Windows Died, Can Knoppix wipe it Out and Take its Place?

[OErjan]

it is most likely the 213 M iso from here you need to boot (if it is not a 64Bit processor).
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/da...t/i386/iso-cd/

if you need some other processor support look here
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/da...y/arch-latest/

as for "difficult installing"i think it is not too hard, my 11 year old niece managed it without problem by just reading and following instructions on screen as she went, true it was a clean hdd but if you allow Debian to auto partition it i think it will be OK (if you do not need to rescue data from it that is).
oh and i heartily agree with Harry - Verifying of md5 checksum and burning a CD at slow speed are important.

[Capricorny]

May I ask why you think it is downsteam? From my Knoppix DVD and that video, it looked like they were pretty much on the same page, as far as I could tell. I would use Knoppix in a heartbeat if it could go safely on the HD, and right now Debian seems intimidating because it looks like so much to download.

AFAIK, Ubuntu started out as a Debian derivative, addressing exactly some of the "intimidating" aspects of then Debian. In distro time, that is very long ago, and while I know there was an intention to feed improvements from the Ubuntu project back to Debian, I don't know how how much that has happened. But I know that for general use, as Harry and Oerjan says, current Debian is quite fine, and I don't think the current Knoppix "experience" is far from what you get with "pure" Debian. Ubuntu could have an edge if you are mostly an "end user", but, for example, for learning system administration, my view is that nothing quite beats Debian.

[OErjan]

Capricorny, I quite agree on most of the above, Debian is now MUCH simpler than when Ubuntu first came.
as for Debian (Or Slackware), in my opinion they are THE distros if you want to learn linux - IF YOU WANT TO - they allow you to dig as everything is NOT automagic, so if you want to go deeper...
to go much Deeper, possibly http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ or http://www.gentoo.org/ should be bout right.

[Zaiella]

All right, thanks. Which of those files do I need and what are all the .small files? Also, unless there is some HUGE difference between the stable and testing versions of Debian, I think I might rather have stable. I'd rather have something that works with minimal errors and crashings then the newest stuff. I'm still using WinXP, which I have minimal crashings with (although, yes they do happen, but nothing like 95, 98, and ME nightmares) and the Vista horror stories made me steer clear. My grandmother and aunt have 7 which I have very limited experiance with.

What I'm looking for really is
A strong solid secure OS to clean up the drive and replace Windows
Updates when they're needed
Great hardware detection (I couldn't tell you what is on that laptop) and driver installion for the stuff
Easy to install and run (also easy program installs)
Can go online and do everything like flash and Java and music
A nice customizable graphic desktop where everything can be accessed with limited commands. I'm just not ready to memorize all those commands yet, so I'd like stuff in the desktop also.
I'm not really interested in going deep into the OS kernal or anything like that.

Thanks for all the replies.

[Harry Kuhman]

I wrote a response to this thread last night, but it isn't here now so I guess something went wrong as I was going to post it.

I don't know the exact dates of the different Debian versions. When I made my choice it was several years out of date and was missing a lot of support for newer hardware. You could research the ages of the different versions if you are really interested. My suggestion is still to do a net install of the testing version even though that may take you five minutes longer to find.

No, you can't just update to testing or unstable later. Compatibilities between packages is very important in Linux and once you have stable you stay in stable. That, in fact, is one of the major issues about installing Knoppix to a hard drive. The developer of Knoppix didn't stay within one version, he mixed and matched between stable, testing and unstable. He had to carefully test things and be sure that interactions worked OK. But when installed to hard disk, if you install anything else or even do a simple update, you likely will pull in newer packages that create serous incompatibilities between the versions and break a lot of things.

[Zaiella]

All right, thanks. What are the .small files in here? Do I need them?

[Werner P. Schulz]

All right, thanks. What are the .small files in here? Do I need them?

... the small files contains the checksums. You need only one; and how to use for example md5sum you can read here

Greetings Werner * http://www.wp-schulz.de/knoppix/summary.html
Own Rescue-CD with Knoppix (Knoppix V6.4.4 remaster)

[Zaiella]

Thanks y'all. I can do checksums. I'll try out Debian next.

[Zaiella]

Actually, before I do Debian, if I want to get Debian off the computer for any reason will I be able to? I'm asking because it doesn't look like it lets me see it from CD first. I have Knoppix of course and I got Ubuntu which I actually really like and it seems perfect for me at this moment, but I'd still like to give Debian a shot too. How many Unix codes will I need to know? Can everything be done from the Graphic interface? I'm checking before I make the CD (but I do have the ISO and checksum downloaded.)

[OErjan]

certainly, just install something else over it or boot Knoppix and use fdisk, cfdisk, qtparted or similar to wipe partitions and go from there.