More About Knoppix

Starting out with Knoppix

The easiest way to begin your own use of Knoppix is with a vended CD-ROM. Almost a score of distributors in Northern Europe, the United States, and Australia process orders for Knoppix CDs, including betas.

If you have bandwidth to burn, you can download the nearly 700-MB Knoppix ISO image, available at no charge through the Knoppix download/order page (see Resources). Mirrors are abundant around the world. Remember that you can burn a CD-ROM from any operating system; you don't need Linux to create a Knoppix CD.

With a standard Knoppix CD-ROM in hand, you've almost reached Linuxland. All you need is a capable PC-class machine: 80486 or later, at least 20 MB of RAM (although with anything less than 128 MB, you'll have to give up office products and perhaps the desktop manager or even X11 server), standard SVGA, and a means to boot. Even without these, it's often possible to use Knoppix. Look first, though, at a conventional situation:

* If the PC boots from CD-ROM, slide in the Knoppix CD and you should have a recognizable, useful Linux two minutes later. Many BIOSes have the capability to boot from CD-ROM but aren't configured for it. In this case, you might need to restart the PC and enter "BIOS setup" or "BIOS features" by pressing Delete or another hardware-specific key on startup. When you configure the boot medium, remember that it doesn't have to be the CD-ROM exclusively, or even first; it's fine to sequence a floppy drive before the CD-ROM. All you need is to ensure that the CD-ROM is present as a recognized boot source. Save the new configuration, and you should be ready to start.
* An alternative is to boot from a floppy disk that recognizes the CD-ROM and passes off boot control to the latter. These are often called "startup diskettes." The Knoppix image includes a "rawrite" program, which prepares such diskettes.

If Knoppix works well for you, it's natural that your next instinct will be to change it. While customization of Knoppix isn't a secret, most effort on the project has gone to making the standard installation "bullet-proof." Among the several distinct ways to alter Knoppix, the one likely to be of broadest interest is remastering, during which you can substitute your own software for a portion of that on the standard Knoppix CD-ROM. Toward the end of 2002, Jubal John prepared an authoritative "How to remaster ..." document, listed in Resources. This process is a rather delicate one, and too involved to abbreviate here. The main difficulty is that low-level management of disk partitions risks system integrity, if anything goes wrong.

Knoppix alternatives

I'm enthusiastic about Knoppix, and I'm far from alone. I've heard from dozens of administrators and network managers with such affection for Knoppix that they "wouldn't leave home without it." Any Linux professional or hobbyist operating in an environment that's at all dynamic -- even just an occasional need to run on others' equipment -- should try out a copy of Knoppix. The cost to do so is vanishingly low, and the potential benefits and convenience are quite high.

Knoppix has also proven friendly to business initiatives. Knopper relates that "there are many Knoppix derivates around; some have been published by the purchasers, and some are used only internally inside a company. It is the customer's decision whether or not to publish the free software product he purchased, since the GPL does not require you to publish or give away a customized version, and does not even force you to include only free software on the same media. So, some companies use Knoppix as a platform for their free, or also proprietary, software, in order to show a demo version of their product to potential customers without the hassle of an installation on hard disk before they can use it."

Be aware, though, that there are specific applications of Knoppix where alternatives might serve you better. The Resources section shows a few of these. If you work much with older equipment, for instance, Knoppix probably isn't practical. Knoppix's standard configuration demands too much memory -- 32 MB isn't enough. That's a case where projects such as muLinux are more likely to help.

Knoppix can also be viewed as a "least common denominator": its purpose is to get the computer running with as little delay or human assistance as possible. Among other consequences, this means that standard Knoppix gives users no chance to configure exotic video or network settings before KDE comes up.

Products like SuSE's Live Eval take a different approach. Live Eval aims to mimic as much of a full SuSE distribution as possible from a single CD-ROM. In particular, it expects user interaction for its boot sequence and configuration. This gives more flexibility, but even an experienced SuSE engineer told me it takes around seven minutes to boot to the point Knoppix typically arrives at in under two. On the other hand, a Live Eval session affords a more accurate glimpse of what it's like to use a full-blown Linux distribution in a standard working environment.

Pascal Scheffers, a programmer with Erasmus University, described still another situation where Knoppix and vendor products provide different solutions. Suppose you need to test the installation of a product. If the tool at hand is Knoppix, you might dedicate one host to installation tests, and perhaps use Ghost (or Ghost-for-Unix) to help automate the installations. Knoppix gives a standard starting point for use of the host.

For this sort of problem, Scheffers likes to use VMware and its "non-persistent" option. VMware can host an operating system within a particular session, exercise an installation, then roll back all changes to their initial state.

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