Blown Away!! Very, very cool

[desire]

I bought the book "Moving to Linux> Kiss the BSoD Goodbye!!" by Marcel Gagne. Along with it came a Knoppix CD. I started reading the book, anyway to make a long story short I'm writing this post in Mozilla from my roommates' PC which has Win "98 (while they unawaringly watch TV) and running a test print on an Epson 777 and listening to Lifehouse "Hanging by a Moment" on XMMS from "my documents" on the HDD. Opened a Word document in OpenOffice just to check it out. The only thing I had to manually adjust was the monitor refresh rate and Whamo!! here I am!!!!! I loaded it on my own machine a little while ago and the post is in the News section and again had so little difficulty with it. Simply put I'm blown away by Knoppix .....very, very cool . The scary part?? Is from Knoppix I can change, delete files that are on Win '98, absolutely no file protection or permissions in 98(FAT32)...so much for security, although I understand that's changed a little in XP(NTFS). What I want are a couple of things, first of all a distro that I can get back into using command lines and secondly a distro that I can take to my buddies to give them a taste of penguin!!! MMMM!! I also work with some single parent children (9-15) who can't afford a computer let alone Windows and also possibly get them interested in something. So I was looking for a way that I could do this and perhaps Knoppix just may be the ticket.

[paradocs]

Hi desire,

Posts like yours make me recall the gratitude I had
on first booting KNOPPIX.

There are many KNOPPIX based projects. Although
I do not have personal experience -- have a look at the
UNESCO supported education version called FREEDUC.

http://www.ofset.org/freeduc-cd/

Good luck on your mentoring project and on KNOPPIX.

Best Wishes
paradocs

[desire]

Thanks Paradox BTW Happy New Year!!
Thanks for the link and certainly something to consider. I bought the book to read and review it with newcomers to Linux in mind or those thinking of making the move and even those that are unaware of Linux(after all I'm still a newbie). So far I really like what I'm reading and and it's not too goofy like the "Dummies" books. In my spare time I hunt down slightly older components and build systems that people can use and I think I can do this now and not have to worry about licenses (notice my carefull choice of words) I have some older systems that I want to test Knoppix on (e.g. Pentium 166MMX 32MB RAM etc)and I think I may have a winner. The test will come with modems and for the few extra bucks it costs for a hard modem (Intel chipset $25CAD) it will be well worth it and I don't mind paying that. BTW I went to Linux Central and ordered the Knoppix 3.3 CD to give it a whirl. I wouldn't even mind making a donation to Debian and/or Knoppix everytime I sucessfully setup a computer for someone. So we'll see how things go and I can tell you I'm pretty excited so far. Well better hit the sack there's a pretty girl I have to go see in the morning.

Thanks
Desire

[true_evil]

There is also a kids version of Knoppix for the younger crowd. It works just like the "regular" knoppix, but the applications are geared for kids. Try it out.

It is called Tux4Kids, find it here:

http://www.osef.org/

Good Hunting!

[stonent]

absolutely no file protection or permissions in 98(FAT32)

All forms of FAT lack security under every OS.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Here, take a look at this related thread:

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7021

for all those new Marcel Gagne Fans!

Regards,

[logesh]

I ran Knoppix for the first time a couple of hours ago intending it as a rescue disk for my Mandrake system.
It ran perfectly.
Amazinlgy, WINE auto-configured itself and ran MSW Logo perfecly within seconds. I could have fallen out of my chair.
Many years ago, when my daughter couldn't get some (long-forgotten) Windows software to work, I told her how WINE would let us run anything. And of course I never even got close to getting it to work installing it myself.
Now it works out of the box with no effort.
My daughter is going to be seriously impressed when she sees this tomorrow morning.
I'm now wondering whether I shouldn't switch permanently to Knoppix or some other (non-KDE) Debian distribution.

Thanks

[desire]

Logesh,
I remember reading a post on this forum (...somewhere) that there is a version of Knoppix called Gnoppix that has Gnome instead of KDE. My own personal preference is in fact Gnome but I also like KDE. IMHO I would encourage you to switch over. I don't see why a person can't download and install Gnome after if they've done a HDD install of Knoppix (maybe someone can help me out here if it can be done).