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.
