May 16th, 2009 | nubae
Knoppix 6.1 - The review
At first glance, knoppix seems to really have it all together, with a realm of software, although organised in a barely discernable fashion. But out of the box, it was able to read all my peripherals and play back my mp3s and tv series without complaints about codecs. For all the other systems, this was a problem, as I was not near an internet connection so downloading the codecs was out of the question.
The Adriane system, which is a windows interface for the blind I take it, was impressive, and a great step in the direction of making a full system easily accesible to to the hard of sight or blind.
As for the general layout of Knoppix itself, the menus and the style choices including colour and themes, I was quite dissapointed. Nevertheless, I attempted to install the operating system to disk, which I know is unusual since knoppix has traditionally been known to be a live cd/dvd idea.
This is where my problems started. First, I had to partition everything by hand, seeing as I alread had another os on the drive. This was NO trivial task, even for a seasoned parted head like myself. First, it demanded a reiserfs partition for /, and then both that and the swap partition had to be turned on (mounted) before the installer would let me do anything. I spent a good 20 minutes figuring that one out.
From then on, installation seemed to go well, until it came to the grub part. I was cryptically asked whether it should just add an entry to my existing grub or make a new one. I naturally answered I wanteda simple addition to the system. When I rebooted my computer, I was greeted with no operating system found. Hmmm, I thought. So, being quite experienced with grub issues, I loaded up a live cd, entred command line, and did the typical, find /boot/grub/menu.lst. It found 2 of them on different partitions?!?
Perplexed as I was, I tried setting the root one to the partition knoppix was on. Reboot... same thing, no operating system. That was frustrating enough for me to pull out my trusty old ubuntu and install that, hoping it would find my other partitions and fix it all. Which it did. So.... knoppix may be a fine live dvd, but I would not recommend installing it unless you really like trouble. Once my bootloader was recovered though, knoppix was quite a delightful OS to work with. Easy access to the applications I needed for work were easy and fast to access, and I have the feeling that overall the system is quick and responsive in comparison to some of the other linux distros.
Knoppix curiously also has something called the knoppix terminal server, which looks and feels very much like a kind of LTSP server, but that just feeds fat knoppix images to other computers on the network. This would seem like a very useful feature which isnt very well documented and would be perfect for educational environments, if only the state of the applications was better. I hope to see more progress in that area in general. On a last note, it took me a good 15 minutes just to find out how to change my keyboard settings.
August 29th, 2010 | laptopdragon
I found this live cd great, until using it and trying to change the desktop menu (which just disappeared, and never returned on any r.clicks)
for being a "liveCD" its great, for a daily user it stinks.
i was able to become root w/out any passwd and make new users, and even assign one to groups, but could never login to them
i could not change the background, nor save to /knoppix
also, the menu system that i have changed, is reborn, and feels more like windows (being locked down)
the sessionmanager is default, and not easily changed.
compiz fuzion is great, but how useful is that anyways? aside from being flashy, its not that great of a beginers, or easy system to master (unlike those listed below).
i prefer Mandriva, Redhat, DSL, and even ELIVE (Which forces a payment or a publishing prior to install-)
June 11th, 2011 | Zachery Ayoub
You actually make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this matter to be actually something that I think I would never understand. It seems too complicated and extremely broad for me. I'm looking forward for your next post, I will try to get the hang of it!
July 16th, 2011 | scrapebox porady
Reason, that I intrude, but I suggest to go a different by.