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Grokking Knoppix
chronicon writes "Knowing Knoppix is a beginner-friendly, 134 page freely downloadable book (released under the GNU Free Documentation License in PDF format) designed to familiarize new users with the Knoppix LiveCD distribution, GNU/Linux in general, and (as listed first on the description) Windows disaster recovery using Knoppix."
I was using Knoppix on a 333mhz K6-2 for quite a long time, and it was very much usable, and even speedy. Although, to be fair, the machine had 256MB ram.
Of course, I'm not putting down the author, or the book, I simply wish to point out that one shouldn't underestimate the power of older hardware. Knoppix is still a great tool for those who simply cannot afford a more 'modern' machine, and this fact should not be left out.
If you like Gnome more than KDE you should really try Gnoppix.
roblimos book "point and click linux" is what you want then. You get simply mepis on cd, then a dvd with instructions that you can run simultaneously with booting the live cd if you use your normal dvd player hooked to the TV for that part. Just recently got one for my GF, it fits what you are looking for, linux for beginners.
FYI:
3
The last time I used the official Knoppix 3.6 for windows recovery, captive-ntfs, which enables linux to use the native ntfs drivers on the windows system for rock solid reliability, was broken. Although reading is possible, you should never write to an ntfs volume without captive-ntfs.
fix: http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=6025
Hmmm, looks like a freely available spec to me... The book is also available as an OO.org file. You'd prefer if they used
Let's face it, most Windows users don't know about OO.org, much less something like LaTex, and most Linux users don't need to read the book.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You can download it OpenOffice format if you want, but it's a lot bigger than the PDF, and most of the world doesn't have a viewer for it.
No, 828Mb is correct. 128 for Knoppix to run in, and 700 to load the CD into RAM for faster access.
boot using "knoppix nodma" (add "nodma" to whatever other boot option you are using) and it should come up fine.
Yeah, almost as popular as Stranger in a Strange Land.
I would also recommend something other than Fedora to somebody (new). Maybe not Gentoo or Debian (because they both involve the scary/evil command line, and are hard to install), but probably Ubuntu (okay, it's Debian based, but much easier). Fedora is a big bloat. It's got too much availible in the installer, and it's sluggish when the system is up and running. Why do you need four CDs for a system? It's a waste of space, particularly if you have internet access to grab what little is missing. It's not a high end server with lots of daemons running on it, it's a desktop... keep it light!
Ubuntu by contrast has only one CD. It's got a good base system, with an office suite, web browser, email client, movie player, music player, etc. and most of the common software types used. I download one 510MB ISO, plus about 70MB of extra stuff (MP3 support, Windows codecs, NVidia drivers, wlan drivers...) that's not on the CD, plus updates. Fedora I download 2 GB of CD images, plus about 70MB of extra stuff, plus updates.
Some CD image sizes, as a comparison:
Debian netinst (debian-installer rc2 sarge): 110MB.
Windows 2000 Professional w/ SP3: 375MB.
Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty): 510MB.
Windows XP Home w/ SP2: 540MB.
Windows XP Professional w/ SP2: 580 - 640MB.
Knoppix 3.6: 700MB.
Fedora Core 2: 2110MB!
All stated sizes acquired from local sources or P2P networks, rounded off to the nearest 5MB. I'm aware that a complete Debian (sarge) set is 12 CDs, but not many people use it as an installation method.
Probably the other reason is the more personal hate of rpm and yum.
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Ubuntu's live CD IS Ubuntu, they merged, which I'm rather angry about because now Gnoppix is buggier than ever after inheriting lots of bad code from Ubuntu. I'm not trolling Ubuntu here, I'm on Ubuntu (Warty) now, it's a great OS, but the live cd? Shoddy. Now Gnoppix is too, for example, I can only boot it up using Safe Mode, but Ubuntu (install) boots perfectly, what the hell?
In order to reduce the slashdot effect on the author's server please consider downloading via coral links or via p2p networks like edonkey/gnutella.t :8090/knowing-knoppix/pdf/knowing-knoppix.pdf/ Main Contentt :8090/knowing-knoppix/pdf/cover.pdf/ t :8090/knowing-knoppix/pdf/back.pdf/
n knowing-knoppixpdf Main content via gnutella network.2 7aef6b60e65b231cecdb140c7C Main content via edonkey network.
Here are the coralized links
http://www.pjls16812.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk.nyud.ne
http://www.pjls16812.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk.nyud.ne
http://www.pjls16812.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk.nyud.ne
The source of the book cannot be coralized as it is more then 4MB.
Basically the above URL's are coralized.That means that the content is cached to a nearby location.You can read more about coral's at http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/overview//
Here are the edonkey/magnet links to download via p2p networks
magnet:xturnsha1LNDDBUSI3H5ECNTIUP5RLSEX5GMLV44Ed
ed2k:7Cfile7Cknowing-knoppixpdf7C40002537C349dd9c
Wow, I always wanted to submit a story to Slashdot. Now, here I am *in* a Slashdot story. More than I ever wanted! It certainly had an amazing effect. In two days, an extraordinary 25,327 visitors downloaded, or attempted to download, the PDF. Thank you, all those who took the trouble to post comments. In a few days there will be a new version, dated 2005-something, that will take the comments into account.
:-(
> "The only people plugging in a knoppix cd are nerds who #1: already have a considerable working
> knowledge of linux & 2: don't read...this."
Yes, I know, that's pretty true. But everyone has to start somewhere. I hope at least some people might find it useful.
> "[if it doesn't work]... you've lied to them saying it was plain and simple... he never says anything
> like "and if THIS doesn't happen, THEN do.."
Guilty! I have changed certain sections about reading the hard disk accordingly. I have already made some attempts in the "Quick help" sections to address some of the errors I have encountered and mistakes I have made while using Knoppix myself.
"Kind of amusing that open source documentation should be released in a proprietary format."
Yes. I plead guilty again. But it is at least an open source format that is built into OpenOffice.org, and GNU Ghostscript, both of which are GPL.
>"Using OpenOffice... for a 134 page document? I stay away from office suites for documents
> longer than a handful of pages... They never heard of LaTeX [latex-project.org]?"
Indeed. Using OpenOffice.org for a 100+ page document is getting kinda horrible... I tried LaTeX but I never figured out how to get the kind of presentation control that I wanted.
> "I think the book bounces back and forth between good "So You Want To Be A Linux
> Consultant" material, like the stuff about hda, fd0, boot process, init, and so on, and
> good "Grandpa Computer User" material, like the stuff about KDE ("click on things
> to start them", "you can lasso many things at once"). This makes it difficult for either
> group to use."
That is an excellent comment. See here the power of peer review. I could never have thought of that myself, yet it seems so obvious now it's been pointed out to me. I have moved the material about "device names" and "user accounts" almost to the back of the book.
> "wasn't necessary to go into detail about the bootup process... as soon as people see "SCSI" or
> IDE" or "PCMCIA" they'll go into idiot mode and fail to grok the rest of the paper, and
> resort to throwing feces at the monitor"
Good point. I have taken out the detailed description of the startup process. I have replaced it with an one-line explanation and a few examples of how long the auto-detection process takes (between 40 seconds and 2 minutes depending on the speed of the machine).