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Knoppix 3.2 Available 214

Posted by timothy from the if-pie-were-this-easy dept.
TheCrimsonUnbeliever writes "The latest version of Knoppix (bootable Linux distribution on CD) is out - New features include: KDE 3.1.1 - XFree86 4.3 - Evolution 1.2.1 - OpenOffice 1.0.2 - KOffice 1.2.1 - The ability to create a home directory on a memory stick or similar - More information is available at the KNOPPIX English homepage." If you're getting started with Knoppix (and speak English), you should also check out knoppix.net for the excellent forums hosted there.
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Knoppix 3.2 Available More

Knoppix 3.2 Available

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  • Great! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CoolVibe ( 11466 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @02:49PM (#5627027) Journal
    I've been waiting for this "ultimate sysadmin's bootdisk" to include kde 3.1.1. This iso saved my life several times already. Go get it! Go knoppix team!

    • Re:Great! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by suyashs ( 645036 )
      Yep, its a great system! I love the way that I don't have to rely on anybody's system configuration for my documents and information. Just pop in the disc and off I go!

      • Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by CoolVibe ( 11466 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @03:07PM (#5627110) Journal
        I tell ya, this thing is a live saver. It saved my ass in the colo the other day when a coworker decided to blow up /etc on a box. I was able to copy over the /etc tree from a working box across nfs, it saved the day.

        Sure there are other emergency rescue disks out there, but none of them are as complete as knoppix.

    • Re:Great! (Score:3, Informative)

      by bucketoftruth ( 583696 )
      The best Sysadmin boot disk IMO is Toms RTBT [http]. I use the enchilada cdrom iso myself. Very tight and no compatibility problems ever.
      • A problem with Toms RootBoot is that since it is not a standard 1.44MB floppy format, it may not be readable in all drives.

        Having encountered that problem, I no longer use it, but have instead built my own linux floppy on a standard 1.44MB format which has what I need (basically ext2, uclibc, busybox, lilo, grub, memtest, thin 2.4.18 kernel with some patches).

        It's still a WIP, but I have some free space left on the filesystem, and I'm building upon it as I encounter scenarios.

        [0] - Said scenarios[2] cr

        • As the parent to your post pointed out, there is a bootable CD-Rom ISO you can use for Tomsrtbt.
          Whilst Knoppix is certainly a nice toy, for a sysadmin with a downed server Tomsrtboot is far preferable - it boots a hell of a lot quicker apart from anything else.

  • Great job! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Blaine Hilton ( 626259 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @02:50PM (#5627033) Homepage
    I am a big fan of Knoppix, "Linux on a CD" is a great idea. It's also a great tool to have for diagnostics when you can't load the regular O/S. I can't wait to try this new edition.

  • Old news... move along (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This has been out for nearly a week. Glad I downloaded it before the crowds started forming.

    Knoppix is awesome BTW.

  • Main OS of a computer (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I know similar things have been discussed before, but does anyone have any experience on installing Knoppix to disk? Any problems with it? Does Knoppix work well as a main installation for a computer?
    • couldn't be easier, CTRL-ALT-F1 to get the root console and knx-hdinstall to run the installer, setup the disk with cfdisk and then it copies away, 4 config questions, done.
      • couldn't be easier, CTRL-ALT-F1 to get the root console and knx-hdinstall to run the installer, setup the disk with cfdisk and then it copies away, 4 config questions, done.

        While knx-hdinstall does a great job e.g. for instant exorcisms of Windows from any machine ;-) by installing a full-fledged KDE workplace from just one single CD, Knoppix also provides a nice console-based Linux when using a boot paramater such as knoppix 2 vga=ask.
        Complete with samba and CUPS, in a heterogenous LAN this does have im

    • Knoppix as an installer :) (Score:5, Informative)

      by timothy ( 36799 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @03:10PM (#5627125) Journal
      Joe Barr wrote a good piece about this [linuxworld.com]; I'm still burning my Knoppix 3.2, but I can testify that what he wrote here is a good guide for the previous versions and I'm guessing will be applicable to the new one.

      (Upshot: there's a script called something like "knxhdinstall" which leads you through formatting hard drive etc, then transfers the Knoppix base OS and included apps. Previous Linux experience strongly recommended, but it's certainly easier than going in with zero experience with, say, regular Debian :))

      I have used Knoppix as an installer for several machines; that's one reason I keep extra desktops around, for playing with different distros as we asymptotically approach The (mythical) Perfect OS.

      It works well, but there are some glitches: with some versions of Knoppix, the hard-drive install method seems to jump between English version and German version, doesn't matter that I had the EN iso, doesn't matter that the system seemed otherwise localized to English ... However, I am optimistic that this is no longer a problem with the new one :) (And my German is good enough that I could get through the German screens, so it *did work* it was just ... worrisome :)). And that was a glitch -- I forget which ISO had the German jumping, but I downloaded another one afterward (the next rev) and it worked fine.

      As a perpetual fumbler, this is the only way I have gotten Debian working well, and it was quick n' easy. Knopper deserves the computing version of the Nobel for this :)

      timothy

      • It works for Gentoo, as well (Score:4, Informative)

        by Mitchell Mebane ( 594797 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @06:35PM (#5628149) Homepage Journal
        Granted, it's not quite the same league as using Knoppix as a Debian installer, but you can use Knoppix to install Gentoo Linux as well, so you can actually use your PC while compiling stuff, instead of having it useless for a couple of days. Pretty sweet, I must say.

        See here [gentoo.org] for details.
        • The only catch with this though is that unless you have a lot of memory, or doing a stage3 install, the bootstrap and emerge system will a little longer because of less available memory. Otherwise it works really, really well, especially since the laptop network card support on the gentoo live cd's is somewhat incomplete.
      • I used knx-hdinstall with the latest version of Knoppix, and it was as easy to install as Redhat... yet the end result was a Debian install!

  • Knoppix Rocks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PhatKat ( 78180 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @02:51PM (#5627042) Homepage
    This OS runs faster than my installation of windows and it runs entirely off 1 CD. So cool.

    • Re:Knoppix Rocks (Score:4, Informative)

      by Sancho ( 17056 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @03:11PM (#5627126) Homepage
      Having run Knoppix on the same machine as Windows, I sincerely doubt that Knoppix actually runs faster than Windows (unless you are running in console mode, and it's hardly fair to compare that to any windowing environment). The sheer amount of swapping required in Knoppix is astounding, unless your system has 1gb+ of memory. And that's assuming a swap partition on your disk--something Knoppix doesn't require. Pulling everything from the cdrom (and then decompressing it) is an agonizingly slow process.

      • Re:Knoppix Rocks (Score:4, Insightful)

        by penguinboy ( 35085 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @03:33PM (#5627219)
        Speed must vary greatly from system to system, then. I use Knoppix from CD on the lab computers (P4 1.7, 128MB RAM, no swap partition) at school occasionally and it runs quite well for web browsing and photo-editing with the Gimp.

      • Re:Knoppix Rocks (Score:4, Interesting)

        by SirDaShadow ( 603846 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @04:12PM (#5627429)
        I wish I had mod points today, this is FUD, FUD, BS, troll, whatever you name it. It's true that Knoppix is unable to open certain memory-hog apps without a swapfile but it's a far cry from being slow and even a farther cry from using 1GB. I have found 256MB without swapfile is more than adequate to run anything in Knoppix. If you have a machine with less than 256MB nowadays you prolly are an AOLuser. Happy swapping! :)
        • No, it isn't. Many apps run a bit slower on my machine in Knoppix than they do on Windows.
          • What does that even mean? There aren't many applications that even run on the two platforms. Are you comparing OpenOffice and Mozilla on Windows to OpenOffice and Mozilla on Linux?

            Well, independent of Knoppix, they run slower on Linux--not because there is anything wrong with Linux, but because both of them are based on cross-platform toolkits, which seem to have been primarily tuned and optimized for Windows and for the way Windows does things.

            • I just meant generally applications run slower. And I do use XChat and The GIMP and they load slower on Knoppix; all I meant to say was that the loading times were often noticeable, I suppose I didn't make that clear... I'd put Linux on my laptop, except having Linux on things makes me tweak them and break them, and I need this for school :(.
        • I guess I should have prefaced that with "in my experience." 1ghz Dell notebook with 512megs of ram and an SMP Athlon with 768 megs of ram. 12x cdrom and 48x cdrom respectively. I can't imagine it running well on your machine given the performance on my machines, but if it is, hey, great. However, without a doubt in my experience, Win2k is much faster than Knoppix with regards to web browsing and Office. Now a full hard drive install, that's a different story....
        • HEY!!! I take offence to that.. i don't have AOL access over here....
      • Actually compressing things gives a speed boost, because the bottleneck is getting the data off the CD, so reducing the transfer off the disk is a good idea, and modern computers stomp all over gzip.

        The program they use to do that is called cloop (compressed loopback). It's cute :)

        • I belive the bottleneck in CD's is the access time not the transfer speed. Once they get going, the transfer speed from a CD is fairly respectable.

          A 1x CD does = 150k/s
          So a 56x does 8400k/s

          Unfortunately they doing get 56x across the whole disk but you get the idea....

  • Home dir on memory stick? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Can someone translate this to a windows user?

    • Re:Home dir on memory stick? (Score:5, Informative)

      by twiztidlojik ( 522383 ) <dapplemac AT mac DOT com> on Sunday March 30, 2003 @02:53PM (#5627054) Homepage
      It's similar to having all your my documents, desktop etc in one folder. This folder happens to reside on a memory stick instead of C:\documents and settings\yournamehere.

      Or something like that. Feel free to flame & berate me at will.

      • Re:Home dir on memory stick? (Score:5, Informative)

        by c0dedude ( 587568 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @03:01PM (#5627087)
        To claify, say you want file winfix. It's not included on the Knoppix distro, so you make a USB memory stick with you home directory. You'd put winfix on that stick, and it'd register at boottime, and when it was fully loaded, your winfix file from the stick would be in /home/$yourname/, easily accessable. It's because 1. you can't write to a CD-R (duh) and 2. any files you create would be stored on a ramdrive, unless you acessed the hard drive, in which case they would be stored locally on that one box. Storing files on a USB memory stick allows you to keep all your knoppix tools and stuff togather. I hope this helps to clear things up.
        • Yikes. That's really confusing. To define stuff: 1. Ramdrive-a virtual memory drive created in RAM
          2. /home/$yourname/ -It's where you store your stuff in unix/linux
          3. USB memory stick- something like one of these [thinkgeek.com]
          4. CD-R: CD-recordable- it's write only, meaning you can only change it once by burning something to it. Compared to the CD-RW, which is a CD-rewritable, which can be written more than once.
          6. Boottime-when the computer starts up.
    • On linux /home/[you] is where all of your settings are saved (for you logged in as [you])

      In many systems it is the only area that is writeable for you as a normal user (not running in admin mode)

      For KNOPPIX - this means that all your settings will be carried around with you - But not all of your hardware condiguration - So you will be booting into 'your' desktop everywhere you go

      All I need now is a supported stick

  • Wonderful! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Badge 17 ( 613974 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @02:52PM (#5627046)
    Knoppix is just the thing that I've been looking for to convert friends and family to Linux - worked with several people.

    Does anyone know if this latest version still has the odd bug where XP systems seem to boot incorrectly? This has been the major obstacle to getting it accepted at school - still worries about it affecting the computers.

    • Re:Wonderful! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Vermyndax ( 126974 )
      I've been using 3.2 for about a week or so now and haven't experienced any dual boot troubles with XP. The only thing to be aware of is that you will have to correct your lilo.conf to add the Windows XP partition back in after installing Knoppix to the hard drive...

  • Yay (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Unregistered ( 584479 )
    while my Knoppix 3.1 cds are fine for mow i'm glad the knoppix folks are so quick w/ updates.

    Knoppix is great for a sys where you can't install an OS. I still use my gentoo livecds for repair, but i never leave home w/out a knoppix CD. (I'm such a nerd)

  • Does it come... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 30, 2003 @02:54PM (#5627058)
    with a large selection of fake Windows login screens, so I can reboot a public computer with this disc and collect a few login/password pairs?

    • Re:Does it come... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Adam9 ( 93947 )
      I've always wondered how many usernames and passwords I could capture as an experiment. Seriously. Windows 2k/XP requires you to press ctrl+alt+del to bypass this sort of thing to get access to the login screen. But what if you just left the login screen up without the ctrl+alt+del message? Do you think anyone would notice? I could say, with a high probability, that I would probably even be fooled. Anyone else ever think about this?

      • You're missing the point of using Linux (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Windows 2k/XP requires you to press ctrl+alt+del to prevent someone from doing this with a Windows app.
      • My first program, way back in 1981 or 1982 was just such a program.
        It printed "Login:" "Password:" and returned "Incorrect Password", writing out the collected info to a file.
        Worked amazingly well, for it's simplicity - I had most everybody's password within a couple of days, even the computer teacher's.

        Not a particularly original or clever hack, but it served the purpose, even way back when on an ancient printer terminal...
        (Yes, Mrs. Fredericks, if you're reading this somehow, I was "PIGDOG". Sorry for t
      • Reminds me of that time I asked a Windows "consultant" to walk over to our Linux firewall and log on a root. He just walked over to it and hit Ctrl - Alt - Del ! Couldn't believe it! Of course it rebooted and came up fine :)

        It's always struck me as fairly amusing that the first thing you do when you walk up to an NT box is to reboot it ;)

  • english? (Score:4, Funny)

    by jfroot ( 455025 ) <darmok@tanagra.ca> on Sunday March 30, 2003 @02:54PM (#5627061) Homepage
    If you're getting started with Knoppix (and speak English), you should also check out knoppix.net for the excellent forums hosted there.

    I think one can assume english is spoken if you're reading an english web site.

  • default language (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kircle ( 564389 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @02:59PM (#5627074)
    make sure you get the latest version of 3.2 and not, say for example, the one from v3.2-3-21-2003. they changed the default language from german back to english...

  • Knoppix is great (Score:5, Informative)

    by ctid ( 449118 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @03:00PM (#5627078) Homepage
    This is just another testimonial for Knoppix. Quite apart from all the other nice things people are saying about it, when I plug in my NEX IIe MP3 player, Knoppix recognizes it straightaway and places a link to its filesystem on the desktop!

  • Downloaded yesterday (Score:5, Informative)

    by perotbot ( 632237 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @03:06PM (#5627106) Journal
    Got it, burned it, loved it. Easiest way to install Debian on x86. They put alot of thought in it. One lesser known feature is that it detects wlans and automatically configures the cards to access it. (provided that there is no WEP installed) so it works great at Starbucks....Latte and linux!

  • Anyone know when KnoppixKDE will be out? (Score:5, Informative)

    by pschmied ( 5648 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @03:19PM (#5627167) Homepage
    For those who haven't tried the KnoppixKDE edition, it's great. Last I heard, the developer of this Knoppix remaster was working on a new version. Does anyone know if it is nearing completion?

    KnoppixKDE doesn't have all the software that the full Knoppix distro has, but I generally find it to be a little more comfortable and much more unified.

    The only thing that was missing (I think) in the last version was Scribus [altmuehlnet.de]. Scribus is a QT app that comes with Knoppix that looks like it may eventually be a good alternative to Pagemaker and perhaps QuarkExpress or InDesign. It's got a ways to go, but it's already quite useable for simple layout.

    -Peter
  • Anybody have a BitTorrent mirror set up yet?

  • How about a CDRW? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pherthyl ( 445706 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @03:44PM (#5627260)
    What if you had Knoppix on a CDRW? Would it be somehow possible to channel disk writes through a cd burning tool and save all your files directly to the cd?

    Space would be at a premium I imagine but if you deleted some of the apps you dont use.... Now THAT would be pretty amazing.
    • You'd need to have a multi-partition CD, one with the fixed-size compressed file system that Knoppix uses to get ~2GB material on a 700MB CD, the other to support the RW'able space.

      Not a bad idea, but you'd only be able to rewrite using RW drives.

      Where I'm putting my energies into is a better COW(Copy on Write) model for Knoppix, so I can apt-get particular applications as needed and have writability against /usr.

      --Dan
  • I've used this on several ocassions to show people interested in linux it's features on their own systems. They were impressed that no installation / partitioning was required and they could play without messing up their MS boxes.

    -- Rick

  • Check out Morphix ! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by IIEFreeMan ( 450812 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @03:48PM (#5627272)
    Knoppix is great but it's quite monolithic. Morphix [morphix.org] is Knoppix-based (with the same great hardware detection) but it is based on modules so you can customize your ISO very easily. For exemple there is a Gnome module, A KDE module, A light GUI module (with ICEwm) and so forth ...

    It's also nice because it's a clean Debian unstable whereas Knoppix was (i don't know about 3.2) based on a mix of stable/unstable packages.
    • Morphix is not quite ready for primetime, however. I'm typing this from a Morphix boot, after having spent all day remastering it twice to fix the broken autofs config, since it turns out that the HeavyGUI module overwrites /sbin (and just about everything else), rendering the work I did on the base module meaningless. Grr....

      For what it has completed so far, though, it rocks, and I will be using it a lot whenever I have to use somebody else's PC at work. (Which is what I'm doing right now.)

  • I don't know what you mean by "available" (Score:3, Funny)

    by chrisseaton ( 573490 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @03:49PM (#5627277) Homepage
    "Knoppix 3.2 Available"

    I don't know what you mean by "available" - I certainly can't find any mirrors that will respond

  • Great! I'm buying a USB memory key today! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by aquarian ( 134728 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @04:34PM (#5627585)
    I've been waiting for this "persistent home" version of Knoppix to appear. Now when I travel I may even be able to leave my laptop behind -- all I need is a Knoppix CD, and a USB memory key.

  • magnet:?xt=urn:bitprint:Y2YAXRLP4RZSMEYSWQMIQPBYP 5 GSJLKA.ST2KW6VMR5CX6XG5K4CQBQOBHLECCZFEGEALOTQ&dn= KNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-03-23-EN.iso [magnet]

    Note: You'll need a Gnutella program that supports magnet links to download this. I personally use Shareaza [shareaza.com]. It's not the newest version of Knoppix, but I've found it to be pretty stable.

  • Speed... (Score:5, Informative)

    by aquarian ( 134728 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @05:23PM (#5627851)
    One thing that really surprised me was how fast Knoppix runs. Compared to the other distros I've had on my laptop (Redhat and Mandrake), Knoppix screams. The others were noticeably slower than Windows, while Knoppix is at least on par, maybe faster. Of course it's a little slow loading applications from a CD, but otherwise it's a screamer.

    The boot speed is incredible, especially considering all the hardware detection it's doing. I'm up and running in about 30 seconds. Win2k takes at least 3-4 minutes, every time.

    I've had little experience with Debian. People say it's faster, and now I see they're not kidding.

  • Demo mode in other distros ? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by InodoroPereyra ( 514794 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @05:24PM (#5627855)
    I just wonder why is it that other distros don't follow the trend, use some of knoppix' technology and add a demo mode to their installers. People could boot off the CD, see a demo, and if they like it and their hardware gets successfully detected they can go ahead and install on the disk. If I remember correctly SuSE was doing it ? How about Mandrake and RedHat ? Are they going to catch up on this one ? It looks like the way to go !

  • Just like AOL trial cds.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pr0c ( 604875 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @05:27PM (#5627873)
    Although i've said this many times before when its come up... I give these things out like AOL trial cds! Whenever a new version of knoppix comes out i burn about 10 copies and hand them out to co-workers, friends and family. I give a very brief explanation of what it is and and I offer support.

    I have sucsessfully switched only a few people over (they both dual boot and only use windows if needed) but if we all got a few people switched over .... think about that :P

  • changelog (Score:2, Informative)

    by xmnemonic ( 603000 )
    Puzzled by the different 3.2 releases? Here's an excerpt from the changelog...

    * V3.2-2003-03-23 (Experimental release)
    - KDE 3.1.1 from Debian/unstable
    - XFree 4.3
    - Language bugfixes for english version
    - Autosetup and online-help updates for OpenOffice
    - ptrace security fix for kernel 2.4.20
    - Blackdown Java-RE 1.4.1 update

    * V3.2-2003-03-21
    - samba, mozilla update
    - icewm, larswm update
    - kismet update
    - evolution, fontconfig update
    - gnomemeeting downgrade (gnome2 is broken)
    - gnome-pilot
    - cpuburn
    - dvd+rw-tools

  • Why doesn't everyone fire up gtk-gnutella and put this new release on there? I just did a search and got zero results for this new release. Gtk-gnutella is great for downloading files from multiple sources, sometimes when I grab isos off it my pipe gets filled because i can grab from 20 sources at the same time.
  • But is there a distro like knoppix for PPC?
  • I was trying to burn the ISO with Nero... and it was giving me problems... same with Fireburner and others. I guess EasyCD creator works fine though I don't have that to use. If you have Winrar... it will read the ISO file and you can extract the whole directory contents onto your harddrive and burn from there. Many use Nero with no problems... many however do have problems.

  • Works great, ultimate linux demo (more than demo?) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Sunday March 30, 2003 @08:19PM (#5628588)
    I downloaded and burned the English Knoppix CD, and booted it up... I'm using it right now, listening to streaming audio and working on my homework (from a data partition on my hard drive) using OpenOffice.

    This is great, because I get to try out the new XFree86 without bothering to install it on my HD. Fonts look better than before.

    You know what wouldn't be too crazy... leave a knoppix CD in public workstations and have a computer startup the OS, connect to the network (DHCP) automatically. You're ready to go. You've got web browsing and Open Office, and multimedia.

  • I've just given away about 50 knoppix 3.1 CDs at a user group show in melbourne. Its great , you don't have to touch your hard drive at all, and the instructions are dead simple.
  • One of the coolest things about Knoppix is that you can customize it! I have followed the guides out there and created my own Knoppix build platform. ( Customizing FAQ) [knoppix.net]. It is great for tinkering, and removing apps you don't want, adding the ones you do, and burning your own version of Knoppix.

    I created one that is console only, and boots to a Quake Team Fortress (original) server, with about 60 maps. I am currently trying to get a mod built for Morphix for this. My webserver can't handle the traffi

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