Knoppix 3.8 at CeBIT w/ Kernel 2.6, FF, and More

clsc writes "The German tech news site Heise Online reports that Knoppix 3.8 is being presented at CeBIT (Hall 9, Stand C39). Knoppix 3.8 has kernel 2.6 as default, KDE 3.3.2, OpenOffice 1.1.4, as well as... Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird 1.0. There's also a really neato new thing involving unionfs . It seems to imply that you can change most anything on the running system, even as it is running from CD - and changes can be stored too (even on NTFS)."

Comments

cool

[xbmodder]

Nothing to see here... Only the best linux boot CD ever Knoppix has saved me thousands. They should win the Nobel Prize or something.

Knoppix is really good

[Dancin_Santa]

I like to take it with me to the computer store to try out on the various laptops I am considering buying. If Knoppix doesn't have any trouble with the device drivers, I feel comfortable buying the laptop. If it runs into some issues, I can scratch that laptop off my list. And since it doesn't have any longterm effect on the existing OS, it can be loaded on with impunity.

That's how I decided which fileservers to buy to run my distribution center.

Re:Knoppix is really good

[carrett]

yeah. it's also great for people who are new to linux and unsure if they actually want to install it on their machine. i tell all my n00b friends that if knoppix works fine on their box, then, theoretically when they install a distro on their harddisk it should work as well (especially if it is debian-based).

coLinux and live CDs

[QuantumG]

I was talking to Jeff Waugh from Ubuntu the other week (*cough* blatant name dropping *cough*) who suggested that the next Ubuntu Live CD might have coLinux on it. You'll be able to plug the CD into any Windows XP machine and get Ubuntu running in a window (that you can fullscreen if you like). He said he'd prefer not to use the Cygwin X server, so I think he's going to put up a bounty for a frame buffer -> DirectX driver for coLinux.

No need to reboot to demo linux, that could well be sweet.

Re:coLinux and live CDs

[WetCat]

Why not run TightVNC session against coLinux running in Windows?
I use it that way and it works very good.

Knoppix can REALLY impress

[xiando]

There is one way of really supremely impressing people using Knoppix some people are not aware of: IF you have a gigabyte of RAM or more then you can actually load the whole Knoppix CD into memory so you can use the CD drive for all other kinds of things... But this has one obvious bi-effect that I have realized impresses so heavily: When programs are started from RAM, they obviously load faster than from a hard drive. Knoppix loaded into memory is the fastest Linux distribution I have seen so far, almost all programs start instantly. So if you have a machine with lots of ram and want to seriously impress: This is the way to do it! This is kind of cheating as no normal Linux system can perform like this, but it is ideal for demonstrating Linux. On a personal note, I would seriously be happy if something like this could be done with a normal distribution: Say if you have 3 GB RAM, then why not load everything into a portion of it at boot and run programs off memory .. even if you have Linux installed on your hard drive? Obviously this is 'waste of RAM', but hey, if you have lots of money and therefore RAM, why not??

Re:Knoppix can REALLY impress

[Bert64]

I used to do that with the Amiga, you could create a reset resident ramdisk so you could copy your OS into it and reboot from it..

Re:Knoppix can REALLY impress

[ahfoo]

Well, Gigs of RAM isn't really all that cheap, so I think using Damn Small Linux to do the same thing is more impressive for most people because you can use what is available in the here and now. You can easily load DSL into RAM with 256Megs and sometimes it works with 128Megs, but you won't be able to add many other packages once you get it online.
However, and I'm currently typing on just such a system, it's not as fast as you'd hope. The reason is that LiveCDs use compression on the filesystems so you have that overhead preventing things from being as fast as it could be. But certainly as big RAM goes mainstream there is no doubt in my mind that the idea of running the whole system from RAM is inevitable. Like I say, I'm already there albeit using a compressed filesystem.
As for this unionfs thing. Is that completely unrelated to klik? That's a pretty cool development on Knoppix that has come a long way in a very short time. You can already install most Debian packages on Knopppix without a hard drive install using Klik. And even better, you can save the packages to hard drive or removeable media. So, you don't lose them at all when you change to another machine.
This totally rocks. I'm not sure if it's related to the unionfs thing, but it certainly deserves mention because it is hot shit.

Re:Knoppix can REALLY impress

[Anonymous Coward]

It is possible to do it yourself:
- create a ramdisk and mount it as /usr
- copy the files from the previos /usr to the new one
- make an image of the ramdrive on shutdown
- load the image at boottime

except for point 3 this is exactly what knoppix does. So it CAN be done.

Re:Knoppix can REALLY impress

[mrogers]

I've just been writing a boot script that finds programs that were accessed between the last boot and the last shutdown and loads them into the disk cache. Speeds up load times even when you "only" have 64 megs of RAM.

http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/mrogers/quickstart.h tml

Re:Knoppix has come full circle

[Mad Merlin]

There have been several Knoppix DVDs already, special versions of 3.5 and 3.6 at least, although they were only given away at various tech shows in the past. Now that they're using BitTorrent to distribute as well as regular mirrors, I don't see any reason they don't have wider distribution of the DVD version. Perhaps ~2 gigs of software is enough and they don't want to fragment development between the CD and DVD version, I wouldn't say that DVD burners are commonplace just yet.

Writing to NTFS...

[Mad Merlin]

As the summary hints at writing to NTFS, will this version of Knoppix use Captive NTFS in some manner, or is it just going to write to a loopback file to get around the problems with using the native Linux driver for writing to NTFS?

Now we need simple online storage - GMail FS anybo

[OlivierB]

The one last thing that could even more favorise live CD adoptions could be online settings and file storage.
Sure you can carry around a USB key and store your settings there. But imagine being able to boot a machine anywhere and beinga ble to retrieve your field from something ala Yahoo briefcase.

Solutions exist out there; think GMailFS
If they would include this on the KNOPPIX CD with automount and all..
I am drooling just thinking about the possibilities!

No, go kio_fuse instead!

[headLITE]

Actually, they should include kio_fuse. It's a fuse module enabling the kernel to mount any KDE kio_slave. This combined with the fish:// or webdavs:// kio_slaves...

You can get 1 GB of webdav accessible space at GMX.net for free if you know enough German to get around the freemail signup.

Re:write to its own disk?

[FlashBuster3000]

lol, oh no, you're all on the wrong way.
In the german article it says:
Through unionfs it is possible to change every file on the knoppix-system. But this doesnt mean the cd,
unionfs just takes care of this, and if you, let's say, change ~/.xinitrx, it copies this file to the harddisk, which can be on NTFS (but this is called unstable..).
And through that you theoretically can change the whole knoppix, install software, whatever you like, because your changes are on the harddrive.

Hope, this helped you.

Re:spyware/malware cleaner on a livecd

[TractorBarry]

If such a live CD were made it could prove to be a killer Linux app.

Imagine the interest generated when you boot off the live CD and then manage to remove all the malware infesting a users machine, even the stubborn stuff, whilst simultaneously showing off some Linux goodness at the same time.

Even better automate the whole cleanup process and end it with a nice "If you were running Linux full time you wouldn't have got all this crap in the first place" message.

This would very soon get a new meme into the user population "Linux removes viruses & spyware, Linux good, Linux is my friend, me want". Especially if a few media outlets pick up on it.

Remastered with e17

[Anonymous Coward]

What might really be interesting, (perhaps a niche project) would be to remaster knoppix with enlightenment e17. I'd love to be able to show off all that eyecandy.

I use KDE and Gnome on a regular basis but showing people KDE is getting fairly bland. Yes, I know there are two schools of thought on this eyecandy vs. clean/simple/functional, but knoppix *is* for showing off to a certain extent.

Re:And if you want Knoppix to run from the hard dr

[xtracto]

I think parent have a point, I would mod you up if I had points. I told my father to download Knoppix (we dont live near) so he could try this "Linux" thing, now he started to use Knoppix just for fun, and he liked it but after some time he has told me he does not want to use it from the CD, and asked me if there was a way to put it in the computer (I am using his own words... ok?). Now, I know I just can not tell him to do what the GP wrote, he will be more than lost and he will just trhow away his Knoppix CD... he has windows in his current machine, with all his files etc etc. I told him about installing Mandrake or other OS, but he told me he wanted this Knoppix because he was used to it. So, well, I think yes, parent has a point, there could be an easy way to install it. (I can tell my father to resize his partition using Partition Magic, so its no problem for dual booting).

Re:I like knoppix and all

[sireasoning]

both ubuntu and pclinuxos .81a does lvm2. pclinuxos .81a actually maps the lvm drives into fstab but has a bug that identifies all lvm filesystems as ext2, so you would probably want to edit /etc/fstab and put in the correct filesystem for each lvm2 partition.

Remastering your own custom KNOPPIX

[rwa2]

Remastering your own KNOPPIX is easy and it works.

I built a custom system maintenance image for work in a couple of hours. Among the changes:

• Stripped out games, i18n (takes up a lot of space)
• installed some extra utilities (gkrellm, iftop, etc.)
• captive-ntfs ntoskrnl and ntfs.sys files already stored in /var/lib/captive
• installed DOSemu to run Ghost and DriveImage (previous backup standards). This allows me to do backups and restores over the network, or from a USB2.0 / firewire drive (that isn't always detected properly under real DOS). I can even backup and restore to SATA or SCSI/RAID arrays that aren't supported under DOS.
  Unfortunately, DOSemu stripped out wholedisk access, so I have to restore the MBR with dd . :( Anyone know how to hack wholedisk access back into the dosemu source?
• Custom scripts to automate connecting to our fileservers and detecting/backing up drives with partimage, dd, etc.
• And of course, custom backgrounds :P

Pretty damn useful... it's the only system maintenance CD that boots on all of our hardware.

If only grub could be bootstrapped from CD, we would also use it to boot into existing systems and it'd be perfect!