This really rocks ....

I have an old dell 3200 PII233 laptop, that once upon a time had a fully functional FreeBSD4.2 install on it with Orinoco wireless in adhoc mode working ... somwhere along the line I decided to screw with it and it never really worked right with anything I tried ... there are some shared interupts that always screwed up the PCMCIA stuff ...

Anyway, I just replaced the old adhoc wireless stuff with a cheap linksys access point and for yucks I fired up the 1/20 Knoppix in the laptop ... damned if it didn't dhcp itself right on the net ... so emboldend by this I tried the hd install .... took a couple attempts (it was a bad idea to not select ext2 as the fs, ... it kept getting confused between the -bf and -xfs versions of the kernel and not copying stuff ... finally I left it at ext2 and had a fully working knoppix on the hd system ... apt-get update; apt-get upgrade and I'm as happy as I've ever been with this old box!

Great stuff Knoppix!

Yeah knoppix rocks!

I tried Libranet 2.0 essentials (supposed to be about the most newbie friendly Deb) and it choked after the partition/format was done because it didn't have a driver for my Samsung burner to read the CD-R and finish the install.

Knoppix boots up with only one floppy vs Libranet's two floppies. Libranet should just put the basic boot kernel and a boat load of CD drivers instead of wasting space with installation utilities. The installation setup could be finished much easier from the CD's 700Mb than two 1.44Mb floppies.