To use a normal telephone with asterisk you need an FXS card, not an FXO. FXS cards are significantly more expensive than FXO. You can get a PCI card that has slots to stick in little mini-cards and get 4 FXO lines for about $500. Comparitively, an FXO card is $7 on ebay.
Another way to use a normal telephone is to get a Digium "IAXy" device or Cisco ATA 186. These are small boxes that have an ethernet on one side and a RJ11 on the other. This still ends up around $100 per real telephone.
That's why there is so much interest in a much cheaper way to use a real telephone or at least a normal handset of some time with a computer softphone.
This device requires that your software be smart enough to use the DTMF tones. If you are willing to give up being able to dial from the handset, there is a simple handset that is a "Y" connector that connects both to your speakers and to the soundcard; picking up the handset automatically mutes the speakers. I can't find the link to it right now. (It's not cordless, which seems to be the main goal of many of these hacks.)
Availability of a graphics card with fully published specs and open source drivers.
Note that the mission is not to actually design or make it. And:
In order to get manufacturers to make such hardware, we have to show that it will be economically viable to do so.
No mention of making it themselves. The rest of the page makes it appear that their main work is coming up with a feature list.
If you dig through the rest of the site, it appears some guy wrote some sort of emulator and they intend to convince someone else to translate it to FPGA code and put it on an FPGA, but the FPGA code probably won't be available. That's not an open source graphics card.
I believe this project is an offshoot of what was originally this guy's ideas. In fact I am pretty sure of it because the name of the guy on OpenGraphics is also Timothy Miller. I wrote those guys when that original article first hit slashdot that I was willing to pre-commit to paying $200 each for up to 5 cards, and I stand by that. But I won't pay for someone's simulation code, or for an FPGA sold by the same bullshit company as before and with a closed FPGA.
I wish someone would try to do an Open Source graphics card, I'd like to buy it. I think it it likely that people would find other uses for it -- reprogramming it to be a software radio, for example. Perhaps after the Open Graphics Card project screws around with the big companies enough, someone else will take their simulation and design and make an open graphics card.
But in the end, the Open Graphics Card project is simply producing a very detailed spec and begging one of the usual asshole companies to make a closed source version to match it. This is doomed to failure. They won't do it, and if they do there will be small undocumented differences from the spec and you won't be able to correct the spec easily or change the FPGA.
This is not a situation that can be solved by lobbying companies. I believe it can be solved by making hardware, even if you have to make your own company in the process.
Giving free and bad legal advice is not any more or less bad than giving any other kind of advice. Unless you are a lawyer; then you can be liable for malapractice for giving bad advice. On the internet, this is often some how twisted around to mean that you shouldn't offer commentary or advice about certain things unless you are a lawyer.
If a foolish crowd-following chump believes in something, that isn't much of a recommendation.
And these people sound stupid. You say "I would never turn down information" but these people don't sound like the kind of people who would filter out mis-information before passing it on, especially if it made them feel important to be passing it on.
They have the kinds of personalities that would have been a trouble making town gossip a hundred years ago in some small village. In today's societies, they similarly cause trouble by spread a generalized distrust, as you have to figure out if each stranger you meet is trying to manipulate you in some way.
Ultimately, if you follow their recommendations, you end up doing other people's (unetheically unlabeled) advertising for free.
The card described in the post has the capability of a $25 generic card. No 3D or fancy stuff.
I'm willing to pay more for it because I think it will work for a long time, and I think because of the flashable ROM and re-programmable FPGA people will find cool hacks to do with it. Maybe someone will turn it into a software radio transmitter.
He did not describe some cutting edge high end card worth hundreds of dollars. He did describe a potentially useful, well documented and flexible piece of hardware. If we put a lot of these out there, people will put one in every slot in a motherboard and re-program them to crunch SETI stuff or whatever, and just possibly, someone will hack it in a way we can't immagine now and start a whole new industry.
He also described a guestimate parts cost of $75 (I think he was underestimating the cost of FPGAs) and a final price of $100. The true final price would probably be more like $200.
And at $200 I might buy one, after they come out and other people try them. But I think that for funding the venture by pre-ordering, at the risk of getting nothing for my money, I should get a sweet deal. Naysayers like you can pay full price after I already have mine.
And finally, in answer to your question, I pay more for inferior products that are Free all the time. For the first computer I ever purchased, I had the alternative of buying a surplus Sun workstation that I was familar with and liked, to buying a PC. But a month before a friend had showed me Redhat 4.0 on his system, and instead of the old Sun for $2,000 I spend $2,200 on a PentiumPro 200 Mhz computer, and bought and installed RedHat. Back then it sucked compaired to a real Unix, but I never looked back. Look at the cost of a Tivo compared to a MythTV machine; guess what I built ? It's not a real choice, if you like being able to do what you want to do with stuff, you don't buy a BMW with the hood welded shut, no matter what the price. If you got one for free you'd just toss it out.
Another example is that I use hardware modems inspite of the fact that I can get the call interruption on busy signal by using Lucent winmodems with their closed-source module.
First, I would like to suggest you may not be going all that wrong using DOS. I know someone who has carefully stripped out the help files from WP5.1 and has a DRDOS 7.03 floppy that will boot up, copying everying into a ramdisk so you can use the floppy, and has enough room to save files, and it has all the common printer drivers on it also. You can put your assignment on this floppy, take it to school, and do last minute editting and print it out on any computer connected to a printer.
However, if you really want all that linux has to offer (maybe browsing the web in coffeeshops, etc) then the way to do it is to have a floppy that boots up doesn't mount the flash disk to run from it, but just to read an image to put into a ram disk; then it runs from the ramdisk. The flash is too slow and may have a limited number of writes.
I did something similar that you might use as a starting point, a linux version of the old laplink boot disks. The first thing you would do is add the USB drivers to the kernel; the next would be to make it mount the flash drive, make a ram drive, and decompress an image onto the ram drive. You would put those commands in the linuxrc file. Compile the kernel to have a larger default ram drive size, and then use it by just accessing/dev/ram0.
If that boots, see if you can copy parts of the 2 floppy X windows setup, and add links for web browsing and if you have to go beyond MC for writing, try abiword.
I would be interested to hear what you figure out on this. Even if you don't complete the project, but get something that partially boots, or anything at all, feel free to send me an email.
Also, modifying one of the existing GUI builders (xforms, etc) to produce code for MS would not be that hard.
Still, I'm interested to know if there is one already available . . . searching on the usual places (freshmeat, sourceforge, google) it seems that most often GUI builders are associated with a specific alternative widget set, not the generic windows one.
Doesn't the full blown Microsoft Studio have a tool that lets you lay out GUIs with buttons and other widgets, and then generates the code with all the positioning and etc ?
It seems to me that this might be one piece of a development environment still not available. I know tools like that are available for wxWindows, but what about for using Microsoft's native widget set ?
The utility floppies that come with Western Digital harddrives boot DRDOS. I don't know about the cdroms they recently started using instead of floppies.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I could easily make a subnet of "virtual" installations and prevert the stats.
However, I think there is little reason to. It doesn't actually promote a piece of software -- getting your piece on the first disk would just mean that more people whould have to use the 2d disk, not that more people would see or install your software.
Essentially, this is a cooperative effort -- the installers don't want to download stuff they don't need, the distributors don't want to get unnecessarily high bandwidth bills. The lack of adversial interests means that aspect of security is less important.
However other aspects of security ARE important. It would be a bad thing for a professional spammer to get a hold of a database of IP addresses and packages installed on them, and wait for the next exploit in some package to know what IPs to target to make into zombie spam-blasters.
It is not against copyright law to possess a copy. It's the COPYING that is controlled, you know, like how it's named COPYright ? Perhaps possessing copies might in some cases be used as evidence that you were copying, but this seems unlikely in the case of this code.
Also, even if you don't look at it, you can't prove that you haven't. As you say, " couldn't prove that I hadn't copied anything. I suffered for it." What suffering will we save ourselves by not looking ? Microsoft will file suits not based on the facts of how their copyrights were infringed, but on their perceptions of how we are cutting into their bottom line. So you can expect that after the SCO stuff winds down (which is financed by a company owned by Melinda Gates buying the stock SCO insiders keep dumping) a new type of legalistic terrorism will be brought into play.
Finally, it's not against copyright to look at someone else's code, and then write your own. Do you think musicians avoid listening to the radio ? That novelists don't read novels ? It is against the law to steal someone's trade secretes, so if there are trade secretes in this code, someone could be in for Federal criminal penalties as well as civil damages. On the other hand, once public, trade secretes are no longer trade secretes. On the gripping hand, who wants to possibly encourage purposeful leaking of other people's code by producing great stuff from the product of such a leak ?
Seeing copyrighted work, and then writing a similar work, is not a copyright violation. Musicians listen to each other's work all the time -- do you think they don't listen to the radio ? Writers read each other's novels.
It is ok to write code even with a printout of copyrighted code on your lap for you to refer to. Unless, of course, you type in that exact code, or anything close enough to be called a derived work. That vague definition of "derived" is practically up to a jury or judge, so it's best not to get close to the boundary.
Sometimes you hear references to doing engineering in a "clean room" with "virgins" who have not been exposed to a particular product. Those are issues that arise in the case of trade secretes. Incidentally, any trade secretes in this code are no longer . . . in the US trade secret law applies only while the secrete is still a secrete. Damages or prosecution of the first person to reveal it might be possible, but not those who follow when it is public knowledge.
The reason not to bother with this is: we already have the source code to a number of much better operating systems, from FreeDOS and DRDOS to CP/M to Linux to BSD, etc.
If the Free Software movement continues to erode the vast money-machines of proprietary software companies, legal and illegal action will be taken regardless of
Please don't go around repeating this "if you even look at MS source you are contaminated" nonsense, because it will lend itself to Microsoft FUD if this is established in the public's mind.
By the way, I have heard through hearsay that many of Microsoft's managers believe this "look and be contaminated" stuff, to the extent that they are worried about their staff possibly looking at linux code.
I think you actually have an interesting product. I would have bought a picputer 12 months ago, had I known about them. I might buy one in a few months if you have them, when I will be doing a semi-automated animatronics project for a Haunted House. In fact, just out of interest, how many would I have to sign up to order right now to get a batch from you ? I can handle getting just the circuit board and components, I can surface mount solder. Also, the software can't be limited in any way -- you'll have to give me source even if you make me sign an agreement not to distribute it.
A couple of tips here dude. For one, link to picputer.com and modaudio.com, it raises your rank in google and brings in customers. Two, while I'm sorry your former friend assaulted you and destroyed your stock of amp cabinents, take that shit off the web site -- it's bad for business. And don't say "I'm not selling these because I have no permanent address", that sounds awful even if it is the truth. Say, "temporarily, I am only taking larger orders, due to the need to be more efficient in production. I will be taking single orders as business builds." Or something like that.
Get a post office box for $12 a year, and put that one the page. Get rid of the "I can't put my real email up here because of spam" nonsense; install spamassassin and put up a contact email address.
Anyway, back to your picputer. I would expand my market beyond music groups; try to contact some of the hobby robot groups and see if they are interested. You might be able to get a club to go in on a group order of a number of unassembled kits which they could all put together in a soldering party.
I have searched extensively and posted on various mailing lists and usenet groups.
There is a Canadian LUG that has the first install iso from 6.1, but not the source CD (technically against the GPL).
And that's it.
Now compare that to professional linux distributions:
http://slackware.com/getslack/ (see the bottom of the page) http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/ (now that's more like it)
If I'm downloading random hackerware off of the net, I keep my archives carefully because I might need to know what I installed and it's up to me. But if I'm paying money, I expect to be able to find that stuff again in a central place if I need it. What's the use of the corporate beauracracy if it can't do anything for you ?
If they are such a good, reliable, stand up company, why can't I find the source code rpms or installation.iso for Mandrake 6.1 anywhere on the net ?
It would be nice to install distributions maintained by people who would leave their downloads up, so that when you were confronted with ancient installations in the future that needed a few tweaks, you could handle it.
Knoppix is very useful for getting your data out of a broken computer, prior to re-installing or replacing the harddrive outright.
I made a floppy based linux especially for this purpose: http://rgr.freeshell.org/flinux/escape/. However, if you have a network, it is probably easier to use Knoppix to copy the data over the network rather than burn it to a cd. Note that Knoppix does have cdrecord and mkisofs on it; if you can boot knoppix from one cd drive, and have another to access as a burner (say an external USB cd burner) then you can save your data that way. Knoppix is better than my floppy setup, unless you have no network, and only a cd burner and no other CD device to boot from. Knoppix also supports more filesystems and hardware than I can fit on a floppy or care to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
The GPL, itself, is copyrighted, so that still doesn't make a "contrast" between the GPL and IBM.
If you use the serial port instead of USB, and a PIC chip and a MAX232, you could do it fairly cheaply.
To use a normal telephone with asterisk you need an FXS card, not an FXO. FXS cards are significantly more expensive than FXO. You can get a PCI card that has slots to stick in little mini-cards and get 4 FXO lines for about $500. Comparitively, an FXO card is $7 on ebay.
Another way to use a normal telephone is to get a Digium "IAXy" device or Cisco ATA 186. These are small boxes that have an ethernet on one side and a RJ11 on the other. This still ends up around $100 per real telephone.
That's why there is so much interest in a much cheaper way to use a real telephone or at least a normal handset of some time with a computer softphone.
This device requires that your software be smart enough to use the DTMF tones. If you are willing to give up being able to dial from the handset, there is a simple handset that is a "Y" connector that connects both to your speakers and to the soundcard; picking up the handset automatically mutes the speakers. I can't find the link to it right now. (It's not cordless, which seems to be the main goal of many of these hacks.)
Well that's a very different situation.
I think I will buy some cards when they come out. Thanks for clarifying, my hopes are up.
Mission
Availability of a graphics card with fully published specs and open source drivers.
Note that the mission is not to actually design or make it. And:
In order to get manufacturers to make such hardware, we have to show that it will be economically viable to do so.
No mention of making it themselves. The rest of the page makes it appear that their main work is coming up with a feature list.
If you dig through the rest of the site, it appears some guy wrote some sort of emulator and they intend to convince someone else to translate it to FPGA code and put it on an FPGA, but the FPGA code probably won't be available. That's not an open source graphics card.
I believe this project is an offshoot of what was originally this guy's ideas. In fact I am pretty sure of it because the name of the guy on OpenGraphics is also Timothy Miller. I wrote those guys when that original article first hit slashdot that I was willing to pre-commit to paying $200 each for up to 5 cards, and I stand by that. But I won't pay for someone's simulation code, or for an FPGA sold by the same bullshit company as before and with a closed FPGA.
I wish someone would try to do an Open Source graphics card, I'd like to buy it. I think it it likely that people would find other uses for it -- reprogramming it to be a software radio, for example. Perhaps after the Open Graphics Card project screws around with the big companies enough, someone else will take their simulation and design and make an open graphics card.
But in the end, the Open Graphics Card project is simply producing a very detailed spec and begging one of the usual asshole companies to make a closed source version to match it. This is doomed to failure. They won't do it, and if they do there will be small undocumented differences from the spec and you won't be able to correct the spec easily or change the FPGA.
This is not a situation that can be solved by lobbying companies. I believe it can be solved by making hardware, even if you have to make your own company in the process.
The open graphics project is essentially a powerless lobbying group, lobbying without money a set of people who only listen to money.
You don't produce any hardware, so there is nothing for you to "spec".
Run "date +%a" to see what it does.
One such compilation is wirelessnotes.org .
Giving free and bad legal advice is not any more or less bad than giving any other kind of advice. Unless you are a lawyer; then you can be liable for malapractice for giving bad advice. On the internet, this is often some how twisted around to mean that you shouldn't offer commentary or advice about certain things unless you are a lawyer.
1) is the "date" command now a DMCA banned circumvention device ?
2) will the linux drivers for these printers be modified to handle this automatically when they get an "expired" error back from the printer ?
If a foolish crowd-following chump believes in something, that isn't much of a recommendation.
And these people sound stupid. You say "I would never turn down information" but these people don't sound like the kind of people who would filter out mis-information before passing it on, especially if it made them feel important to be passing it on.
They have the kinds of personalities that would have been a trouble making town gossip a hundred years ago in some small village. In today's societies, they similarly cause trouble by spread a generalized distrust, as you have to figure out if each stranger you meet is trying to manipulate you in some way.
Ultimately, if you follow their recommendations, you end up doing other people's (unetheically unlabeled) advertising for free.
The card described in the post has the capability of a $25 generic card. No 3D or fancy stuff.
I'm willing to pay more for it because I think it will work for a long time, and I think because of the flashable ROM and re-programmable FPGA people will find cool hacks to do with it. Maybe someone will turn it into a software radio transmitter.
He did not describe some cutting edge high end card worth hundreds of dollars. He did describe a potentially useful, well documented and flexible piece of hardware. If we put a lot of these out there, people will put one in every slot in a motherboard and re-program them to crunch SETI stuff or whatever, and just possibly, someone will hack it in a way we can't immagine now and start a whole new industry.
He also described a guestimate parts cost of $75 (I think he was underestimating the cost of FPGAs) and a final price of $100. The true final price would probably be more like $200.
And at $200 I might buy one, after they come out and other people try them. But I think that for funding the venture by pre-ordering, at the risk of getting nothing for my money, I should get a sweet deal. Naysayers like you can pay full price after I already have mine.
And finally, in answer to your question, I pay more for inferior products that are Free all the time. For the first computer I ever purchased, I had the alternative of buying a surplus Sun workstation that I was familar with and liked, to buying a PC. But a month before a friend had showed me Redhat 4.0 on his system, and instead of the old Sun for $2,000 I spend $2,200 on a PentiumPro 200 Mhz computer, and bought and installed RedHat. Back then it sucked compaired to a real Unix, but I never looked back. Look at the cost of a Tivo compared to a MythTV machine; guess what I built ? It's not a real choice, if you like being able to do what you want to do with stuff, you don't buy a BMW with the hood welded shut, no matter what the price. If you got one for free you'd just toss it out.
Another example is that I use hardware modems inspite of the fact that I can get the call interruption on busy signal by using Lucent winmodems with their closed-source module.
I'd be willing to pre-order 5 at $50/each.
Be sure to have PCI in addition to AGP.
However, if you really want all that linux has to offer (maybe browsing the web in coffeeshops, etc) then the way to do it is to have a floppy that boots up doesn't mount the flash disk to run from it, but just to read an image to put into a ram disk; then it runs from the ramdisk. The flash is too slow and may have a limited number of writes.
I did something similar that you might use as a starting point, a linux version of the old laplink boot disks. The first thing you would do is add the USB drivers to the kernel; the next would be to make it mount the flash drive, make a ram drive, and decompress an image onto the ram drive. You would put those commands in the linuxrc file. Compile the kernel to have a larger default ram drive size, and then use it by just accessing /dev/ram0.
If that boots, see if you can copy parts of the 2 floppy X windows setup, and add links for web browsing and if you have to go beyond MC for writing, try abiword.
I would be interested to hear what you figure out on this. Even if you don't complete the project, but get something that partially boots, or anything at all, feel free to send me an email.
Yes, that is how I have usually done it.
Also, modifying one of the existing GUI builders (xforms, etc) to produce code for MS would not be that hard.
Still, I'm interested to know if there is one already available . . . searching on the usual places (freshmeat, sourceforge, google) it seems that most often GUI builders are associated with a specific alternative widget set, not the generic windows one.
Doesn't the full blown Microsoft Studio have a tool that lets you lay out GUIs with buttons and other widgets, and then generates the code with all the positioning and etc ?
It seems to me that this might be one piece of a development environment still not available. I know tools like that are available for wxWindows, but what about for using Microsoft's native widget set ?
The utility floppies that come with Western Digital harddrives boot DRDOS. I don't know about the cdroms they recently started using instead of floppies.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I could easily make a subnet of "virtual" installations and prevert the stats.
However, I think there is little reason to. It doesn't actually promote a piece of software -- getting your piece on the first disk would just mean that more people whould have to use the 2d disk, not that more people would see or install your software.
Essentially, this is a cooperative effort -- the installers don't want to download stuff they don't need, the distributors don't want to get unnecessarily high bandwidth bills. The lack of adversial interests means that aspect of security is less important.
However other aspects of security ARE important. It would be a bad thing for a professional spammer to get a hold of a database of IP addresses and packages installed on them, and wait for the next exploit in some package to know what IPs to target to make into zombie spam-blasters.
Where do you learn about copyright law ?
It is not against copyright law to possess a copy. It's the COPYING that is controlled, you know, like how it's named COPYright ? Perhaps possessing copies might in some cases be used as evidence that you were copying, but this seems unlikely in the case of this code.
Also, even if you don't look at it, you can't prove that you haven't. As you say, " couldn't prove that I hadn't copied anything. I suffered for it." What suffering will we save ourselves by not looking ? Microsoft will file suits not based on the facts of how their copyrights were infringed, but on their perceptions of how we are cutting into their bottom line. So you can expect that after the SCO stuff winds down (which is financed by a company owned by Melinda Gates buying the stock SCO insiders keep dumping) a new type of legalistic terrorism will be brought into play.
Finally, it's not against copyright to look at someone else's code, and then write your own. Do you think musicians avoid listening to the radio ? That novelists don't read novels ? It is against the law to steal someone's trade secretes, so if there are trade secretes in this code, someone could be in for Federal criminal penalties as well as civil damages. On the other hand, once public, trade secretes are no longer trade secretes. On the gripping hand, who wants to possibly encourage purposeful leaking of other people's code by producing great stuff from the product of such a leak ?
Seeing copyrighted work, and then writing a similar work, is not a copyright violation. Musicians listen to each other's work all the time -- do you think they don't listen to the radio ? Writers read each other's novels.
It is ok to write code even with a printout of copyrighted code on your lap for you to refer to. Unless, of course, you type in that exact code, or anything close enough to be called a derived work. That vague definition of "derived" is practically up to a jury or judge, so it's best not to get close to the boundary.
Sometimes you hear references to doing engineering in a "clean room" with "virgins" who have not been exposed to a particular product. Those are issues that arise in the case of trade secretes. Incidentally, any trade secretes in this code are no longer . . . in the US trade secret law applies only while the secrete is still a secrete. Damages or prosecution of the first person to reveal it might be possible, but not those who follow when it is public knowledge.
The reason not to bother with this is: we already have the source code to a number of much better operating systems, from FreeDOS and DRDOS to CP/M to Linux to BSD, etc.
If the Free Software movement continues to erode the vast money-machines of proprietary software companies, legal and illegal action will be taken regardless of
Please don't go around repeating this "if you even look at MS source you are contaminated" nonsense, because it will lend itself to Microsoft FUD if this is established in the public's mind.
By the way, I have heard through hearsay that many of Microsoft's managers believe this "look and be contaminated" stuff, to the extent that they are worried about their staff possibly looking at linux code.
A couple of tips here dude. For one, link to picputer.com and modaudio.com, it raises your rank in google and brings in customers. Two, while I'm sorry your former friend assaulted you and destroyed your stock of amp cabinents, take that shit off the web site -- it's bad for business. And don't say "I'm not selling these because I have no permanent address", that sounds awful even if it is the truth. Say, "temporarily, I am only taking larger orders, due to the need to be more efficient in production. I will be taking single orders as business builds." Or something like that.
Get a post office box for $12 a year, and put that one the page. Get rid of the "I can't put my real email up here because of spam" nonsense; install spamassassin and put up a contact email address.
Anyway, back to your picputer. I would expand my market beyond music groups; try to contact some of the hobby robot groups and see if they are interested. You might be able to get a club to go in on a group order of a number of unassembled kits which they could all put together in a soldering party.
I'll post one shortly ! Don't anyone else respond to this, because you'll be wasting the effort.
I have searched extensively and posted on various mailing lists and usenet groups.
There is a Canadian LUG that has the first install iso from 6.1, but not the source CD (technically against the GPL).
And that's it.
Now compare that to professional linux distributions:
http://slackware.com/getslack/ (see the bottom of the page)
http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/ (now that's more like it)
If I'm downloading random hackerware off of the net, I keep my archives carefully because I might need to know what I installed and it's up to me. But if I'm paying money, I expect to be able to find that stuff again in a central place if I need it. What's the use of the corporate beauracracy if it can't do anything for you ?
If they are such a good, reliable, stand up company, why can't I find the source code rpms or installation .iso for Mandrake 6.1 anywhere on the net ?
It would be nice to install distributions maintained by people who would leave their downloads up, so that when you were confronted with ancient installations in the future that needed a few tweaks, you could handle it.
I made a floppy based linux especially for this purpose: http://rgr.freeshell.org/flinux/escape/. However, if you have a network, it is probably easier to use Knoppix to copy the data over the network rather than burn it to a cd. Note that Knoppix does have cdrecord and mkisofs on it; if you can boot knoppix from one cd drive, and have another to access as a burner (say an external USB cd burner) then you can save your data that way. Knoppix is better than my floppy setup, unless you have no network, and only a cd burner and no other CD device to boot from. Knoppix also supports more filesystems and hardware than I can fit on a floppy or care to deal with.