New free Knoppix book for beginners

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Originally Posted by patelbhavesh

All the more reason to use coralized links......

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The front page Slashdot article linked right to the html website that hosts the book. It didn't use the coralized links (which I think was just for the pdf files, not for the webpage itself). I don't see that there's much that can be done now to make that better. So the site will likely get an awful lot of traffic, although I expect not every visitor will actually download the files. The Shashdot effect is well known for having maor impact on sites and has taken down many; I'm impressed that the site is still even up.

http://unit.aist.go.jp/itri/knoppix/...-knoppix/main/

Is a link to an html version of "Knowing Knoppix" that some people may find convenient to get an idea about the book.
I have emailed the author today about getting a hard copy and the interesting thing is that the book is obviously undergoing development as we speak. If you order a hard copy of the book you get it in a loose leafed folder. Not only do you get an up-to-date copy (along with a CD and a boot floppy) when you order the book, but I presume as things get added you merely update the folder and print-out / remove the bits you don't need as time goes by and new bits are published. This seems like a very good idea to me.
Happy New Year!
Mark Preston

Thank you for your work and thank you for the GNU FDL licence.

Wow, I always wanted to submit a story to Slashdot. Now, here I am *in* a Slashdot story. More than I ever wanted! It certainly had an amazing effect. In two days, an extraordinary 25,327 visitors downloaded, or attempted to download, the PDF. Perhaps this would be a good place for me to respond to some of the Slashdot comments, since that discussion is now closed and I missed it. From the article:

> "The only people plugging in a knoppix cd are nerds who #1: already have a considerable working
> knowledge of linux & 2: don't read...this."

Yes, I know, that's pretty true. But everyone has to start somewhere. I hope at least some people might find it useful.

> "[if it doesn't work]... you've lied to them saying it was plain and simple... he never says anything
> like "and if THIS doesn't happen, THEN do.."

Guilty! I have changed certain sections about reading the hard disk accordingly. I have already made some attempts in the "Quick help" sections to address some of the errors I have encountered and mistakes I have made while using Knoppix myself.

"Kind of amusing that open source documentation should be released in a proprietary format."

Yes. I plead guilty again. But it is at least an open source format that is built into OpenOffice.org, and GNU Ghostscript, both of which are GPL.

>"Using OpenOffice... for a 134 page document? I stay away from office suites for documents
> longer than a handful of pages... They never heard of LaTeX [latex-project.org]?"

Indeed. Using OpenOffice.org for a 100+ page document is getting kinda horrible... I tried LaTeX but I never figured out how to get the kind of presentation control that I wanted. :-(

> "I think the book bounces back and forth between good "So You Want To Be A Linux
> Consultant" material, like the stuff about hda, fd0, boot process, init, and so on, and
> good "Grandpa Computer User" material, like the stuff about KDE ("click on things
> to start them", "you can lasso many things at once"). This makes it difficult for either
> group to use."

That is an excellent comment. See here the power of peer review. I could never have thought of that myself, yet it seems so obvious now it's been pointed out to me. I have moved the material about "device names" and "user accounts" almost to the back of the book.

> "wasn't necessary to go into detail about the bootup process... as soon as people see "SCSI" or
> IDE" or "PCMCIA" they'll go into idiot mode and fail to grok the rest of the paper, and
> resort to throwing feces at the monitor"

Good point. I have taken out the detailed description of the startup process. I have replaced it with an one-line explanation and a few examples of how long the auto-detection process takes (between 40 seconds and 2 minutes depending on the speed of the machine).

Don't let the negative comments get you down. I think you wrote a very good manual for noobies and there is a need for such a document. I distribute KNOPPIX CDs (see http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQgotopage...sortpropertyZ1 ) to a lot of noobies and they'd love to get their hands on this doc. I'm going to give them the link you gave if that's OK.

Good Luck with your future revisions,
AJG

THANKS, PHIL. I hope you get honorable mention here. In fact, I hope you get moved onto the "front page" under a "Knowing Knoppix" category. I'm running Knoppix 3.7 on a laptop using sudo knoppix-installer on a dedicated hard drive , and also on my Windows 2000 (fat32) desktop, using the Knoppix TOHD and FROMHD cheatcodes. I read your section on "finding Permanence", and hooked up an old 4.3GB drive in a USB enclosure to my desktop. Then I read your section on advanced startup, and used the TOHD cheatcode to copy the cd image to my Windows drive as a regular windows folder. This makes the boot sequence considerably faster, and frees up the CD drive. Please check out my post under the General topic "Windows & linux on the same HD" One consequence of this is that I cannot use the same partition for a swap file . Knoppix seems to mount my Windows drive (/dev/hda1) as a "read only cdrom", and so I lose write access. I actually consider that a safety feature.

Also, I not only created a 2GB linux partition for my Persistent Home Directory on the USB drive, I also created a 1GB "Linux Swap File" on a 2nd partition . I saw the section in your book about the swap file, but I think having a larger one improves performance as well. I have 384 MB ram, but I notice that knoppix creates a 301mb ramdisk when it boots, so it seems to leave 84mb for general use, then takes the rest for it's ramdisk. I wonder if you could explore what Knoppix uses it's ramdisk for, and also check on whether a swap file bigger than 128MB is really a waste or not. I put the knoppix cd in the cd drive on my desktop, key "knoppix fromhd=/dev/hda1 home=/dev/sda1", press enter, then take the cd out when Knoppix accesses the cdrom image from /dev/hda1. Knoppix sees the swap file automatically at /dev/sda2, and I'm off and running.

At any rate , keep up the good work, AND THANKS AGAIN FOR ALL YOUR HARD WORK !
8)

I just downloaded and printed your book. All I can say is:

:!: T H A N K Y O U ! ! ! :!:

Not only is it the first Linux book I've seen that has color illustrations (my feable brain thanks you) but it appears to be pretty well written, and it's about Knoppix! Triple bonus! Very nice work and enormously generous of you since I'm sure you could have easily gotten it published and made a few dollars to compensate you for all your work.

Thanks again,

Paul

allocates 301megs of ram for a ramdisk? I thought knoppix uses tmpfs which means memory is only allocated towards the ramdrive as its used up

Changes:

"...certain inaccuracies have been corrected; some of the more advanced material has been moved towards the back of the book; and a few non-essential details have been deleted."

Go download it:

http://www.pjls16812.pwp.blueyonder....pix/index.html

*spanish version in the works

If the bandwidth got alot more I'd be glad to mirror it a bit, just not too much ;)