Knoppix To Split Into 'Light,' 'Maximum' Versions

prostoalex writes "Everyone's favorite Knoppix project will be split into light and maximum editions, which should end the argument on whether the Live CD operating system should focus on small footprint, or greater support for external applications." From the linked ZDNet article: "'We will split the mainstream edition of Knoppix into two versions: a 'maximum' DVD edition with a complete Debian installation, and a 'light' edition on CD that contains the most popular desktop and server software only, for older computers or smaller systems that don't have a bootable DVD drive yet,' said Knopper."

Comments

FireFox Will Be A Challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox, despite all of the marketing hype about how it is small, fast, secure, etc, is virtually unusable on old machines. My p3-700 takes about 2 seconds to create a new window in Linux. Scale down to a pentium 90 and you are looking at a 5-10 second delay. Windows98 IE would probably provide ~1-2 seconds in comparison (until it gets 0wned, anyway).

Sadly, the Linux firefox builds tend to be slower than Windows. I think W32 firefox uses GDI directly, but on Linux you get firefox built with the barely-optimizing GNU C++ compiler on top of GTK+ on top of ATK+ on top of GDK on top of xlib on top of a unix domain socket on top of an xserver on top of an unaccelerated video driver (because the video companies don't release docs).

The Linux desktop is over-abstracted and that fact really sucks for old hardware.

Re:650MB "lite", or 700MB "lite"?

[mabinogi]

If you can't copy and paste by now, you shouldn't be on slashdot.