turn off compiz fusion

[Harry Kuhman]

jc1742:

I too use Live CD including Knoppix mainly as tools. Sometimes for recovering files from a crashed system. Sometimes just as safe and secure browsing tools when I am concerned about exposing my primary system. Sometimes booting very focused network related live discs such as Backtrack. I'm not sure though why one would want to actually install a live disc like Knoppix rather than simply install Debian. I've been using Knoppix long enough to remember the days when a Debian install was painful; one had to record in painful detail a lot of information about their system down to even Interrupt addresses and memory addresses used, start the Debian install and then usually abort it and restart Windows when some setting was asked for that wasn't in extensive notes. Unfortunately I never saw any tool that could record ALL of that stuff automatically before starting a Debian install. When Knoppix came out it certainly proved that a program could determine those things for itself. People complained that if Knoppix could do that why couldn't the Debian installer? They even came up with some crude ways to "install" Knoppix, some of which Klaus even included in the CDs, although he cautioned that they were only intended for special cases such as classroom installs. That was a caution that many frustrated users ignored.

Debian got much better. A Debian install is now cleaner than a Knoppix install and doesn't suffer from the mixture of different versions that frequently causes problems in Knoppix when installing and updating. Of course it doesn't suffer from the bloat of a lot of extra packages that will never be used, and you can easily install any package that is included in Knoppix. I would welcome if you could explain to me any reason why you think rational people are still installing Knoppix over Debian, beyond the "mother duck" principle.

As to buying Knoppix discs, as far as I know, all people who offer these discs are or at least should be providing exactly the same software built from the same ISO file. That includes those who advertise here and provide a very small support back to Knoppix.net in return for the advertising. None of that income gets back to Klaus or the people who help him build the releases.

[jc1742]

Thanks for the informative reply. It all sounds a bit familiar. In particular, I've used Knoppix rather than Debian because, in my experience from 5 or so years back, Debian was a time-consuming effort that required multiple passes to install on a "new" machine, while Knoppix could be installed simply once you'd verified that it worked acceptably off the live CD. It didn't get installed often, but it was handy at times, and then missing stuff could be fetched from Debian if needed. I have one machine that's been running as a web server for about 6 years that started off that way. It's time to upgrade it and a few other machines, though, and I discovered by experience that things have changed a bit. I ordered a Knoppix7.2.0 32-bit CD from osdisk.com; it's specs included LXDE as the "desktop", but it actually runs compiz, which uses over 95% of the CPU (plus 5% for Xorg), and has a 5-20-sec delay before the effect of hitting a key or a mouse button is seen on the screen. It's unusable on several of the machines I tried it on.

Maybe I'll give Debian a try. But one question I guess I should look at is exactly which window manager package a distro actually delivers. Some of the fancier new ones might look great on the latest, fastest hardware, but they might not be quite what you want if you're installing it on some of the older hardware (e.g., "cast-off" ex-Windows machines that aren't powerful enough for the latest supported releases of Windows .

Actually, I guess one question I'd have is whether my CD has both LXDE (as advertised) and compiz. I don't really understand what either of those names stands for, whether they might both be running, or how to correctly identify the pieces of either one (except that there's a process named "compiz", which is a clue, but there's nothing spelled "LXDE" that I can see . All I really know is that my meagre experience with running a current Knoppix "live CD" is that on the (older) boxes I've tried it on, its performance is around an order of magnitude too slow to be even minimally usable. And my attempts to investigate have mostly turned up lots of similar problems reported by others.

[Harry Kuhman]

...but there's nothing spelled "LXDE" that I can see ....

I don't really know the various window managers under Linux as well as I should. But for info on LXDE you can start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXDE

And you can look at the various Knoppix cheat codes in the desktop section, particularly the desktop= and 3d and no3d options.

One big difference between Knoppix and some other live disc distros like Linux Mint is that some distros release different ISO files for each desktop as well as different ISOs for 32 bit and 64 bit versions. Knoppix packs all of the options that it offers on one DVD. That may be good for easy testing of different start up options, it might be a negative when installing a lot of extra unneeded stuff and trying to maintain the system when upgrading. I really can't take advantage of these cheat codes myself, as my Knoppix system has a broken screen and the external monitor isn't viewable until after Linux boots, so no boot time cheat codes for me.