am so impressed that I think Linux may need to make a comeback to my desktop (always welcome on my servers).

Re:May bring me back to linux

[harikiri]

I wanted to go that route a while back. This way I could be guaranteed that my resume would appear well-formatted irrespective of what platform/viewer someone used to look at it with.

Unfortunately, guess what - recruiters (that I've dealt with) only want msword documents . There are two reasons for this:

• 1) They don't like you leaving any personal contact details in your resume, in case their client decides to interface with your directly. They therefore edit any of that stuff out and put their own letterhead on your resume. They may also "touch it up" so that it appears more attractive to the client.

• 2) Recruitment agencies have to deal with hundreds of resumes. Instead of having to deal with all manner of resume formats (hardcopy, wordperfect, msword, rtf, and pdf) they standardise on msword. They are then stored in a database that lets them search for appropriate candidates based on keywords.

Every time I've submitted it in pdf format they've asked for it in word. You can't win. :(

Re:May bring me back to linux

[Anonymous Coward]

PDF is a great format to send a resume in on. When you put a job posting, you get in a ton of formats. I've seen everything from the standard .doc format, to .pdf, to .bmps and .jpg scans of people's resumes written by hand. The point is, they want a hard copy. And me being the guy that has to print it all up and hand people's resumes to the manager, I prefer .pdf over all other formats. PDF is also VERY common for people to send in their resume as, in fact, I would say it is the second most common format (second only to MS's .doc format). PDF is also preferable because even when you use MS Office, it is not always the same layout from one machine to another. I have seen 2-page resumes print out on three pages and other such things. I like PDF because it is consistent. It is only fscked if it was originally fscked, and if they didn't catch that then they don't deserve the job anyhow. on a side note: I have never seen someone submit .sxw, but if they did, I would print it out and put it on the top of the stack.

What's New?

[AKAImBatman]

Anyone see a list of changes? I'm particularly interested to know if they've integrated the NTFS read/write libraries.

Dropping KOffice just makes sense. Why add all that extra space when 80% of the user base wants OpenOffice? Although it would be interesting to build a cross platform program (in Java perhaps?) that would allow you to custom-create these disks. Give me a version that will build a FreeBSD/KDE3/OpenOffice/Java CD to my specifications and I'll be in heaven. :-D

Re:What's New?

[AKAImBatman]

Morphix is definitely interesting, but it's not for the faint of heart. Building a Morphix ISO is one part education, one part command line voodoo, and one part dumb luck. ;-)

An integrated program that would build the ISO from a bunch of selected packages would be very cool. Make it Java and you could run it on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, etc. I know there have been times that I've used my iBook to write a quick CD for a PC, or grab some software that I need for some other OS.

Re:What's New?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Morphix is definitely interesting, but it's not for the faint of heart.

hmm, that doesn't agree with what I've observered.

I don't have first hand experience building a morphix CD but when I needed a customized CD about 10 days ago, I pointed a friend to morphix.org and he had a CD ready for me a couple of hours later. It was his first time making a knoppix-like CD and he never mentioned any difficulty. (I pointed him to morphix.org because I wanted gnome.)

He later tweaked some of the customisations and burned 35 copies of that iso and no one came back to us with problems.

Re:What's New?

[dotwaffle]

I wonder if it is possible to create a Jigdo set... Jigdo is the Jigsaw Download program that Debian pushes. Essentially, it downloads individual files off the Debian website, then assembles them in an order suitable for burning onto CD, including the correct boot sector etc... Then it would be very easy to distribute multiple copies of KNOPPIX without having to seed them all. Just an idea...

Re:What's New?

[Manuzhai]

Morphix is good, but maybe Gentoo's catalyst is better? I haven't actually used it myself, but it's apparently a pretty good tool to build your own LiveCDs.

No Koffice?

[moxruby]

Despite a few limitations such as no word count (if it's hidden away there, please tell me!), I find Koffice the cleanest the most useable office suite available for linux.
Abiword comes a close second, but all versions I tried don't highlight selected text! This makes editing a frustrating guessing game.

Openoffice is too sluggish on my duron 1.3ghz, I'll give them a few more versions to clean it up before I try it again.

I hand out knoppix cds to many friends, can anyone shed light on why kOffice is no longer indluded?

Re:No Koffice?

[BladeMelbourne]

> OpenOffice is too sluggish on my Duron 1.3GHz

I find that very interesting. I run OO 1.1.1 (under Fedora Core 1 & Win98) on a PIII 450 MHz with 576 MB RAM. It runs very sweetly.

With the QuickStarter in the tray keeping part of OO in memory - starting times are quite acceptable.

Hardware

[The_Mystic_For_Real]

I haven't used this new version yet, but past the words "improved hardware detection" are music to my ears. It wasn't awful in previous versions, but there certainly was room for improvement. Otherwise Knoppix has been my choice of distros (mostly because it was my first) since I switched to Linux a while back.

DVD Distro?

[Robotech_Master]

Will there ever be a DVD distro of Knoppix or some similar Linux that can be downloaded & burned? With all the extra space available on a DVD, there'd be room to put some really awesome apps on there...sort of a complete Linux machine in a can. And when you consider people are bittorrenting entire seasons of TV shows over on Suprnova and Animesuki, it doesn't seem like size would be that much of a problem...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Question

[AKAImBatman]

They're still using a KDE 3.2.x build, so you should be OK there. OpenOffice files haven't changed in a long time, nor has Mozilla's config stuff. The only place you could get screwed over is if you've got a bunch of KOffice files. Can't think of much else that could possibly be a problem. I'd say give it a go and see if it works. :-)

Harddrive install?

[identity0]

Have they changed/improved the HDD installer in Knoppix? I wanted to install a debian setup from Knoppix, but in 3.3, it tries to dump the whole system into one partition, and I did not have the space for that so I ended up using the Debian Sarge installer instead... Have they made the install process more flexible since then?

Re:Changes in V3.4

[Squideye]

Removal of LaTex is not all that good. Lots of scientific and mathematic users need that for their formula-laden documents. And surprise there are a LOT of Linux users who are sci/mathies. I guess one could argue "then they should just install a distro themselves" but if the portability and applicability of a Linux distribution is a consideration, ie. they're going to use Knoppix on their laptop or a secondary computer, wouldn't it be terribly useful to have a TeX formatting app installed?

I mean... isn't UNIX originally conceived for scientific and mathematical applications, for which... ack.

Anyway, I'll just assume that OpenOffice.org has some kind of TeX-formatting facility which justified LaTeX's removal. Can anyone give us an indication as to whether this is the case?

Koffice vs. Openoffice

[ChiralSoftware]

I use OOo all the time, and find it to be very powerful, more powerful than MS Office in many ways. If it had better KDE integration it would be perfect... fortunately, KDE integration is on its way, and it will be fantastic, giving serious competition to anything else (including OSX) on the desktop. It makes sense to drop Koffice from Knoppix, and it will make even more sense once the KDE/OOo integration is ready.

----------
Create a WAP site

Re:Leave it running for what?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

> all your seeders vanish or no current seeder has all parts of the file your after.

Exactly! Leave those BT clients running as long as you can. Most (>90%?) BT downloads fail because people disconnect after downloading the file. When they all do, all downloads for the file fail for all downloaders. It's the reason BT will never be mainstream. It's just too frustrating.

Re:Leave it running for what?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have Azureus running (which by the way simulates a p2p environment) and am uploading at 2.5 MB/s. It feels good :D

mono distro

[jon_galloway]

It'd be nice if there was a Knoppix/Morphix variant with Mono. I know, I know, Mono is evil or something, but it could expand number of crossover developers who code .NET at work and want to get started with Linux in their spare time. If you're already reading and writing .DOC's, it seems like a logical step...

Re:No Koffice

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to think OpenOffice was slow. Until I realized that running OpenOffice from Knoppix on the CD drive, and not the hard disk, was why I could start up OpenOffice, go grab a cup of coffee, come back, and it still didn't finish starting up.

I recently experienced running OpenOffice (windows version) on a system far slower than yours, and was shocked at how fast it ran. Whether it runs faster than MS Office, or fast enough in general, is another matter. Once I start running OpenOffice (1.1.1 or later) from a hard drive, the speed of OpenOffice will hardly (note, I didn't say "not") be an issue.

As for KOffice, from the times I've tried using it (from Knoppix 3.3 distro, so that should give an idea as to how recent it is), kword crashed too many times for me to be able to say with a straight face that it is stable. The same with other apps from KOffice (kspread also crashes). When KOffice becomes stable, I'll try it again, as I prefer a low resources office suite in some circumstances. But until it is stable, it doesn't belong in what is essentially a distro with other applications that are much more stable.

I also found problems with KOffice's file format translations, and with the export to pdf. The exported files (to pdf) from kword were found to be unusable on several windows systems and another Linux system.

Beta software has its uses. Putting a beta version of an office suite in a stable distro release is bad, especially in a distro that is tight on space for the media.

I like KOffice, and can't wait to get a stable version. It currently is not stable. And it really sucks to find that out when pressed for time, or when you have to waste a lot of additional time to transfer the data (if not lost) to OpenOffice so you can print it out or share it.

Leaving things out (KOffice etc)

[Frodo420024]

No KOffice

For LiveCD's, I would love to have KOffice. It's good-looking, functional and fast. I understand the political reasons (MSOffice user migration), but would love to see a version with KOffice, LaTeX and possibly other stuff.

Ideally, someone would set up a server where one can pick and drop whatever modules needed and drop the rest (I don't use GIMP, for one), within the space limitations of your standard ISO. Download ISO, burn, and you have your very own Linux boot CD with the best of both worlds:

LiveCD

• Misconfiguration impossible
• Hard drive & HD install not needed
• No virus
• Runs on any machine at hand

Installed

• You get to choose the SW packages

Heck, I'd even pay to have such a CD beside my SuSE install.

Re:Still got plenty of KDE goodies.

[twener]

Well, KOffice is not gone completely - there is still koffice-i18n-de. ;-) What I don't understand is that according to the package list Kopete doesn't seem to be included?

Re:check out MAME

[IceAgeComing]

KnoppixMAME is sweet. It even worked on my Toshiba Satellite 5005 laptop, which says a lot.

I did have to boot with additional parameters in "expert" mode in order to get 1600x1200 screen resolution, though. It took about 15 minutes to get the boot settings correct.

Now all we need is full coLinux support

[ktulu1115]

This is great... Knoppix with 2.6.

I just used Knoppix the other day for the first time to save my FC2 test install (accidently removed wrong package). Thanks guys.

I can't wait till they have full boot-from-CDROM support for coLinux... Then I can always have a 2.6 kernel running on practically any machine I use.