As you all know, I am a huge fan of cygwin... but... I just found the coolest CD EVER! About a year ago a friend of mine from the Deridder library gave me a bootable copy of linux on a CD-R called Knoppix. It was at version 1.3 at the time and was slow and rough around the edges. Well, the other day I saw Knoppix on slashdot and decide to see how updated it was. Long story short. IT'S THE COOLEST BOOTABLE VERSION OF LINUX EVER! This thing has everything and the kitchen sink in it. I boot to it on my laptop all the time. It detects my sound card, my video, and my linksys network card flawlessly. (it also found my dads wireless linksys card) It has tons of programs in it like: kde 3.0, gnome, wmaker, icewm, ethereal, open office, vncviewer, ssh, wine (it ran internet explorer and publisher 98!), gimp, much too many to list...
It's not like the suse live eval, this does not even touch your hard drive. As a matter of fact, last week my hard drive died on me and I used this to recover the partition that had my documents on it to a networked computer. And until I could get a new drive I just booted to this and used it as my main desktop for a few days. It can mount your hard drive for you by clicking on an icon on the desktop (it mounts it read only so newbies dont trash the drive :) more experienced people can mount it read/write. If you want to give people a simple way to test out linux without them having to repartition and reinstall, and give them a reason to switch, hand out TONS of these cd's. Heck this cd has cooler stuff than my redhat 7.1 box at home. It also freaks people out when you say "want to see linux", and you pop this in their cd drive and reboot to linux in about 60 seconds! I made my dad a copy and also some younger guys here in Abbeville. He showed some of his friends and now they all want copies. Here is the site. Hand these things out like there is no tomorrow. http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html If anyone tries/tried it, I'd like to know opinions on this distro. :) I guess it wasn't long story short... sorry, got carried away. Quotes from the site: KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it. The following Highlights are available in version 3.1 of this Debian-based (www.debian.org) CD: Linux-Kernel 2.4.x KDE V3.0.2 as the standard desktop with K Office and the Konqueror WWW-browser konqueror X Multimedia System (xmms) an MPEG-video, MP3, Ogg Vorbis Audio player and xine Internet connection software kppp,pppoeconf (DSL) and isdn-config Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) Version 1.2 utilities for data recovery and system repairs, even for other operating systems network and security analysis tools for network administrators OpenOffice(TM), the GPL-developed version of the well-known StarOffice(TM) office suite many programming languages, development tools (including kdevelop) and libraries for developers in total more than 900 installed software packages with over 2000 executable user programs, utilities, and games Adam J. Melancon _________________________________________________________________ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
