Glonoinha's Journal: Knoppix - that wacky boot Linux CD that just works

Ok I did it, went to www.knoppix-std.org and downloaded an iso of their latest release, burned it to CD, and popped into an older laptop to see how I liked it. I am not entirely trusting of the world, so I popped it into a disposable laptop just in case ..

Dell Latitude CPiA - 366MHz with 192M RAM. 2M crap video card pushing a 1024x768 13" display. 3Com 10/100 nic, wired.

First impressions : very nice. It recognized my hard drives although it didn't seem to write anything to them during boot up. Makes a ramdrive and runs everything from there. If I have to guess, I would guess that persistance can be gained by copying the contents of the ramdrive somewhere more permanent, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

On my PII/366MHz box with 192M of RAM it actually runs very fast, in fact this is better than RH9 installed in a VM (VMware running on an XP Pro host with a Gig of RAM and a P4/2.4GHz w HT) - athough the other system is using Gnome, and I'm using KDE in Knoppix. Still - other than the occasional performance hit when reading from the CD-ROM it is pretty nice.

I will keep the CD handy, lets leave it at that.

I just created a VM on the other machine, used this .iso as a virtual CD and started it up, and it absolutely screams. Now I just need to figure out persistance between sessions.

Update - DOH. regular ol' Knoppix is www.knoppix.org, the -std version is the security tool distro. I was wondering why this one was just chock FULL of sys/admin and security tools.

yeah I know...

[ramdac]

Knoppix is knice.

3 cheers for Knoppix

[m0smithslash]

I have been using Knoppix for a couple of weeks now. I really like it and have been very impressed.

As for writing stuff to the drive, you can't do that if the drives are NTFS. It is rumored that Linux will support writing to NTFS drives in the not too distant future.

Knoppix:

[turkeyphant]

I've been using it for a while now and it's really rather awesome. Its possible uses are almost limitless and this will improve even more if the ability to write to NTFS volumes is ever introduced.

A friend managed to fuck up his Win XP install beyond repair. I burned him a copy of the ISO and Knoppix sorted it out in minutes. It's blisteringly fast, the hardware auto-detection has to be seen to be believed and the amount of software on that one disc is mindblowing.