Knoppix, Ubuntu, Linux in general not good

Dave Boland

snip general package issues with Knoppix and Ubuntu and other general musings

You must realise that liveCDs are to be used asstaticdistributions, you cannot upgrade any of the apps on the CD as it's a read-only medium. LiveCDs tend to be mainly used as troubleshooting tools or to test the spec of hardware not as your everyday OS (except perhaps if you need to run on several different machines).

If you need to update apps or libraries etc. then you need to install the distro to your HD.

For some distros what you can do is use a usb pen drive to have a home parbreastion where you save all your dynamic data. Presumably on this dynamic home dir you could install newer versions of particular apps that you need to be the most uptodate and run them from there. I've not tried it, but it should work as I've installed apps to my home directory before.

You mention speed as an issue, but you can't expect it to be any kind of speed demon when you're running a *whole OS* from your CD-ROM drive. I think that in itself is pretty incredible and not only does it work, it isveryusable.

BTW Knoppix and Ubuntu are far from the only liveCDs see here for a comprehensive list: