I used to think that myself until recently. My opinion was based on
Knoppix's claim to run on a 486 with as little as 20MB of RAM, to be
able to run KDE on only 96MB of RAM, and to run OpenOffice on 128MB
of RAM:
"What are the minimum system requirements? Intel-compatible CPU (i486
or later), 20 MB of RAM for text mode, at least 96 MB for graphics
mode with KDE (at least 128 MB of RAM is recommended to use the
various office products), bootable CD-ROM drive, or a boot floppy and
standard CD-ROM (IDE/ATAPI or SCSI), standard SVGA-compatible
graphics card, serial or PS/2 standard mouse or IMPS/2-compatible
USB-mouse." (from knoppix.org info tab).
Today I spent several hours putting this claim to the test with two
English versions of Knoppix, v3.3 of 11-14-2003 and v3.4 of
05-10-2004.
The test machine was a Compaq575 upgraded to P166 with 192MB of RAM
and a 16MB video card, well above the stated minimum requirements for
running Knoppix. The system doesn't have a bootable CD-ROM drive (like
most 486s and early Pentiums), so a floppy boot was needed.
Knoppix 3.3 took 12 minutes to load KDE and another two minutes to
lock up while trying to load OpenOffice Impress.
Knoppix 3.4 took 8 minutes to load KDE and another 6 minutes to
produce an OpenOffice crash message (in German). A few more attempts
to load OpenOffice resulted in a system lockup with 3.4 also.
One has to wonder when, if ever, the system requirements statement was
true, and whether any of the Knoppix documentation can be relied on.
Knoppix 3.4 was actually a far worse fit for the P166 than the above
would indicate, for two reasons:
1. The Knoppix 3.3 iso contains a boot.img file and Rawrite2.exe, from
which the user can create the necessary boot floppy under Windows. In
Version 3.4, these files were left out and the only way to get boot
floppies (3.4 requires two) is to have a running version of Knoppix3.4
and issue the mkbootfloppy command. So you have to ask someone with a
bootable CD-ROM to run Knoppix 3.4 and make these boot floppies for
you.
2. V 3.3 had KDE office, as well as OpenOffice, while V3.4 eliminated
everything but Kwrite.
3. V 3.3 was able to display the desktop properly with my video card,
while V 3.4 distorted the colours so badly that I could barely make
out the text in the menus, and then only after highlighting the text
by placing the cursor on it.
Yesterday I burned Knoppix 3.6, made the two boot floppies, and tried
it on my P166. On the first try, it loaded without problems, in about
8 minutes, and presented a proper display, unlike V3.4, but I couldn't
get OpenOffice to run. The OO crash popup appeared, in German, but the
system didn't hang. The next two boot attempts failed, causing the
system to hang. Both failures occured while reading the CD-ROM (which
passed the md5 check for all the program packages).
On the fourth try, 3.6 loaded again without problems. This time I
tried to create a swap file through the Knoppix config menu, and
Knoppix launched mkdosswapfile, flashed something on the screen too
briefly to read, and closed again. I wasn't prompted for the drive to
use, nor for the size of the file, and had no indication of the
success of the operation.
I then tried OpenOffice again, but it locked up once more. To close
Open Office, I ended the session. KDE restarted, and soon became
unstable, flashing the display on and off, until it finally expired
with the message that it couldn't find any Xserver.
Aside from the several releases of Knoppix, the only other LiveCD I've
tried is PCLinuxOS, based on Mandrake, so I can't compare their
performance on a more powerful machine. But, given that Knoppix can't
really run on a PI system, it seems to make more sense to go directly
to one of the mainline LiveCDs like Mandrakelive or Suse LiveCD, where
presumably, security updates, bug fixes and upgrades are more
frequently issued.
I also tested the above idea last night by downloading Suse LiveCD
9.1-01 . It took all night too, as I had to go to the main Suse server
in order to use StarDownloader. The various mirrors wouldn't display
the download URLs, and SD couldn't connect. The download started at
105KB/sec, but soon degraded to 30, but it did complete eventually,
and passed the md5sum test.
After spending several hours with the Suse LiveCD, I'm not inclined to
throw my lot in with this bunch. There's no provision for boot
floppies of any kind (there's a menu for it, but the system reports it
can't find the files), so I couldn't compare performance on the P166.
But on my AMDK6-2/500, Suse LiveCD performs so dismally, it almost
makes Knoppix look good:
1. it took 7.5 minutes to boot and load KDE, compared to 3.5 minutes
for Knoppix 3.6 on the same machine. Knoppix almost loaded in the same
time (8 minutes) on the P166 with the dual-floppy boot!
2. no storage devices were automounted by Suse, not even the floppy
drive! Nor was there any way to mount them from the KDE menus. I had
to monkey around with the command line in the Konsole to gain access.
The normal mount points ("mkdir /mnt/floppy" etc.) were refused
("cannot create directory .... operation not permitted"), so I had to
create the mount points in the /home directory, then mount the drives
there. Only then did they appear in KwikDisk and File Manger. Someone
unfamiliar with the need to mount Zip disks as sdx4 would be out of
luck. Knoppix automounts all the system hard drives and removables
with disks inserted, as well as the floppy.
3. Suse was unable to autoconfigure my sound card, but didn't provide
any warning of this. When I discovered the system had no sound, I had
to search through the menus to find Yast in order to configure the
card and get sound working. Knoppix was able to autoconfigure this
same sound card more than a year ago (as one would expect, since the
system hardware is five years old).
4. Suse provides a menu for producing a variety of boot floppies, but
all of them fail with the message that the files are not available.
5. Suse briefly seemed to have the advantage over Knoppix by having a
scanner tab on the main menus, and having Xsane installed.
Unfortunately, xsane didn't recognize my scanner, and the scanner
configuration module is broken. It asked me to choose from the lists
of scanner brands and models, or failing that, to pick a generic
driver. The only problem - the drop-down menus for both lists failed
to work, and there was nothing to choose from.
