March 14, 2004
Knoppix
I've had some fun playing with the most recent Knoppix Live-CD. It's a "live" Linux installation on a bootable CD-Rom.
I download the image, burned it to disc, and booted off of it. It autodetected all my hardware and network settings, so within a few minutes I had a very useable desktop, including Mozilla, Gaim, and OpenOffice.
To be fair, my Knoppix session crashed/hung after a few hours, but since it's all on CD, there's not much chance for damage.
This is a nice way to "show someone Linux", and it's also useful as a recovery CD, or as an emergency "must get online to download fixes for this broken/infected WinXP machine" CD.
If you've not used Linux and you're interested, this is a good way to try it out. The LiveCD method puts you in a nice "sandbox", so you can't break your existing OS/installation unless you try very hard.
The new 3.2 supposedly supports "persistent home directories", which lets you save your Knoppix config info on some mounted volume, but I haven't tried this yet.
Posted by Eric at March 14, 2004 03:50 PMKnoppix lets you save a config file to a mounted volume (that is, your hard drive) and has for the past couple of versions. Only thing is I think it saves a root password too. Have a look at DemoLinux (made by the French) as well.
Posted by: try b4 u ... download 4 free? at March 15, 2004 05:26 PMyo check this out!!
http://www.r50rd.co.uk/research/internal/v2i/engin/
when ya get your Mini in, lets get to work on this!
Posted by: Jeremie at March 17, 2004 11:47 AM