SillyDog701

[Andrew T.]

Today some young gentlemen at my university were giving out free copies of Knoppix bootable live CD-ROM Linux distributions, so I of course took up the offer. Although I've always been mildly interested in and advocative of Linux, I had not had the opportunity to actually try a distribution of the operating system until now. Some of my observations:

Knoppix, of course, boots directly from the CD-ROM drive. When it loads, it automatically detects one's computer hardware, and it correctly configured my video card and network card, among others. However, it wasn't perfect; for example, it won't pick up my second floppy drive (The 5.25" one).

It appears to be based on Debian Linux, and the KDE shell (v. 3.1.5) it utilizes by default I found relatively straightforward to use. It is similar in usability to the Windows 95 et al Explorer, although the shell's UI has lots of eye candy (I draw the line at the transparent menus).

The Knoppix CD distribution contains a wealth of free software pre-installed, including full-featured OpenOffice 1.1 and KOffice application suites, the latest version of Mozilla , Konqueror, miscellaneous accessories, editors, other tools, and games.

Because it runs from a CD-ROM, Knoppix is slow. Also, this prevents one from permanently modifying and saving settings on programs that run off the CD.

Also, it seems very stable, although once or twice the computer got into a mad fit of continually reading the CD-ROM drive for minutes on end which slowed things down to a crawl.

Overall, I am satisfied with what Knoppix has to offer, and I would recommend this distribution to those curious about Linux that would like to try the OS without installing it on a hard drive. Questions, though:

How does Knoppix compare in features and usability to Debian Linux, which it is presumably based upon?

I read here that the Knoppix CD can be used to install a stock dirstribution of Debian Linux onto your hard drive, through a script that when run "allows you to copy the files to a hard disk, and subsequently to boot from a hard disk."
If I was interested in taking Linux full time and installing a distribution of the OS on a bootable partition of my hard drive (however that's done), would I be better advised to follow the aforementioned routine to install Debian (which from what I understand is not the easiest to use) and not spend another dime, or go all out and buy a distribution such as SuSE Linux 9.x?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040122 Debian/1.6-1

[DJGM]

If you're going to install any Linux distro, I always advise to ensure you have a few
gigabytes of empty, unformatted, and unallocated space on the end of your HDD.
If you have more than one HDD installed on your PC, you can use the entire
capacity of your second (or third if applicable) HDD if you wish.

As for the choice of distro . . . by all means, use the aforementioned install script
to setup the Knoppix/Debian distro on your PC, but I'd personally recommend
waiting for the release of SUSE Linux 9.1, which is due out on 6th May.

(BTW . . . SUSE Linux 9.1 will include KDE 3.2.1 and Linux Kernel 2.6.x)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040316

[Edward]

As for the choice of distro . . . by all means, use the aforementioned install script
to setup the Knoppix/Debian distro on your PC, but I'd personally recommend
waiting for the release of SUSE Linux 9.1, which is due out on 6th May.

(BTW . . . SUSE Linux 9.1 will include KDE 3.2.1 and Linux Kernel 2.6.x)

I've read articles that the desktop in 9.1 is a mix of both KDE and Gnome, but I'm assuming it's in the applications themselves, and not the GUI.

UserAgent: Opera/7.23 (X11; Linux i586; U) [en]

[Mandrake]

I've heard that too, Novell is 'merging' KDE and Gnome for SuSE 9.1.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)