I downloaded and burned the Knoppix iso a couple days ago and WOW am I ever impressed.

First a little background on me:
I've been using computers in the IBM/MS world for about 10 years now. I started with MSDOS 5.0 and have used every MS OS since pretty fluently. Though I'm not a proficient programmer, I have done a bit of structured programming in C, Pascal, and Basic. I've been building PCs for myself, relatives, and lately small businesses since the the original Pentium/AMD K6 days. Even though I consider myself a power user in the Windows arena I've never quite been able to grasp Linux...but thanks to Knoppix you can welcome another born again penquin head to the fray.

Installation:
Just for reference I'm running an AMD Athlon XP 1600 on a ECS K7S5A (SiS735 chipset) motherboard with 512MB PC2100 DDR, a GeForce4 4200 video card, a generic 10/100 PCI NIC connected to cable router, an ATAPI NEC CD burner, a Western Digital 20gb IDE hard drive, a standard PS/2 keyboard and an off brand (Harma) USB optical wheel mouse... details on my audio setup below...

Hardware detection was ALMOST flawless. I had an AU8830 based Tutle Beach Montego II and the onboard SiS7012 based AC97 audio installed and enabled, respectively. Everything was detected and worked properly except, of course, for the sound card. Fortunately my network configuration was already set up by Knoppix automatically so I could jump online right away and find out that my AU8830 wasn't supported without 3rd party beta drivers (http://sourceforge.net/projects/aureal/). I shut down, removed the card, and Knoppix was able to find and configure my AC97 audio without a hitch!

Initial reactions:
It had been awhile since I'd last given linux a chance (with RedHat 6.0) so I wasn't quite sure what to expect this time around. KDE made the switch from WindowsXP very simple for me. Aside from a bit of mucking with the sound server (XMMS doesn't come with a aRts plugin by default) all the software worked "right out of the box").

I was (and still am) impressed and a bit overwhelmed with the sheer amount of apps included for a 1 CD distro. GAIM, OpenOffice, XMMS, Xine, Mozilla, Gimp, etc. If only there was a sequencer with VST support for Linux I'd never have to deal with Windows again (I'm a rabid Fruityloops fan).

In closing:
The biggest improvements that can be made, from a newbie perspective anyway, are: 1) a GUI for installing Knoppix to your hard drive and 2) some kind of unified sound server and all multimedia apps preconfigured to use it. That's pretty much it.

Like I said at the start of this rather lengthly post I've only been using Knoppix for a couple days but I've already given out 3 CDs and got a friend to download the ISO. This will now be my main OS, but Windows will stay on another partition for the audio apps and games.

Thanks,
Will