Any one play with MORPHIX?

[xetaprime]

yet? Would love to here opinions.

Thanx, xeta

[A. Jorge Garcia]

I just downloaded the game module and will try to give my students a BZFlag or freecraft LAN Party after their AP Computer Science exam in May.

Did you know that Klauss Knopper himself uses KNOPPIX in the classroom to teach C++ and Java?

BTW, I love your userid! I had a slackware/bigslack intranet set up in my lab not long ago where the server names were:

alphaCentauri, betaCentauri, gammaCentauri, deltaCentauri,
epsilonCentauri, ZETACentauri, etaCentauri, thetaCentauri,
iotaCentauri, kappaCentauri, lambdaCentauri, muCentauri,
nuCentauri, xiCentauri, omicronCentauri, piCentauri,
rhoCenauri, sigmaCentauri, tauCentauri, upsilonCentauri,
phiCentauri, psiCentauri, chiCentauri, omegaCentauri

and an ftp server named CentauriPRIME! Worked out pretty well as I had
24 student stations and there's 24 ancient greek letters! Oh, and I'm a fan of Babylon 5 on TV (remember ambassador "Molari from Centauri" Prime?)!

While on the subject of Babylon 5, anyone else notice that the KNOPPIX background is based on a picture of the Babylon 5 Space Station and a Shadow ship???

Regards,

[probono]

Yes, looks very promising. I have been playing with the KDE version: But without KMail... it's not more than a playground. What really starts to annoy me is this "sid" thing. Different incompatible verisons of debian with only partial availability of packages. Imagine if there was a new Windows version every half a year that would refuse running earlier applications. :-(

What would really be a breaktrough would be the translucent/overlay filesystem minimodule, along with a modified apt-get that would allow you to "install" your own software. Of course, the overlyed parts of the filesystem should be stored in a persistent home. This way, it would really rock :-)

[RockMumbles]

xeta, do you mean running/using Morphix or developing and/or adding on to Morphix?

I run Morphix from cd at school when my computer is busy burning a cd, I have an old 2x cdrw in my office computer. I've got three machines with Morphix hd installs. One KDE-Morphix 0.3-2 the other two with lightGUI-Morphix 0.3-2. One of the lightGUI boxes I pretty much left as is and just added a few packages, such as gdm for login, mozilla and java, and a bunch of console apps, it's a p200MMX, 64MB with two ~600mb hd's and overall works fine. The other lightGUI install is an AMD 300 w/ 128MB ram and has a 1.7GB hd so I added KDE 3.1, openoffice and a bunch of other stuff.

One of the cool things about Morphix is that since it is small and uses modules, is that if you burn a Morphix cd as a multisession cd, you can put together a new minimodules directory, ex: add usb-support mini-module, a new background mini-module, a new theme mini-module and reburn the cd with the new minimodules directory and you now have the new mini-modules added onto your existing Morphix cd.

rock

[A. Jorge Garcia]

I also ran knx-hdinstall on an old PII-233 with 32MB RAM but found it really slow even with a swap partition! Is MORPHIX that much more efficient on the hdd?

Oh, you use it at school and use Java too? We currently teach C++ (preAPCS and APCS) using GCC's g++. Next year we're going to try to use GCC's gcj to teach Java (in the new APCS). I'm curious if you use MORPHIX and/or KNOPPIX with students.

I have my students use KNOPPIX CDs in two labs.

One lab has sound cards and speakers with PIIIs and 128MB RAM. This lab is great. My students love to play the penguin oggs in the background while we write code. I wish my boss would let me do a knx-hdinstall on those machines!

My kids, in another class, also use KNOPPIX CDs and boot disks in another lab with only PMMX-233 and 128MB RAM. These are slow to boot-up, but then run pretty well.

Regards,

[RockMumbles]

I teach 100 level chemistry labs and a developmental chem class. I have given a knopix cd and boot floppy to one of the CS professors, unfortunately as most, the CS department is currently 100% ms, there are two, maybe three linux computers on campus, my personal computer, which has Libranet 2.0, Knoppix and KDE-Morphix installed and a RedHat 8 server that is mainly used as a webserver for one of the CS/math professors.

I add jre so I can use linux to have full access to the schools exchange server. There is one computer in our instrumental chem lab that won't boot into win2000 so I'm thinking about configuring it for the jetdirect hp printer and leaving it running knoppix and see what happens. Here even the one professor that has been running linux webservers for years cannot comprehend using linux as a desktop OS.


I also ran knx-hdinstall on an old PII-233 with 32MB RAM but found it really slow even with a swap partition! Is MORPHIX that much more efficient on the hdd?

I don't think it's a Knoppix issue, unfortunately with the vast amount of hardware available today, the same feature creep we have seen affect windows is also affecting linux, I have a P-200MMX that runs a Morphix install OK with 64MB RAM, Debian woody is slow on the same hardware, slower than my old Debian potato, Libranet 1.2, Slackware 7.1, Mandrake 6, or RedHat 6 installs, I used to run a P-133 w/ 32MB RAM (several years ago) and it was totally usable, but it had KDE 1.X. There was nothing like open office or even star office, netscape was the most power hungry app. I used it mainly for internet stuff and used a netscape 4.X browser and a 1.X version of kmail. I have gotten to the point that if I don't have at least 64MB of RAM I make the machine into a dedicated server or router. One thing you could use the P-II w/ 32MB for is an X-terminal so you can remotely login to another machine, it would do that just fine, the one thing here is you need to have the same resolution on both machines. You would have to have a hd install on one machine and use gdm, kdm, or xdm for X logins (I use gdm, it seems the easiest to use for me) and set up your display manager to allow remote logins on your 'server' machine. I'm going to start doing this during exams as one of my classes is in a multimedia classroom, I'll boot into Morphix or Knoppix and then be able to remotely login to my computer in my office.

rock

[A. Jorge Garcia]

I too am a CS/Math teacher/professor and I use linux desktops all the time! 8)

You had to add jre, what from www.sun.com? Doesn't KNOPPIX have Blackdown Java jre 1.3 installed.

I was going to run knx-hdinstall at school to avoid remastering KNOPPIX so I could install jdk 1.4.1 for my APCS class next year. It seems, however, that GCC has finally implemented most of the Java classes I will be needing and that's already on the KNOPPIX CD! They even have java.awt.* and java.applet.* but I'll be missing javax.swing.* for event-driven GUI programming.

Can't have it all I guess.

Regards,

[RockMumbles]

You had to add jre, ... Doesn't KNOPPIX have Blackdown Java jre 1.3 installed.


I add mozilla and jre to my Morphix lightGUI hd installs.

rock

[roberto]

ok has anyone else had their browser hang while trying to connect to the ftp server from morhix's homepage?


fyi:

Windows XP
i.e. 5.5 sp2 and internet explorer 6.0 w/service pack
no blocking from firewall... have used other computers that also hang...
really want to try out morphix..


if anyone can send me the link the preassembled one with base + light windowmanager (icewm or fluxbox) it would be appreciated... if i can get the exact link i have other ways of getting it besides windows b.s. :)


toast

[Alextreme]

Hmm, the mirror is a tad flaky at times, thinking about distributing the load (especially a mirror in the US would be a welcome change i think)...

Anyway, things are starting to roll nicely, got that game iso up for testing so if anyone with an nvidia card wants to play a couple of rounds of the q3a demo :D
(note: it's a 575mb download, and it's still pretty messy. in short: don't download it with a dialup)

oh, and probono, i'm working on that KMail problem. Was sloppy, sorry about that :?
and on that modified apt-get you were talking about, keep an eye on the morphix announcements in the customization forum ;)

[roberto]

Alextreme: If you would like to have an alternate location to post your morphix releases. I would be willing to post the main / final releases on my sourceforge site. I already have one up there as it was a bit difficult getting your ftp site to allow me to download it :-( . Let me know.




toast