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

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?

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

You're looking for morphix - modular knoppix.

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.

check out MAME

[Kiro]

If you're gonna check out Knoppix then have a look at KnoppiXMAME too.

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...

Re:DVD Distro?

[MarkWPiper]

I believe there was a DVD distro of version 3.3, that was handed out only at a some various Linux conferences. There were bandwidth concerns, so it was never placed on the official mirrors.

IIRC, the DVD was given out at Linux-tag, in Germany a few months ago. If you google around, you might be able to find it.

Re:DVD Distro?

[Sancho]

This is a pretty hot topic on the forums and mailing lists devoted to Knoppix. For DVD is, obviously, space for more programs. Against, we have the fact that not everyone has DVD burners, DVD burners are still much more expensive than CD burners, DVDs cost quite a bit more, and downloading DVD images would suck up even more bandwidth. Some of these would be mitigated by maintaining two images (one DVD, one CD) but then there's the PITA of having two images to maintain!
What I'd like to see is Knoppix create sort of a framework DVD that you can use to remaster your own DVD. That's sort of the best of both worlds, I think.

Re:May bring me back to linux

[Neil Blender]

I have not used Linux in about 9 months. Why? Games.

I gave up Windows completely a year ago (except TurboTax on my wife's laptop.) Guess what? I smoke a hell of a lot less pot and spend at lot less time on the computer overall. Why? Same reason. Games.

Custom Knoppix

[smiley2billion]

And for those looking for a custom version of Knoppix with a few different tools built in check out this site:

http://www.knoppix-std.org/

From the site:
STD focuses on information security and network management tools. It is meant to be used by both the novice looking to learn more about information security and the security professional looking for another swiss army knife for their tool kit.

Bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Please try to atleast have a ratio of 1 before disconnecting your client.

Have some manners :P

Still got plenty of KDE goodies.

[Erris]

No Koffice had me a little worried, so I checked the list. Sure enough, they kept the most impressive KDE "productivity" goodies, kmail, kaddress, kpilot, korganizer, and their container, kontact. They, like Mepis, are using KDE 3.2.2, which is very nice indeed. Too bad they had to axe KOffice, which is lighter and faster than Open Office. I'm also partial to gnumeric over OO as well. Oh well, Knoppix still rocks.

Re:Mirrors for the torrent files

[prockcore]

crackmonkey mods...

hey, i mirrored them too! here they are:

Knoppix 3.4 Deutsch
Knoppix 3.4 English

Where's my +5 informative?

Yes, Knoppix does sound like an STD ...

[Anonymous Coward]

What an unfortunate choice of name. Then again I'm sure that a large number of the users will never have to worry about conventional STDs :P

Hit the mirrors?

[skogs]

Not the FTP mirrors...though now that we've slashdoted the damn thing they'll never get updated. Way to go poster dude. The torrents may be out, but the regular ftp/http sites are not synced up yet.

Guess I'll just have to wait. Tried every server across the globe and saw no version 3.4

Oh well.

Re:Hit the mirrors?

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

Not all of us have upstream providers that let BT run...and not all of us can change upstream providers either...

TurboTax Online

[mr_zorg]

...except TurboTax on my wife's laptop.

Here's a tip: next year try TurboTax online. I can tell you it works fantastically, I've been using it for a few years now.

Re:Mirrors for the torrent files

[Anonymous Coward]

I translated them, then mirrored them.

scinobE 4.3 xipponK
ilihawS 4.3 xipponK

Bad news for Knoppix

[SteelX]

Knoppix v3.4 Hits The Mirrors

I guess that's seven years of bad luck for Knoppix... ;-)

Yes, NTFS write support included

[greppling]

"captive" is mentioned in the package list, so it seems they included it.

Changes in V3.4

[Necroman]

These are from the comments on the torrent page for KNOPPIX

* V3.4-2004-05-03 (experimental)
- switched from syslinux to isolinux (no emulation) boot method
- Kernel 2.4.26 (default) and Kernel 2.6.5 (as boot option) with ACPI enabled (use knoppix acpi=off in case of problems, knoppix26 to try Kernel 2.6)
- New wireless drivers for: ipw2100 ("Centrino"(TM)), madwifi, hostap
- captive-ntfs installer
- live-installer by Fabian Franz
- KDE 3.2.2
- kdevelop3
- OpenOffice 1.1.1 (german and english)
- gimp 2.0
- Had to remove the entire latex system (101MB) because of space reasons
- Removed KOffice for the same reason
- /dev/modem setup tool supporting serial, USB, bluetooth and irda devices
- gprs connection tool
- lots of improvements in the hardware detection and new boot options, please check knoppix-cheatcodes.txt.

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?

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.

Re:acroread?

[mabhatter654]

He's already check out most of the stuff on the disk as redistributable. It's been out for over a year now. Several companies have made exceptions so he can put the stuff on the disk and have it be redistributable. Note, Knoppix isn't about being "pure" OSS. It's meant to work and show off how good Linux can be... not turn everything on the disk into OSS. Klaus has banged on a lot of doors to get cool stuff put on the disk. Hint: Tell your favorite packages [flash, Nvidia drivers, etc] to get on board!!!!

Re:Leave it running for what?!?

[erikharrison]

Courtesy.

Every P2P application since napster has started in the Windows system tray in order to increase the amount of stuff available at once. BT's design means that it can't work quite the same way - stuff is only shared while your downloading the thing, and rather than share a pool of files, you share individual files while your connected to a tracker.

It's not unusual (though thankfully not too usual) to be downloading via BT and all your seeders vanish or no current seeder has all parts of the file your after. Staying connected for an extra 5-10 minutes is a simple way to increase traffic, and is generally considered polite.

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:My only complaint

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to throttle.

If you don't set a max upload limit, bittorrent will suck every bit of upload bandwidth available, and you will not be able to do anything else (including downloading that same bittorrent). Try setting your max to 35kbps, or something about 5kbps below what it's showing your max is now.

That will give your connection some breathing room to actually get a decent download speed.

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...

Ironic.....

[vwjeff]

Post about RAID modded as Redundant.

Slashdot and Bittorrent

[harborpirate]

When I first grabbed the torrent (English ver), there were a few seeds online and a couple hundred leechers. I got about 50 k/s to start out.

About an hour later, there were over 120 seeds and thousands of leechers. I was getting over 250 k/s.

How many other distribution methods can you say actually get FASTER when the bulk of the slashbots arrive on the scene? Bittorrent, my friends, is a beautiful thing.

Sure, when there aren't many folks on a torrent, its not that fast. And if there aren't any seeders you can't get the whole thing. But when a crowd this size comes into play, Bittorrent just makes sense.

I'm really surprised to see as many complaints as I saw in this thread. Especially given that bt is free, and that the speed has ramped up to rediculous proportions.

I managed to download a 696.2 MB file, which was posted on the front page of Slashdot, in 1h 25m. To me, thats absolutely stunning.

Go Bittorrent! And, if I may say so, thank you slashbots! When else can you say "thank you" for people slashdotting something? (Well, unless its a spammers IP...)

Re:Slashdot and Bittorrent

[kyhwana]

Try throttling your upstream on your BT client (Or get a better one if it doesn't let you) to 1/2 or 2/3 your total upstream bandwidth.. If you use all your upstream, you're downstream speed will suck ass..
I'm on comcast cable, which (in real life) has 24-25K upstream, so I set my upstream throttle in Azeurus to 16K, and i'm now maxing out my downstream with just the knoppix DL.. (400K/s)

No LaTeX?

[Quattro Vezina]

Hmm...I actually use LaTeX far more than I use a regular word processor. That's not good.

I understand why the Knoppix guys did it tho...space on live CDs is a pretty big problem, and I suppose they had no choice if they wanted to upgrade KDE, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, etc.

It irks me, but I can live with it. And it's not like Knoppix is my main distro anyway--I mostly just play around with it and use it as an advocacy tool.

leaving stuff out

[sewagemaster]

here's what i dont really understand...
since this is a live CD, why would they take out koffice and latex while leaving development libraries in? sure developers need these things, but they would be compiling their large projects running their OS entirely off a liveCD. this is true too for hdd install - it includes a lot of junk that makes everything slow. i love knoppix and it's excellent hardware, but maybe this is one of the improvements it can make?

also, it would be great if the hdd installation tool would allow installing over seperate partitions, except everything under one....

Re:leaving stuff out

[Lothsahn]

Well, I'm glad they left the development libraries in. Here's why:

I tutor inner city kids, of all ages. Some just use knoppix for kids, which removes the development stuff for games and such, while other older kids are actually interested in learning how to use a computer.

For one of them, I'm actively using G++ to teach him about how to program in C++. Without knoppix, that would have been much more difficult, and I probably would have ended up downloading the free (as in beer) MS compiler.

Since it's included on knoppix, I can teach him both linux and C++ at the same time.

That's why it's in there :)

\LaTeX Removal

[d-Orb]

While I tend to use LaTeX for everything, I understand that after all, Knoppix is a distro that enables loads of new users to try Linux for the first time and so on. They are not going to use LaTeX. Otoh, LaTeX (and a flurry of other scientific applications) would benefit from their own liveCD. And you know what? It exists!!!! It's called Quantian, and hopefully, a new version (based on Knoppix 3.4) will be out soon. Loads of math/engineering programs, TeX, LyX, Texmacs, scipy... Unfortunately, this project is not as visible as Knoppix (it's a derivative, after all).

Better Torrent than Slashdot's

[FreeUser]

Slashdotters appear to be a bunch of leaches unwilling to leave their sessions open for others to download with.

Fortunately, for those of us who weren't reading slashdot last night, suprnova.org has a far better torrent available (which still works the morning after):

http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/1681/KNOPPIX _V3.4-2004-05-04-EN.iso.torrent

After getting 0kB/s via the torrent provided to slashdot, I was gratified to be getting 79kB/s via the suprnova.org torrent.