Tidying up after Linux 16771
That's good for Konqueror but we're talking about the desktop. The original claim was that the "windows...
Knoppix is often used as a diagnostic distro because it is so complete and it runs off a CD. That CD is compressed, so it actually has around 2 gigs of stuff installed.
It includes, among other things, KDE, KOffice, XMMS, Xine (video player), The GIMP, Scribus, OpenOffice, development tools, Apache, MySQL, mail tools (server and client), Mozilla, KStars, and a bunch of games.
It also includes many tools of interest to system administrators, such as recovery tools, ethereal, and stuff like that.
It is very useful when checking for supported hardware. When I was installing SuSE 9.1 on my Asus P4PE motherboard, I could not get the onboard sound to work. So I tried Knoppix, and sound worked. From Knoppix, I checked what modules it had loaded, and then went back to SuSE and made it load those modules instead of the ones it had decided were right. Result: sound on SuSE.
But it's use goes far beyond that. Some people carry a Knoppix CD and a USB flash drive with them. They store their work on the flash drive. Result: they have a full Linux environment anywhere they can borrow a PC that can boot from CD.
Perhaps this is why I ask questions. If you don't want to answer them then don't. But don't waste bandwidth, my time and everyone elses time with one line...
I've used it when I've needed a bunch of temporary Linux systems. At work, I wrote a chat server that should be able to handle somewhere between 20000 and 50000 chat clients on a single Linux server. To find its limits and stress test it, I have a special test client that makes thousands of connections and simulates a user on each one. I needed a bunch of systems to run that client. Solution: burn 10 Knoppix CDs, and boot them on 10 Windows boxes around the office.
So, as long as you keep in mind that running off the CD will be noticeably sluggish compared to running off a hard disk, Knoppix is a great distro for evaluating Linux *and* a good chunk of the things a typical user runs on Linux, without disturbing whatever is already on your computer.
-- --Tim Smith
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