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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're forgetting about one thing. This is Free Software. There's no motivation behind releasing crippled versions. You just try to make it best possible within specified limits.
And people will complain, yes. No matter what to do.
I think that this could be a move that will start some off-shoots of Knoppix. It should be very good for Knoppix users.
MORE KNOPPIX OFF-SHOOTS??? NOOOOOOO!
(do you have a clue how many different Knoppix off-shoots are out there? HUNDREDS!)
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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?
For Europeans, 100 miles is a long way to go.
For Americans, 100 years is a long time ago.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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.
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
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.
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...
What? No Menthol?
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.