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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."
You might want to download and actually give it a try. It doesn't touch the HD at all, making it perfect for data recovery or situations where you don't have permission to use the drive for personal use. It gives you a complete set of applications and leaves no residue on the system.
Knoppix is amazingly useful as a resuce resource. I can't always carry everything that I'd like with me when I might encounter a computer in need of repair. With a Knoppix CD on hand I have a great set of tools that can help to diagnose and repair many problems.
I'm curious, will Fluxbox be on this "light" disk? I ask because the summary says that the most 'popular desktop'. That would be KDE, but light it is not!
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
A Live CD is configured to [usually] boot completely from RAM. In some configurations, it can even live there completely [the CD can be ejected].
I mod down pathetic posts.
I can think of two fairly good reasons for always having a Live CD handy.
First, for those unfortunate incidents in which I screw up a new kernel compilation and lock myself out of my computer.
Second, for scaring the crap out of my computer teacher -- "What did you do to Windows? What the **** did you do to Windows?!?"
* Olaserov is in the process of thinking up a signature.
Is it digitally signed?
I know that Klaus Knopper doesn't see Knoppix as a Debian installer, but I think that he should take a second look at this, especially considering the idea of a "lite" and a "full" version of the Knoppix CD.
The "lite" version of the CD should allow for a simplified HD install, complete with Knoppix' superior hardware detection facility. Neither the official Debian Sarge installer nor the Ubuntu installer is as good as Knoppix for "figuring out" the hardware it's looking at. I don't know about Mepis because I've never used it.
Maybe if Herr Knopper won't do it, someone should fork Knoppix and do it for him.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Blackbox, twm, even enlightenment is pretty small. I bet all of these put together would fit just fine, and each merits being included for differing reasons.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
Operating systems expand to fill the available boot media.
which should end the argument on whether the Live CD operating system should focus on small footprint, or greater support for external applications.
Not likely. It'll just mean that each camp will have a disc that suits them.
As others have said, you can boot Knoppix without it touching the hard drive (or even in a computer without one I assume), and in fact that's the default configuration. It is possible to tell it about a swap partition (or file I think), but it's unnecessary.
Any drives you have aren't even mounted at boot, though they do get desktop icons. Clicking them mounts the drive for use. (I forget about defaults regarding read vs. read/write; I think using the icons just gives you readonly.)
Linux doesn't take much space.
The lite edition still has 600MB to work with, and if they don't pack it full, it's not as useful as if they did. KDE would certainly be good to have, and they'll still have plenty of space to install it when they're done.
When I installed everything I might think about using (five window managers, gnome and kde versions of almost everything, etc) on my box compiled with -Os, I got about 3.7GB of programs. I can't wait to see the DVD-DL version of Knoppix. That should be able to contain almost every OSS app on Freshmeat.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Microsoft is bitching about how people can't trust code that doesn't belong to them, Homeland security says we can't trust what should be a simple piece of software *by* them...
meanwhile, Knoppix is a wonderful, portable, safe, stable distribution that can go anywhere you do, and is so easy to use that my 87 year old grandmother who is so frial she can't leave her bed (we've had a hospital bed put in her room for her) can literally boot an old laptop (with DOS 6.2 installed) and use it to email and *even instant message* her grandson (me), who is 300km away.
And its free.
If there were *ever* a prime demonstration of what can be accomplished by OSS in action, surely Knoppix is that demonstration.
P.S. I told my grandmother about the microsoft-flaming-firefox thing... she said (and I quote, verbatim)"Someone should tell those... those... those Microstuff people (shes a little poor of hearing) to smarten up or be quiet."
Grandma, How I Love You.
I can't wait to see the DVD-DL version of Knoppix.
I hope they continue to make a DVD-5 version even if they do make a DVD-9 version, as not all DVD+/-R drives that can record a DVD-5 can record a DVD-9.
- run Linux with/without a hard disk /etc/password or /etc/shadow
- evaluate latest software
- password recovery - allows you to reset
- file system fsck
- install to hard disk: you get Debian without the 'orrible Debian installer
Dude, I'm sure Klaus is shaking in his boots at the veiled threat of "someone" forking Knoppix... there are only several dozen Knoppix-based projects at the moment. In any case, installing Knoppix to HD is insanely simple already:
o pp ix+to+hard+drive&btnG=Google+Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=install+kn
A 'Behemoth' DVD I can keep in my kit, hopefully along with me excepting those "Oh Fuck" moments.
Actually, Knoppix does touch the drive if you have any swap partitions around. For any kind of forensics usage of Knoppix, pass it the "noswap" option.
That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen here, oh anonymous one.
it made me proud to be an American! Won't someone please think of the grandmothers??
It does actually touch the HDD. It mounts a swap partition if it exists.
I can only see this as bad if you have a suspended session saved on the swap partition. Think laptops.
I've played with Knoppix before, and think it's just amazing.
Just over a year ago, I inhereted an old K6-2 450Mhz box with a dead hard drive. As I had an old monitor kicking around, and as I typically hate having guests use any of my workstations, I decided to remove the hard drive and set the system up as a dedicated Knoppix box.
I dutifully downloaded the ISO and burned a CD, only to find that the machine in question had an old CD-ROM drive incapable of reading 700MB discs. So I was SOL (and eventually found Gnoppix, which did fit onto a 650MB disc this machine could boot).
I can't imagine I've been the only person to run into this issue with Knoppix, so I wonder if this new "lite" version will be designed to work on 650MB discs (although admittedly I had a bit of a rough time even finding such discs to burn that Gnoppix CD oh so long ago).
(And yes, I suppose I could spend a bit of money and buy a new CD-ROM drive for the machine, but it was a freebie, and is supposed to be a guest machine, so it isn't as if I'm personally hurting by not putting any money into it ;) ).
Yaz.
I'm assuming you're referring to the possibility of putting a swap file on a FAT partition, where Knoppix creates a file of user-specified size to use as swap on one of your partitions. After you're done with Knoppix, the file can simply be deleted.
Er... Use the CD (lite) version? Perhaps?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Don't worry about distribution - they will just send it to everybody as an email attachment.
Yeah. Then you can have swap space without the mess of repartitioning anything.
Step 1: read the article
Step 2: failing this daunting undertaking, read the article summary:
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
Step 3: Try to find mods who also read the article summaries before modding people up.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I'll give you a great use for Knoppix. My father in-law was going to throw out his old laptop because the hard drive crashed and he wanted to buy a new one. Yes, he could have have just bought a new hard drive but that isn't the way he thinks...
Anyway, instead of throwing it out he let me take it. I popped in Knoppix and had instantly useful laptop for around the house. The only money I have put into it was a used 802.11g card from eBay. Knoppix is certainly not the speediest running off of a CD drive but it does the trick.
Another thing it works great for is people who are learning Unix and want to practice/poke around but no interest in installing Linux on their systems. For example, the place where I work supports the major Unix variations (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX) but we have a lot of support and tech people who know next to nothing about Unix. The company has lately been pushing these people to get up to speed and many are taking courses and trying to learn more. Thing is, they don't care about Unix that much and they won't be installing Linux on their home PC but they do want to practice what they have learned. Knoppix is perfect for them.
For the first situation you don't want to use Knoppix but rather a Live Cd that matches your distribution closely and boots without all this crap like X and KDE or Gnome
Linux is not Windows
Will the download have a Verisign sig? If not, how can we trust it?
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
This reminds me of my first year of college, studying Computing as one of my subjects. Now my teacher for this was Welsh, and had absolutely no clue about anything not contained within the pages of his hideously out-of-date textbook. He even forced us to learn Pascal when there was C/C++ availible as a 'preferred equivalent' in the curriculum. One long year of being baby-walked through coding and compiling command-line apps with Borland TurboPascal 5.5 for Windows. Sheer Hell. So after wasting countless hours posting to /., reading bash.org and spending as little time as possible coding the crappy database app we were forced to make in probably the worst language I've ever had to code in, we decided to play a little trick on our Welsh tormen^H^H^H^H^H^Htutor - We'd pop a Knoppix CD into one of the few boxes in the room with a CD-ROM drive and wait for him to do his usual rounds. We expected him to go ballistic, but he didnt - He just stared open-jawed at the screen.
Why? Had he just experienced a sort of open-source epiphany? Was he mesmerised by the dubious beauty of the the KDE backgrounds? No - the reason he was gazing in quiet awe at the contents of the battered, flickering screen in the corner of the computing lab was he thought we'd made it ourselves. In Pascal.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
With a "light" version and "maximum" version, the dev team might take the approach that "light" means "demo." In other words, they might leave some key features out of the "light" version that really should be in it. If that happens, people will complain and get what they want and the features they need. Or they will customize it and release it. I think that this could be a move that will start some off-shoots of Knoppix. It should be very good for Knoppix users.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
I work with a charity that gives donated computers to schoolchildren.
Unless there's a canned one out there, it looks like I'm going to have to roll my own "ultralight" CD to give away to people still running mid-90s hardware: 16-64MB RAM, 500MB-1GB HD, 2-4x CD if you are lucky, 14.4-33.6 modem if you are lucky, ISA or early-PCI sound card and video
Example software:
Lightweight web browser w/ Java - FF if it's not too heavy
Lightweight word processor that opens/saves MS-Word 95 files
Lightweight spreadsheet that opens/saves MS-Excel 95 files
Lightweight "presentation" program that opens/saves MS-Powerpoint 95 format
ssh, ftp, etc.
lightweight games
easy-to-use modem-dialer
cd-audio player/mixer
MS-Windows remote terminal services client
and of course support for all kinds of older hardware one might find on computers donated to charity.
Boot CD with a single floppy.
Anyone know of a canned Linux distro or bootable CD that fits my needs?
Anyone see any glaring ommissions from my software requirements?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I actually literally never leave home without a Knoppix CD (at least not during the winter, when I have pockets big enough for a CD :-P). There has been just too many occasions where I have saved the day just by booting into Knoppix and fixing whatever's broken. With Captive NTFS, even most Windows problem can be solved safely.
I actually use Knoppix at this very moment, as I'm at a friend's place and I couldn't get the borrowed network card to work in Windows. So I whipped out the Knoppix CD from my jacket, and of course, it worked pretty much out-of-the-box.
So I too am looking for ISO's that will fit on them.
,have not tried.
Damnsmalllinux
Being one of those unfortunate folks with less than 4GB RAM in their laptop, I won't be able to harness the performance offered by running Knoppix from a ramdisk with the toram cheat code.
Morphix, which is what I've been basically using as "Knoppix-Lite," and it does the trick for me. I use the Light-GUI iso, which is about 200MB. It's basically a modular Knoppix (it is, in fact, based on Knoppix). You can also roll your own. Say, if you don't need the GUI module, you can opt for other modules. Pretty neat.
my cd-rw are only 650 variety.
You've mentioned it twice here. So burn to a 700Mb CD-R already! I've seen them as cheap as $0.30 Australian (if you buy 100), but in any case, a CD-R is certainly cheap enough to waste if Knoppix doesn't suit you.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
And name the light version Fire'Something' as the Mozilla Team did.
this is a great idea i use Knoppix a lot and frequently on old computers but having some additional features on a dvd would be great for higher end systems and simplify carrying a bunch of cds or downloading some utilities"
:)
Is your version of Knoppix devoid of comma or period support?
Need - not really. But it could make life easier now and then.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
4.7GB seems like Medium.
Get a dual-layer double-sided 16GB DVD of Knoppix and that will be Maximum.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
you dont get much lite-er than that as live cd's go. and its very freakin useful webshite here can be used as rescue disk (root as default), audio & video streaming and lightweight web browser even on my oldest pc (p2 266mhz) and can be installed (well, docked, but i still get the cd drive back) *pix*
Remastering Knoppix CDs is doable. If any of the standard Knoppix live cds don't meet your needs you can customize one of your own. Ce cil Watson will giving a talk at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 3x) in February about how to go about doing this. Cecil is maintainer of KnoppMyth, a Knoppix distribution customized for use as a Linux based PVR with MythTV.
Would Debian fill that need? Since I've got Debian running on my old 486 laptop. Not to mention on an old 386/33 with 4 megs ram. Had to do a floppy install on both, but they run just peachy. Of course they are lacking everything you've prefaced with the word "lightweight":) So I guess they wouldn't work. But I have MP3 players on the 486 (386 has no sound anyway, not that it could probably handle MP3's), games, and all the usual suspects.
There are several - I usually go to http://www.linux.org/dist/index.html and select the "LiveCD" Category. This suggests a range of options, each with different advantages. I try out a new one every few months, just to get some variety.
One I tried recently, which is close to your needs is FeatherLinux (http://featherlinux.berlios.de/). I'm not sure about XL/Powerpoint in the default install, but it can install OpenOffice if you wish.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Okay, and can I force it i.e. to use swapfile while swap partition is present?
Say, I hibernate my native OS to the swap partition, then want to boot Knoppix. If it tries to use the swap partition it will corrupt the "hibernation" image, but the native memory may be not enough to boot the GUI...?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
In soviet russia knoppix splits you.
Have you metaroderated recently?
Damn Small Linux would run well on a system with those specs, but doesn't include the software you want. Check it out and see if you can modify it to suit your needs... It's worth a spin, and not that large a download. At any rate it has VNC so you could use it as a thin client.
I have a PC like that, and I can tell you: the one thing that's not going to work is the web browser. There just aren't any good, graphical web browsers that will run on such hardware.
The closest two are probably Konqueror and Dillo, with Konqueror being a bit too heavy and Dillo lacking too many features. You can also try Netscape 4, though I have had a hard time finding a stable version.
For the rest, you can run Linux, X, a light window manager like icewm or windowmaker, xmms, some games (freeciv), abiword for opening word documents (forget about the joker that mentioned OOo), etc just fine.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Is there any knoppix based distobution that has the vmwware vmtools integrated? To run you knoppix cd in a (faster) vmware box without having to install it, or remaster a cd?
As others have pointed out, you're probably going to have a hard time filling all your requirements on a really low-end box.
However, I recently installed VectorLinux on an old, mid-90s laptop (Toshiba 220CS) and it runs pretty well.
The main requirements for the laptop were word processing (Abiword) and music (XMMS).
Performance isn't stunning, but it's pretty usable.
The idea of Knoppix is great but it only ever seems to half work - you need to be a unix admin to get more than 50% going. Getting sound took a year off my life. The modem doesn't work (it's a winmodem) so I got a wifi transciever with the aim of attaching quietly to a local network - seemed to recognise unit but wouldn't play. I tried XP and everything connected seemlessly - it's infuriating as is I really want to use a linux system. Mike
...is what, 13-14 CDs? It is certainly past what you can squeeze in on a dual-layer DVD (11, IIRC), so it could happen. All debian would need is another jidgo file to build it...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Really, Knoppix is everyone's favorite? Give me Ubuntu's Live CD any day!
The Free desktop that Just Works
I had the same thoughts as yourself on Live CDs until recently, when a friend of mine showed me what he uses Live CDs for. He codes on the side from his real job. When he's on a plane/etc, He takes his work laptop and boots an Ubuntu Live CD, and does his coding there, basically in a demo environment, where he can go ahead and email it to himself at home, save it to a personal usb drive, etc, all with it techincally never touching his emplyer's hard drive. This could be one of the few reasonable uses other than for demonstration purposes. My boss used a Knoppix CD to set up an Asterisk server, if you believe that, which is one of the dumbest uses I've ever seen, and fitting regarding the person I'm talking about...
Puppy linux or Austrumi might be worth a look. No presentation software though.
I am trolling
but now i think its intentional- can they make the project sound any more like feminine napkins? maybe they should come up with a new discrete carrying case
What? No Menthol?
Yeah, I read the article, I just don't happen to think that the "light" version will be all that impressive for someone who has never seen linux before. One of the selling points of linux is that most of what you need is included with the distribution, you don't have to spend 2 days installing irfanview, mozilla, and 2 petabytes of MS service packs. What a condescending asshole. I'll bet you sound just like the comic book guy from the Simpsons.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
Yay! Not only do you get a bootable Linux distro, you'll also get a bootable kernel.org mirror ;)
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Fact: FireFox is slow and bloated. It takes about 35 MB of main memory, so don't even think about loading it on systems with less than 64 MB of RAM. Even konqueror doesn't take more memory and renders pages at least twice as fast.
So I would suggest something like this:
Conclusion: I think there aren't any Office-compatible apps that run at least halfway decent on a Pentium 90. You'd better try Windows 95 and Office 97, that is even usable on a 486.*) Sorry for the table, but I incapable of convincing Slashdot to display anything table-like.
...But I, for one, do not have a DVD burner. It was a choice I made, as I thought, "When will I ever need to burn a DVD?" I think it will be hard to overcome this problem until a few years down the road, when DVD burners and DVD burning software (is there any for linux?) have become as commonplace as CD burning is today, not to mention a reduction in blank media prices.
I don't know if it's me, but I can never seem to find an FTP site that lets me DL a copy of Knoppix at a speed better than 2-5 Kb/s -- this, on a cable modem! Does anyone else have this problem? The only reason I haven't already given up on FTP and switched to BitTorrent is that our home LAN is on a router that from time to time will flake out under load...
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
And don't even get me started on "cleave" meaning both "to seperate" and "to put together"...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
What about an installer that will give you some choice about what to install on your system?
If they are going to give you an entire DVD's worth of software taking an "install it all or install none of it" approach is going to seem a bit ridiculous.
Being a regular knoppix user I have seen them make some ridiculous decisions to save space on the CD.
For example...not installing an English dictionary for the spellchecker in mozilla, but including a full suite of games and 4 text editors.
I wonder with a whole DVD is they will start supporting gnome again?
I would prefer a WinCE boot USB key and/or CD. Would be a more familiar UI and better support (from MS). Kinda like AMD's 50x15 stuff, but use regular PC or an XBox.
Damnsmall, Suse Live, Slax, Gnoppix, and loads and loads of others. every time i go to distrowatch, theres another ton of them, but i like dyne cos its small and fast with a lot of useful shit and not so much bloat.
^_^ For that matter, one might ask why telling a girl she "looks nice today" sometimes results in her taking offense, insinuating you mean it didn't look nice before.
Personally, I don't find your second comment as really being offensive. Maybe it's just mentioning ugliness? Use of certain words can definitely tint (taint) the rest of the sentence.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I've had a really good experience with installing plain old Debian Woody on old hardware. I set up an old machine for my kids to use. Here's my setup:
Pentium I 100 Mhz cpu w/1xCDROM & ISA slots
Lightweight web browser w/ Java - FF if it's not too heavyI installed FF, too. It's kinda slow, but my kids can even do flash games from sesamestreet.com. If it's not working for you, try Dillo, or even links. You won't have Java, but they're very fast.
Lightweight word processor that opens/saves MS-Word 95 filesTry using catdoc (doc -> txt or tex) to get them out of Word format, altogether... you can even convert them to rtf, by using latex2rtf and then you can open them in AbiWord, or Ted, both very good lightweight Word processors.
Lightweight spreadsheet that opens/saves MS-Excel 95 filesUse xlhtml to convert your Excel file to html, for easy parsing/conversion. Then consider xspread, or even sc. Their file format is ASCII, for easy parsing, and conversion to CSV, which Excel can open without any problem.
Lightweight "presentation" program that opens/saves MS-Powerpoint 95 formatTry ppthtml to convert your PowerPoint files to more flexible HTML.
Other apps I'd recommend:
---
I didn't have a reason to own a DVD writer before this. Crud, now I have to spend money.
Good luck running FF with 16mb ram. I absolutey hate IE, but I could just barely use it, with a 486/dx4 100mhz, and 64 mb ram, Mozilla and FF were simply unusable.
Debian Woody (chosen for stability, not size, though it ran well on half of the 2GB hdd before I upgraded to 20GB (and still does)), most of "generic" applications, just postfix for mail (I'm not a sendmail masochist), boa for webserver (apache is way too big for my needs), 128M of swap space (only 16M of RAM), NOTHING X. Webbrowsers: lynx, links. Mailers: mutt, pine. All common shells. It runs quite fine, though heavier tasks like compiling the kernel upgrade are performed on my other box because this one takes some 3 days... Also standard more computationally intense tasks take some time, like I wait some 5-8s for ssh login (then ssh runs smoothly). I recently got a new monitor for my primary box so I moved the old 17" CRT to that 486 (replacing a crappy 14" mono) and I can run even svgalib programs i.e. zgv to view pics (although it takes quite some time to decompress and display bigger JPEGs)
:)
Uptimes reach a year and are usually ended by power failure or kernel upgrade. I had one major failure: the power supply died and I had a hard time finding an AT power supply.
I'd say the key to running it fast is giving up ALL of X-windows. I know that if I increased the swap size, I could run KDE on it. But it wouldn't be usable. In my case it runs great with console - and not only as firewall. I play some 'doze game and check hints from the FAQ on the other screen, or do some programming and keep some chat open on the other screen... The only problem is I keep confusing the keyboards
Ah. The CPU is "Cyrix Instead"
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"