Am I nuts! My 70 year old parents a candidate for Knoppix?

My parents have had a 466M Celeron Win98 machine for the past four years and they are now wanting me to upgrade there computer/operating system. Since they use dial up and really can't justify the cost of broadband, I am weighing their upgrade options. Considering the bandwitdh needed to keep XP current with patches, virus signatures and firewall upgrades, not to mention the learnung curve, I do not think it is very feasable to use WinXP via dial-up. They only do email, via a POP/IMAP client and browse the web. I have until March to experiment with Knoppix, or something else, as a solution for there situation. Keep in mind this needs to be simple, IE.. easy to boot and select from a few on screen icons to read email or browse the WEB. Now for my thoughts for using Knoppix for them.

Boot from CD with the compressed image already installed on a FAT32 partition. This would boot and run faster but might require a remaster of the Knoppix to boot from the hard drive image. If the image on the hard drive gets corrupted they, with my help on the telephone, could reload the image from the Knoppix Boot CD to the hard drive.

Configure a dialer for their dial-up ISP, store this information to the hard drive and add an icon to the desktop for dial-up access.

I would need to configure a POP/IMAP client to retreive their email and store it on the hard drive for later reading and offline email replies.

I am sure most of this is in the Knoppix FAQ's but can anyone point me to a FAQ dealing with issues discussed above. Has anyone else implemented a simular solution?


Thanks Very Much In Advance For Any Advice
Ron

Very do-able, One thing to make sure is that the modem is not a winmodem. You might need to get a true modem.

Booting from the hardrive can already be done
knoppix tohd=/dev/hda1 for the first time
knoppix fromhd=/dev/hda2 all the other times.

Kmail is rather friendly and Konqueror is pretty straightforward.

Firebyrd10

Thanks for your input, I have experimented with the todh/fromhd boot time switches; however, asking my nearly blind 80 year old father to type in boot commands would be stretch. What I would like to do is have three boot disks: the first one no switches, the second remastered so my father would not have to enter the "knoppix tohd" command and the third remastered so my father would not have to enter the "knoppix fromhd" command at boot time. The third would be his normal boot disk and the second would be used, in the event somthing happened to the image on the hard drive, to roll the compressed knoppix image back to the hard drive. The challenging part of this is making it "VERY" easy as far as bootup, dialup, using email and browsing the WEB are concerned.

Again Thanks for Your Input
Ron

There is a file on the knoppix disk/iso called isolinux.cfg under boot/isolinux/ that contains all of knoppix defualt boot settings.
That would be the thing to edit, unfortunatly I don't know if its that same with a boot disk or not.

I am 79 and have been in Knoppix and archlinux and slackware and gentoo and PcLinuxOS.

I have DVD Knoppix running in TORAM 3GBRam.

If one edits isolinux.cfg one has to reburn the CD to get the cheatcodes to work.

In my system, the simple label ..."\"...enter... starts the boot with all cheat codes included.

In order to "burn" a CD, the correct mkisofs prep has to be applied to generate a new .iso which is then the candidate for the burn of the modified isolinux.cfg and the rest of the Knoppix files.

Good luck!