Hey all,

I originally tried to get registered on the forum here quite some time ago, but was thwarted by not receiving the email response, and seeing no sight of it on the comcast spam mailbox either. This time I was more persistent and emailed our webmaster/administrator a couple of times. I thank him for getting me on here!

For the last year and a half or so I've been using Linux 98% percent of the time on my computer. First was OpenSUSE, then Debian, back and forth between them, Mandriva for a short period, and now back on Debian Lenny. During all this I experimented with other distro's Live CD/DVD as well. Knoppix appears to be the only Live distro (excepting the small distro's like Puppy Linux) that really is designed for a user to make full use of what Linux offers. Most have a small selection designed for a user to check out the distro before installing it on the hard drive, where they would have access to real computer use.

Knoppix on the other hand and especially on the DVD editions, has so much available on the CD/DVD image that there really is a real full experience and use of just about anything one would want. And there's a bit of space to install much of what one might find missing. Really an ingenious design!

I just bought an 8GB Sandisk Cruser Micro USB flash drive and have been reading the various how-to's on installing Knoppix as well as noticing how OpenSUSE also provides some guides on doing much the same type of thing. I am kind of stuck here at home, have been for several years with my Mom needing home care and I'm the one doing it. But I do have some friends that I occasionally (usually during football season) get out to see, and they know nothing about Linux. Actually I'd be hard pressed to not say that they don't know much about Windows either but that wouldn't be too nice. They are friends, after all.

I just figured it would be fun one day to show up with either the Knoppix DVD or my customized USB version and show them the works. Plus the cool factor of being able to travel anywhere and be able to have access to my stuff as long as there was a computer available.

For now, it's just to have the experience of doing the USB install. Don't need to, but well, because it's there! I already used Vista to uninstall that U3 stuff so the drive's clean and ready.

It was fun checking out the new version. It had only been a brief try with 5.1.1 as I was still doing baby steps with Linux with my installed distro and really didn't see the point. I had a distro right here, installed! I wasn't going anywhere.

Anyway, it was nice to see how easy it was to install the NVidia drivers the Debian way. The linux-headers, build-essential, and module-assistant are already installed so I just needed to do the module-assistant and aptitude (keep-all first so it wouldn't start removing the whole system) steps to get it installed, modify xorg.conf, init 2, init 5, and I had 3D. Tried a few games and they played fine, and ran Compiz Fusion alright as well.

I did have a bit of trouble with Compiz Fusion after I added some installations from debian-multimedia.org (added the repo and installed the codecs, switching out Helix for RealPlayer, etc). Compiz Fusion had survived several logouts and logins until I installed those codec things but afterwards it ran without the window decorator. I got the no FBGLX available for default depth 24 (which I had changed the default depth to as Compiz doesn't run on 16). Nothing but removing Shame's Compiz Fusion and installing Debian's version from Lenny would get the decorator to work. Once I did that it worked fine.

I've got Shame's Lenny version on my current Debian Lenny and it works fine, with no decorator problems. It is a slightly newer version than Knoppix 5.3.1 comes with so it's possible that if I had simply upgraded the Shame Compiz packages the problem would have gone away. I'll check it out next time.

I had the Debian version installed, but once I saw Compiz Fusion came out with another development build I just wanted something newer than what's in Lenny. I made the switch out and it went fine. Had to make uninstall my 0.5.2 Emerald packages that I had compiled myself since Debian doesn't have Emerald.

I've purchased the 3 books out (Dummies, Hacking, and Hacks, fill in the rest) on Knoppix. I always like books. Some are more technically helpful than others, but even the simplest offer a nice tour and offer points it might have taken be longer to discover and figure out with web searching and exploring on my own. I can't complain about my purchases of "The Debian System," "Debian GNU/Linux Bible," "Linux Bible 2007," or the books by Keir Thomas on OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. Never used Ubuntu, but it helped me learning Debian.

Nothing much to ask about yet. I generally check out forums for learning and also chip in if I see someone needs some advice on something I might know something about. I didn't want to get the webmaster get me in here and then not post anything, so I figured I'd post and ramble a bit.

Debian Lenny's getting KDE 3.5.9 sometime today. That's good. I missed my system notifications, which haven't worked for anybody for a couple of weeks now. KDE 3.5.9 fixes that. Let's hope my system survives the upgrade! That's a lot of stuff, and one never really knows if that many things will go in smoothly and still work properly. Debian and aptitude are probably more trustworthy for massive upgrades than most, but then there's the guy at the other end of the keyboard. I'll make sure to get out of X for this one. That ought to help.