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Journal ObviousGuy's Journal: Knoppix 8

Journal by ObviousGuy

Slashdot ran a story about Knoppix yesterday and it piqued my interest. So I went ahead and downloaded the latest ISO and burned the CD.

I'm impressed at the automatic support of all my devices without any user input. It, as they say, "just works". All Linux installations ought to be this easy.

I have some gripes with the system, though.

The first is that Knoppix doesn't make it obvious how to complete the Linux installation. I understand that Knoppix is designed to be a distro on disk, but such a distribution is only a stepping stone to actually putting the OS on the disk for permanent installation. Why, then, doesn't Knoppix have an option under the Knoppix menu to prep and install the OS to the hard drive?

Another complaint is the lack of device control. Specifically I cannot figure out how to adjust the mouse sensitivity. The mouse pointer for my USB mouse flies across the screen at the slightest touch, and I can't figure out where the mouse applet lives. There doesn't seem to be any consolidated device control area, so I'm sure I just haven't hunted enough for the right applet. I would really like it if the device settings were all in a easily accessible and obvious place.

A very small thing I noticed and thought strange was that the KDE 'Start' button isn't activated by the Windows key.

I really don't like transparent system menus. I guess some people like it, so I don't begrudge them that. I just want to know how to turn it off. Where is this setting? It sure as hell isn't in the Desktop settings applet.

Why is the documentation so lacking? There seems to be a concerted effort to put the least amount of effort into writing the help documentation. I started Frozen Bubble, which I think is a game, and it hung when I selected the 1-player mode. So I clicked the 'X' and...nothing. So I right click Frozen Bubble in the task bar and select Close and...nothing. Now I'm stumped. It seems to me that the OS should realize that the application isn't terminating and do what it can to shut down the process, ideally it would prompt the user before it sent the final kill signal. There was simply no response from the application or any acknowledgement from the OS that the application was hanging.

Then I remembered, hey, this is Unix. There's got to be some manual way to kill processes. So I opened up bash and tried to figure out a way to kill the hanging process. The kill command needs a process number, so how do I get a process number? bash help doesn't help. This is where my documentation complaint really started to kick in. Why wouldn't the bash 'help kill' documentation have a pointer to whatever the command was to list running procs? I'm not asking for a hyperlinked set of docs, just a simple 'Also see: WHATEVER THE COMMAND IS TO GET THE PROC LIST'. Finally I found Kkill in the application menu (of all places) which proceeded to kill the game of Mahjongg I had to minimize to get to the hanging Frozen Bubble.

In general, I get the feeling of a very good OS from Knoppix, but it lacks the polish of Windows 2000/XP or MacOS. I'd like to get to know it more when I have more time. I really want to figure out what the attraction is to this OS. Windows has come such a long way since the nightmare days of Win98. Windows 2000 and XP are approaching the point of perfection from a user perspective and stability standpoint.

Is it my preconceived notions of how smoothly and comfortably an OS should work that turns me off every time I boot Linux?

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  • Why is the documentation so lacking? There seems to be a concerted effort to put the least amount of effort into writing the help documentation.

    I've written some large chunks of the KDE documentation (Konsole, for instance) and can certainly answer your question: I'm a biologist, I write the documentation in my spare time (which has been very short in recent years) and the rest of it is written by people just like me.

    I don't mean to come across as "It's free, stop whining, do it yourself." I hate when peop

    • I also don't want to come across as an idle complainer either which is why I tried to enumerate specific problems that I saw rather than bitching about Linux generally. I think there is a lot of promise (most people here would say that I'm hopelessly behind the times if that's what I think), but I also see lots of room for improvement. I guess it's just my nature as a long time QA engineer to see the problems before the benefits.

      In regards to the documentation, I am going to take an opposing viewpoint fr
      • Oh, bash. I thought you were talking about documentation for minor KED games. As you say, core functionality like bash is a completely different matter.

        Two reasons why you had trouble:
        1) The main GNU software is pretty well documented (from the point of view of an experienced Unix user). Unfortunately, GNU uses the insane "info" format for its documentation, instead of the more usable "man". Without the KDE help interface, I can't read info pages. If you can persuade the FSF to change this idiocy, bless yo
  • Just a short comment about the fallen game... The reason why you weren't able to kill the game is simple: you're used to the Windows way of doing things.

    Just as you have no idea how to kill processes in Unix, I have no idea how processes are killed in Mac OS X GUI. Does that make Macs unfriendly? No, it just proves that I know nothing about them.

    Similarly, why is installing programs in Windows so damn hard? Why do I have to bother googling around first for the program, then for the instructions and lastly
    • The reason why you weren't able to kill the game is simple: you're used to the Windows way of doing things.

      I don't think that this is true. It is a fundamental problem of the operating system that it cannot recognize an unresponsive program and prompt the user to shut it down.

      When I instruct the OS to close a program, whether the program is running properly or hangin, I expect that the program will be closed within a reasonable amount of time. Of course the program has to perform its own cleanup which
  • I understand the principle of your journal entry, but sometimes the only(/best) way to learn is to ask and be told. Linux is ALOT like that in my experience... never feel afraid to ask.

    In any case, here's how to kill a process from a Linux terminal. I'm (reasonably) certain that the program 'ps' comes as a standard utility for Linux. The simple rundown is:

    % ps x

    - shows all processes that this user is running. The PID column is the process ID number that you want. You can then use

    % kill <pid>

    -

    • Back in college (once upon a time) I actually knew these commands. As soon as I heard 'ps' it all came rushing back to me. Unfortunately my memory isn't as good as I'd like. :-/
  • It seems all your complaints were totally invalid as you would say something like when you were complaining about the mouse saying you couldn't find how to change the sensitivity. Well news flash, KDE has all the settings in ONE place. Yup, that was about what you were asking for right? Just because you don't know about the control center from you 10 minutes of use, doesn't mean it isn't there. Hell, it is plainly listed on the KDE menu.

    And you complaint about the windows key not popping the menu up.... Um

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