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paj1234
11-29-2004, 12:12 AM
I have written a free book about Knoppix for beginners. It is called "Knowing Knoppix". It is in PDF format, and the original OpenOffice.org (sxw) source documents are also available. The book addresses Knoppix version 3.3. I realise 3.3 is a bit dated now but that is the version that was available when I started writing the book! It is licenced under the GNU Free Documentation Licence. Download from my page:

<removed dead link>
New link (http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=%22Knowing+Knoppix%22+by+Phil+Jones)

I would like feedback to help improve the guide. A printed version with a corresponding Knoppix bootable CD and boot floppy disk is also available by mail order for a small charge. It would be really nice if my effort could be mentioned on this site. Please note that the book is not for "dummies". Instead, it is for smart people who want - or need - to use Knoppix for the first time, without prior experience of Linux.

Phil

made2000
11-29-2004, 01:51 AM
Great timing just what I needed. Looks great sit back and get comfratable and read this thing. Thanks when you have used windows only forever it can be a little confusing. I'll be able to leave harry alone.

fester13
11-29-2004, 04:41 AM
Rocks. For the beginner, well written. Flows. . .

spandit
11-29-2004, 05:26 AM
Rocks. For the beginner, well written. Flows. . .

hats off for putting in the time and putting it together buddy
it is an excellent book
the mods should make this post a sticky

gnarvaja
11-30-2004, 10:03 PM
From your web site:

Just as Knoppix is free, so is Knowing Knoppix. It is released under the GNU Free Documentation Licence. You are welcome to copy and redistribute it (subject to certain conditions). You will probably want to download the PDF version. The source archive contains the original documents in OpenOffice.org version 1.1.1 (SXW) format.

You may be better served using a Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/) license, they are the equivalent of GPL for creative works.

I downloaded the source files since I love OO for this kind of work, I don't mind to contribute if possilbe.

My $.02
-GN

A.O.Q.
12-29-2004, 07:25 AM
i can't d/l it. it starts but won't finish. i wonder why...

paj1234
12-29-2004, 02:40 PM
Try it again now. I was uploading a new version, which takes a while.

patelbhavesh
12-30-2004, 02:18 AM
In order to reduce the load on paj1234's server you can download it from

Main content (http://www.pjls16812.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/knowing-knoppix/pdf/knowing-knoppix.pdf)
Front cover (http://www.pjls16812.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/knowing-knoppix/pdf/cover.pdf)
Back cover (http://www.pjls16812.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/knowing-knoppix/pdf/back.pdf)
The source cannot be coralized as it is more then 4MB.

Basically the above URL's are coralized.That means that the content is cached to a nearby location.You can read more about coral's at http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/overview/

Here are the edonkey/magnet links to download via p2p networks

magnet:?xt=urn:sha1:LNDDBUSI3H5ECNTIUP5RLSEX5GMLV4 4E&dn=knowing-knoppix.pdf Main content via gnutella network.
ed2k://|file|knowing-knoppix.pdf|4000253|349dd9c27aef6b60e65b231cecdb14 0c| Main content via edonkey network.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
Free Software , Free Speech , Free Society
http://bhavesh.freeshell.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Harry Kuhman
01-01-2005, 05:19 PM
This got front page mention on Slashdot (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/31/2255239&tid=146&tid=106) today. Hope you have the bandwidth and don't pay wherever it's hosted by the amount of traffic. Maybe we'll be seeing more users here soon.

patelbhavesh
01-01-2005, 06:21 PM
This got front page mention on Slashdot (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/31/2255239&tid=146&tid=106) today. Hope you have the bandwidth and don't pay wherever it's hosted by the amount of traffic. Maybe we'll be seeing more users here soon.
All the more reason to use coralized links which I mentioned in my previous post.Coralized links act like akamai and are specifically meant for slashdot like situation.
Also I have uploaded the book and other stuff on p2p networks like edonkey,gnutella.So this also should help in reducing bandwidth usage.

Harry Kuhman
01-01-2005, 06:34 PM
All the more reason to use coralized links......
The front page Slashdot article linked right to the html website that hosts the book. It didn't use the coralized links (which I think was just for the pdf files, not for the webpage itself). I don't see that there's much that can be done now to make that better. So the site will likely get an awful lot of traffic, although I expect not every visitor will actually download the files. The Shashdot effect is well known for having maor impact on sites and has taken down many; I'm impressed that the site is still even up.

markpreston
01-01-2005, 10:03 PM
http://unit.aist.go.jp/itri/knoppix/knowing-knoppix/main/

Is a link to an html version of "Knowing Knoppix" that some people may find convenient to get an idea about the book.
I have emailed the author today about getting a hard copy and the interesting thing is that the book is obviously undergoing development as we speak. If you order a hard copy of the book you get it in a loose leafed folder. Not only do you get an up-to-date copy (along with a CD and a boot floppy) when you order the book, but I presume as things get added you merely update the folder and print-out / remove the bits you don't need as time goes by and new bits are published. This seems like a very good idea to me.
Happy New Year!
Mark Preston

pnti
01-01-2005, 11:38 PM
Thank you for your work and thank you for the GNU FDL licence.

paj1234
01-03-2005, 02:43 AM
Wow, I always wanted to submit a story to Slashdot. Now, here I am *in* a Slashdot story. More than I ever wanted! It certainly had an amazing effect. In two days, an extraordinary 25,327 visitors downloaded, or attempted to download, the PDF. Perhaps this would be a good place for me to respond to some of the Slashdot comments, since that discussion is now closed and I missed it. From the article:

> "The only people plugging in a knoppix cd are nerds who #1: already have a considerable working
> knowledge of linux & 2: don't read...this."

Yes, I know, that's pretty true. But everyone has to start somewhere. I hope at least some people might find it useful.

> "[if it doesn't work]... you've lied to them saying it was plain and simple... he never says anything
> like "and if THIS doesn't happen, THEN do.."

Guilty! I have changed certain sections about reading the hard disk accordingly. I have already made some attempts in the "Quick help" sections to address some of the errors I have encountered and mistakes I have made while using Knoppix myself.

"Kind of amusing that open source documentation should be released in a proprietary format."

Yes. I plead guilty again. But it is at least an open source format that is built into OpenOffice.org, and GNU Ghostscript, both of which are GPL.

>"Using OpenOffice... for a 134 page document? I stay away from office suites for documents
> longer than a handful of pages... They never heard of LaTeX [latex-project.org]?"

Indeed. Using OpenOffice.org for a 100+ page document is getting kinda horrible... I tried LaTeX but I never figured out how to get the kind of presentation control that I wanted. :-(

> "I think the book bounces back and forth between good "So You Want To Be A Linux
> Consultant" material, like the stuff about hda, fd0, boot process, init, and so on, and
> good "Grandpa Computer User" material, like the stuff about KDE ("click on things
> to start them", "you can lasso many things at once"). This makes it difficult for either
> group to use."

That is an excellent comment. See here the power of peer review. I could never have thought of that myself, yet it seems so obvious now it's been pointed out to me. I have moved the material about "device names" and "user accounts" almost to the back of the book.

> "wasn't necessary to go into detail about the bootup process... as soon as people see "SCSI" or
> IDE" or "PCMCIA" they'll go into idiot mode and fail to grok the rest of the paper, and
> resort to throwing feces at the monitor"

Good point. I have taken out the detailed description of the startup process. I have replaced it with an one-line explanation and a few examples of how long the auto-detection process takes (between 40 seconds and 2 minutes depending on the speed of the machine).

A. Jorge Garcia
01-04-2005, 02:54 AM
Don't let the negative comments get you down. I think you wrote a very good manual for noobies and there is a need for such a document. I distribute KNOPPIX CDs (see http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQgotopageZ1QQsassZsffbclubQQsorecordsperpageZ5 0QQsosortpropertyZ1 ) to a lot of noobies and they'd love to get their hands on this doc. I'm going to give them the link you gave if that's OK.

Good Luck with your future revisions,
AJG

rgarden
01-09-2005, 06:50 PM
THANKS, PHIL. I hope you get honorable mention here. In fact, I hope you get moved onto the "front page" under a "Knowing Knoppix" category. I'm running Knoppix 3.7 on a laptop using sudo knoppix-installer on a dedicated hard drive , and also on my Windows 2000 (fat32) desktop, using the Knoppix TOHD and FROMHD cheatcodes. I read your section on "finding Permanence", and hooked up an old 4.3GB drive in a USB enclosure to my desktop. Then I read your section on advanced startup, and used the TOHD cheatcode to copy the cd image to my Windows drive as a regular windows folder. This makes the boot sequence considerably faster, and frees up the CD drive. Please check out my post under the General topic "Windows & linux on the same HD" One consequence of this is that I cannot use the same partition for a swap file . Knoppix seems to mount my Windows drive (/dev/hda1) as a "read only cdrom", and so I lose write access. I actually consider that a safety feature.

Also, I not only created a 2GB linux partition for my Persistent Home Directory on the USB drive, I also created a 1GB "Linux Swap File" on a 2nd partition . I saw the section in your book about the swap file, but I think having a larger one improves performance as well. I have 384 MB ram, but I notice that knoppix creates a 301mb ramdisk when it boots, so it seems to leave 84mb for general use, then takes the rest for it's ramdisk. I wonder if you could explore what Knoppix uses it's ramdisk for, and also check on whether a swap file bigger than 128MB is really a waste or not. I put the knoppix cd in the cd drive on my desktop, key "knoppix fromhd=/dev/hda1 home=/dev/sda1", press enter, then take the cd out when Knoppix accesses the cdrom image from /dev/hda1. Knoppix sees the swap file automatically at /dev/sda2, and I'm off and running.

At any rate , keep up the good work, AND THANKS AGAIN FOR ALL YOUR HARD WORK !
8)

bigkahuna
01-19-2005, 02:12 AM
I just downloaded and printed your book. All I can say is:

:!: T H A N K Y O U ! ! ! :!:

Not only is it the first Linux book I've seen that has color illustrations (my feable brain thanks you) but it appears to be pretty well written, and it's about Knoppix! Triple bonus! Very nice work and enormously generous of you since I'm sure you could have easily gotten it published and made a few dollars to compensate you for all your work.

Thanks again,

Paul

Doctor
01-19-2005, 06:15 AM
allocates 301megs of ram for a ramdisk? I thought knoppix uses tmpfs which means memory is only allocated towards the ramdrive as its used up

jacksonon
01-22-2005, 08:49 AM
Changes:

"...certain inaccuracies have been corrected; some of the more advanced material has been moved towards the back of the book; and a few non-essential details have been deleted."

Go download it:

http://www.pjls16812.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/knowing-knoppix/index.html

*spanish version in the works

gildedlink
03-08-2005, 08:18 PM
If the bandwidth got alot more I'd be glad to mirror it a bit, just not too much ;)

ssustudent01
03-11-2005, 01:55 PM
I downloaded and printed out the manual the other day at work. I had it printed duplex, bound in with our Docubind P300 (http://www.duplointernational.com/duplo/CGI_BIN/page_prod_det.asp?parm01=118), and had a nice clear plastic cover put before and after the title and back page. I was laying in bed one night reading it when my wife came in and looked at what I was reading.

"What is 'know-pix'?" she asked, crawling into bed.

[LOL] "It's 'nah-pix'" I told her. "It's a free operating system that boots from a CD. It can replace the Windows XP that's on our computer. It totally bypasses reading anything on the hard drive. And if the power goes out or you need to turn off the computer, you can just hit the power button. You know, it doesn't mess up the computer and have to sit forever running a scandisk. And it comes with a cool audio program that shows the waves... like the program the guys use on Ghost Hunters..." (Ghost Hunters is a show she watches on SCI-Fi channel.)

As she rolls over, "You've already lost me. I'm going to bed. Good night sweetie."

----------------------

Awesome manual. I love it. I've tinkered some with Linux for about 8 years off and on. This is a great overview and EASY document to read.

Thanks so much!

drdjnicholls
03-13-2005, 02:04 PM
Exlcellent! Many thanks.

Carlsym
03-21-2005, 09:24 PM
Thank you for putting this together. Also just what was needed at the right time for me.

You may be interested in extended PDF http://www.jdisoftware.co.uk/pages/jdi-about.php

It adds some pizzaz (like bookmarks) beyond the "export to PDF" function built into OOo 1.1.x. It doesn't work with the 2.0 beta yet.

ddrex
04-03-2005, 04:28 AM
http://unit.aist.go.jp/itri/knoppix/knowing-knoppix/main/

Is a link to an html version of "Knowing Knoppix" that some people may find convenient to get an idea about the book.

Too bad this page won't display in the mozilla included in knoppix ;-)

dd

A. Jorge Garcia
04-03-2005, 02:54 PM
I loaded

http://www.pjls16812.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/knowing-knoppix/index.html

in mozilla!

HTH,
AJG

zeth
04-08-2005, 11:22 PM
I read this book the other day and I have to say it is one of best GNU/Linux manuals I have ever read. Well Done. Clear, perfectly presented, good choice of license, just a perfect piece of documentation, pure art.

markpreston
04-09-2005, 11:45 AM
ddrex wrote

markpreston wrote:
http://unit.aist.go.jp/itri/knoppix/knowing-knoppix/main/

Is a link to an html version of "Knowing Knoppix" that some people may find convenient to get an idea about the book.


Too bad this page won't display in the mozilla included in knoppix ;-)

dd
It does load in the mozilla browser I am using (Knoppix 3.3)
It's just that you have to scroll down the page to see anything useful.
Regards,
Mark

ar
04-11-2005, 06:12 AM
Thanks phil for yuor help!
An exciting book.been looking for suchthing.
Linux=do what you can do. :wink:

Capt. Cautious
03-27-2006, 08:14 PM
Blessings:
When this came out in 04, I downloaded it and was very plesantly surprized. I learned a lot. Unfortunately Winblow$ ate the copy I put in mydocs. I recently downloaded it again and noted that the pdf opened before allowing me to save it, very disconcerting. However my intent in this post is to tell the author that his work and clarity ofexplainations is absolutely OUTSTANDING!!! I have the knoppix for dummies book and this really, in it's way, puts it to shame. The only thing I'd like to see is more of the intermediate to advanced material. BTW, one piece of info saved me from doing a super blooie! Thanks.
Long may you and the manual prosper, it is the best documetation I've ever seen. If I find some stuff that is not in the book which I think will be helpful I'll send it on.

I Remain ~ In health & In Service,
Captain Cautious :D
2006.03.27

derekge
04-24-2008, 07:31 PM
Thank you - this is nice for us beginners!

k666stw
10-22-2008, 01:42 AM
Are there any other mirrors to download this book from?
I've just got knoppix with a view to making a permanent switch to a Linux OS. My awesome noobishness would no doubt offend so I'd like to get a bit of working knowledge, before I start begging for help. :)

Clinton
10-22-2008, 10:45 AM
This link to the pdf (http://db.glug-bom.org/Documentation/knowing-knoppix_2004-12-30.pdf) seems to work. It's about 4 MB. The print version is available at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Phil-Jones-Knowing-Knoppix-beginners/dp/1440413096).

I'm happy to mirror resources like this right here at Knoppix.net if any author/developer is interested.

k666stw
10-22-2008, 01:14 PM
Thanks muchly. The download managed to finish with that link.