R
Richard Steven Hack
And the experiment is a rousing success so far!
I downloaded and burned Knoppix this evening.
Thing apparently detected all my hardware (although I think it
identified my old Dell monitor wrong - but it works) like a champ.
Detected all my Windows and Linux partitions and put them on the
desktop. Right-click and select "mount" to mount any of them is
trivial.
What really blew me away was the ADSL configuration utility. This
thing configured my SBC Yahoo DSL connection in probably thirty to
sixty seconds! Unbelievable! Made the Windows Enternet 300 client
look like using a couple Coke cans and a string! Detected both my
onboard Broadcom Ethernet chip and my D-Link NIC card, scanned to
detect an "Access Concentrator" (i.e., DSL modem) on each of the
Ethernet interfaces, found it on the second one, asked me a few
questions (which I couldn't answer since I had no clue what it was
asking, so I just clicked 'yes'), entered my SBC user ID and password
and ran a browser and was on the Net! Absolutely incredible!
Detected and configured ALSA for my onboard Avance sound chip
automatically. Played some MP3's on XMMS with absolutely nothing to
do but mount the partition with my music files and click on one.
Ditto for Xine - mount the Windows partition with my music videos,
played them flawlessly - no configuration required.
Haven't tried configuring the printer but it undoubtedly has CUPS and
Gimp-Print drivers which thoroughly support my Epson Stylus C60, so
that should be a piece of cake.
The latest version (V3.3) allows you to store config files on a floppy
or a partition on your hard drive (FAT32 or Linux, doesn't matter). I
opted to store on my Windows D: drive - worked fine.
Takes a little longer to boot than a regular distro - about a minute
and a half or more - because it has to detect its hardware every time
it runs, but works beautifully.
There's a "cheatsheet" with a list of boot options for workarounds for
various hardware problems one might encounter.
I'm going to test Knoppix on the machines at City College and see if
it ramps up on them.
So far this is a really slick piece of work!
At least 900 packages installed on the CD, including Open Office V1.1,
CDRW backup utility, the Bochs x86 emulator, an error-tolerant version
of dd for rescuing disks, cdrecord plus DVD burning tools, ethereal
network traffic analyzer, GPG, GNU development tools, gnumeric GNOME
spreadsheet, gphoto digital camera command line client, the GIMP,
partimage partition image backup, jpilot Palm Pilot tools, k3b CD
burner, KOffice KDE office suite, mondo CD backup system, Mozilla
browser, MySQL database, Nessus network security auditor, NTFSTools,
Perl, Python, QTparted partition manager, VNC server, Samba, SSH,
Tcl/Tk, WINE, Xawtv TV controller, XMMS, Xine, other players, xpdf PDF
viewer, and hundreds more.
This thing rocks!
I downloaded and burned Knoppix this evening.
Thing apparently detected all my hardware (although I think it
identified my old Dell monitor wrong - but it works) like a champ.
Detected all my Windows and Linux partitions and put them on the
desktop. Right-click and select "mount" to mount any of them is
trivial.
What really blew me away was the ADSL configuration utility. This
thing configured my SBC Yahoo DSL connection in probably thirty to
sixty seconds! Unbelievable! Made the Windows Enternet 300 client
look like using a couple Coke cans and a string! Detected both my
onboard Broadcom Ethernet chip and my D-Link NIC card, scanned to
detect an "Access Concentrator" (i.e., DSL modem) on each of the
Ethernet interfaces, found it on the second one, asked me a few
questions (which I couldn't answer since I had no clue what it was
asking, so I just clicked 'yes'), entered my SBC user ID and password
and ran a browser and was on the Net! Absolutely incredible!
Detected and configured ALSA for my onboard Avance sound chip
automatically. Played some MP3's on XMMS with absolutely nothing to
do but mount the partition with my music files and click on one.
Ditto for Xine - mount the Windows partition with my music videos,
played them flawlessly - no configuration required.
Haven't tried configuring the printer but it undoubtedly has CUPS and
Gimp-Print drivers which thoroughly support my Epson Stylus C60, so
that should be a piece of cake.
The latest version (V3.3) allows you to store config files on a floppy
or a partition on your hard drive (FAT32 or Linux, doesn't matter). I
opted to store on my Windows D: drive - worked fine.
Takes a little longer to boot than a regular distro - about a minute
and a half or more - because it has to detect its hardware every time
it runs, but works beautifully.
There's a "cheatsheet" with a list of boot options for workarounds for
various hardware problems one might encounter.
I'm going to test Knoppix on the machines at City College and see if
it ramps up on them.
So far this is a really slick piece of work!
At least 900 packages installed on the CD, including Open Office V1.1,
CDRW backup utility, the Bochs x86 emulator, an error-tolerant version
of dd for rescuing disks, cdrecord plus DVD burning tools, ethereal
network traffic analyzer, GPG, GNU development tools, gnumeric GNOME
spreadsheet, gphoto digital camera command line client, the GIMP,
partimage partition image backup, jpilot Palm Pilot tools, k3b CD
burner, KOffice KDE office suite, mondo CD backup system, Mozilla
browser, MySQL database, Nessus network security auditor, NTFSTools,
Perl, Python, QTparted partition manager, VNC server, Samba, SSH,
Tcl/Tk, WINE, Xawtv TV controller, XMMS, Xine, other players, xpdf PDF
viewer, and hundreds more.
This thing rocks!
