Documentation on different distros of Linux

Hi all;

I am new to linux and after looking for a suitable distribution to start learning, I have decided to use knoppix installed in my HD.
Looking at different distributions, I know that the linux kernel is common to everyone, but depending of the distro, I think there are certain
konsole commands that are particular to each version, for example "apt-get" for Debian, "emerge" for Gentoo and so on.
I have a book on Linux and Unix, but is there anywhere specific information about Knoppix (Debian) thant explains well the particularities of these distros???

Thanks all in advance

PD: by the way is it possible when I knew more, to recompile the kernel and programs of knoppix to convert it to my 64 bit (AMD64) platform? (Doesn work well the one in the net)

Best Regards

Quote:

---

I am new to linux and after looking for a suitable distribution to start learning, I have decided to use knoppix installed in my HD.
Looking at different distributions, I know that the linux kernel is common to everyone, but depending of the distro,

---

That is correct.

Quote:

---

I think there are certain konsole commands that are particular to each version, for example "apt-get" for Debian, "emerge" for Gentoo and so on.

---

Debian's apt-get/dpkg and Gentoo's emerge are high level software package managment tools & yes they are specific to a particular breed of linux distros. Something to remember is that apt-get is NOT specific to just Debian or Debian based distros like Knoppix or Mepis. Apt-get/synaptic is a front-end to Debian's dpkg system. As a front end, it can and is used on RPM based distros like redhat & suse.

Quote:

---

but is there anywhere specific information about Knoppix (Debian) thant explains well the particularities of these distros???

---

I gather that you are looking for more info on Debian package management. Here is a Apt HOWTO http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/ap.../index.en.htmland FAQs on Debian package management http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-pkgtools.en.html.

If you are looking for books about Knoppix:
NewsForge | Review: "Knoppix Hacks" - I wrote this review. The author, Kyle Rankin, also posts on this forum. Great book for experienced people or people not afraid to experiment.

"Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!" - Even though I am not a newbie :) (I'm a Unix & Linux sysadmin), I bought this book. Great for newbies.

As for 64 bit Debian, Knoppix based KANOTIX has a 64bit LiveCD available.

I hope this helps.
James

All you have provided is very useful, learning Linux from scratch is difficult... :)
I have a doubt about Kanotix. It seems to be a remasterized Knoppix for 64 bit.
As i am starting I prefer to start with knoppix, which is more developed, has more support, and in fact it´s a more "official and supported" version. As a prove you can find Knoppix in www.linuxiso.org among the mast famous linux distributions....thats why I was asking if it was possible to convert an standard Knoppix to 64 bit, to do it myself and learn. But this is far from now, I have tio install knoppix in my HD and start learning.
By the way, is it possible to say in the installation of Knoppix that you want Lilo in a floppy disk?

Thanks again.

Alberto

Quote:

---

By the way, is it possible to say in the installation of Knoppix that you want Lilo in a floppy disk?

---

It is, at least in the Debian install. But you can always do:

/sbin/lilo-b /dev/fd0

Hello, and welcome!

Quote:

---

I am new to linux and after looking for a suitable distribution to start learning....

---

I'm a big fan of Knoppix, but I recommend against it as the first Linux to install and learn from unless you have hardware that won't easily work with any other distro.

Klaus Knopper writes (in Knoppix Hacks) that he wanted a portable work environment without carrying around a laptop. So he stuffed a ton of software - and excellent hardware detection - into one CD that he could pop into any computer that he found nearby.

This has lots of beneficial side effects - for example, it's easy to show a friend how great Linux works by popping that same CD into their computer. Knoppix is very likely to run on their machine; it has nearly 2GB of software, so there's plenty to show off; it's cheap and easy to give them their own copy to play with; and it doesn't have to be installed for them to have fun with it.

All of this makes Knoppix famous, and this is very good! :D So let's dig a little deeper.

Think of a "Linux" as five layers of software:

• 1 - Linux, by Linus Torvalds, is the kernel, the center - the layer that works directly with hardware;
  2 - next higher is the rest of the operating system, essentially software from the GNU project http://www.gnu.org - it gives you a prompt, executes your request to list the files in a directory, connects various programs with libraries of shared code, etc.;
  3 - in the next layer up are applications such as word processors, web browsers, games, calculators - some are from GNU, but many aren't;
  4 - then this is all wrapped up by the people who create distributions - they choose which Linux kernel to include, they may tweak the GNU tools, they'll include the Mozilla suite instead of just Firefox, and maybe they'll throw in some of their own stuff (which is how apt and RPM started) - Debian fits here
  5 - some people just aren't satisfied with that :) - they take one of these big, wrapped-up balls and make it work harder while still keeping the basic nature of the package - Karl Knopper made Knoppix out of Debian

And thanks to the great success of Knopper's work, many others have made level-5 distros by repackaging Knoppix for their own purposes. For example, replace KDE with Gnome and you get ... Gnoppix!

At level 4 there are four (or five, depending on how you count) major, major distros. It's impossible to say that any GNU/Linux combination is official. But it's here that you mainly look for what's most-developed and most-supported.

Three of these distros are commercial: Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSE. These people are actually paid to play with Linux! :D And you can buy support from them, too. The fourth, if you count it as separate (and I guess we have to, now) is Fedora, a public spin-off from Red Hat. On distrowatch.com it ranks second of the 393 Linuxes (and BSDs) that people want to read about the most.

The fifth major, major distro is Debian. You could easily say that it's the most developed and most supported of them all, based on three measurements:

• - it's been around the longest, except for Slackware;
  - it has many, many more people working on it than any other distro; and
  - it has thousands and thousands more tools and applications than any other.

Debian also does little or no messing around with the three layers of software beneath it. So even though you can't call it "official" in any way, you could say that it's the most "pure." (And in fact may people do, though they usually mean it in a philosophical or even moral way.)

So if Debian is great, then Knoppix must be even greater, right? :)

For its intended purpose, yes! And that's how you should look at any distro. If you want a GNU/Linux to carry around, work with, and show off, Knoppix is really the first and probably the best.

But some of its strengths as everything-on-CD become weaknesses when Knoppix is installed to HD. Knoppix has everything picked out for you - but maybe you'd rather have Gnome, leave out OpenOffice.org, include a few forensic tools. No problem, this is a Debian so you just use the dpkg/apt tools to install what you want, right? And while you're doing that, why not upgrade the rest of the software and make everything current?

Knoppix makes this difficult for a newcomer because, as a level-5 Linux, it's made many changes on the other levels as well as mixing in its own brew of customized applications and start-up scripts.

It's like building a sturdy wall with rocks found in the field instead of with bricks. Each rock has to be trimmed by hand and carefully fitted to make a solid wall, while (for the most part) a brick is a brick is a brick, and they don't need nearly so much individual tweaking. (My father was a bricklayer and probably died thinking I learned nothing about his craft - hello up there, Dad! :))

You can upgrade piece A, but now it's very possible that A no longer works with B and C. And because of how Knoppix was built, upgrading B might take it even farther away from working with A.

This is because, first, Knoppix just plain changes some pieces. But also, it uses three different kinds of brick - that is, pieces from the three different tracks of Debian development. (Oh, okay, three different "releases.") :D

See, Debian will typically have three versions of every piece of software. One they'll stand behind, in the "stable" distribution. Another version they're still working on, but it's nearly ready for public release - "testing." A third needs still more work, and it's in "unstable."

If A, B, and C are all from stable, and you change one or all of them, they'll all still work together. Even if they're all from testing, it's very likely they'll be okay. But if one piece is from stable, another from testing, and a third from unstable - it may take some effort to put your Linux back on its feet.

Finally, there's the installation process. Fabian Franz has written a great script (knoppix-installer), but it's very slightly broken in Knoppix 3.7 and has resulted in questions on this forum. I think this is due to some changes in the 2.6 kernel and one of the GNU tools.

Maybe these are fixed in 3.8, which is not officially available yet. But still, Knoppix is designed to be a "live CD," so work on the CD components will always have higher priority than on installation tools.

Do you want to guess which distro Mr. Ed, the talking horse, recommends? And remember, this is straight from the horse's front end! :D

I used to be pretty anti-Debian. I just couldn't get the software to work with my hardware, and as famous as dpkg was, I felt sure that it was a product of the Spanish Inquisition. So I installed Red Hat 7.3 and puttered around happily.

But I think the people at Debian have made great progress in both of these areas. I recently did what they call a net install and had to make only one minor hardware tweak. To give credit where credit is due, I stole a video setting from my installed Knoppix.

The official net install is from Debian's testing release, named sarge. But sarge is very nearly ready to be promoted to stable. For learning, maintaining, and expanding, I think this is the best way to start out.

But there are three pretty good reasons for not going with Debian, especially with a net install. One is that the hardware detection just may not be good enough for your equipment.

Another is that choosing among more than 8,710 software packages (per http://www.debian.org) can be overwhelming, especially with as little description as they provide. Fortunately, during installation you're offered some pre-selected groups as well.

Third is that this is a net installation. You download a CD image that is just over 100 kb and which creates a base Debian system, and the rest you retrieve over the internet after doing your post-installation selection.

If you do this all at once over a slow telephone line, it'll take a long time. I picked the workstation configuration, and the download was a half-hour - and my broadband connection runs at 3 Mb per second (not quite the equivalent of 2 T-1 circuits). Still, that's only 3/4ths of the time it would take to download another full CD image.

So here's an alternative: Progeny http://componentizedlinux.org. The company that makes it is still commercial, but the distribution no longer is.

Progeny is intended to be absolutely Debian, but modular. That way people (that is, their clients) can get just the Linux they want without 8,710 choices. There's only one CD to download, and then upgrading is done with the apt tools. (APT is set to download from their website, but it's nothing to point it to Debian instead, or in addition.)

Besides being stock Debian, Progeny is an effort toward an openly developed, standardized Linux. See their website for details on the Linux Core Consortium and the Linux Standard Base.

They do make one significant change to Debian, and that is to add their own hardware-detection scheme (Discover). So if Debian-from-Debian doesn't quite work with your hardware, maybe Debian-from-Progeny will.

And by the way, Ian Murdock founded both Progeny and ... the Deb-Ian project. :D

I hope this helps.

-- Ed

Wow¡¡¡ this is an explanation, thank you very much¡¡¡

I´ve been looking at the progeny website.
as I have been able to understand in your post, you mean that progeny is a Debian,
but much more structured and easy to manage for a poor newbie like me ;). Is this right?
I´ve tried to install Fedora, it has given me problems with the CDROM drive, and
Mandrake doesn´t recoognize my video card.
I´ve seen also that Progeny doesn´t have support for AMD64, which is my mew PC.
Does sarge have this platform implemented??

To put things sort, which distro could be the best for me to start from 0?? Progeny?
(I don´t really mind about my AMD64, but....)

Thanks in advance.

PD: By the way, I live in Spain, good example with the Spanish inquisition ¡¡¡ :D

Regards

Alberto

Hello again!

Quote:

---

By the way, I live in Spain....

---

Then you probably don't know about talking horses. :D "Mr. Ed" was an American TV comedy about a beautiful and intelligent horse that talked - but only to one person. (http://epguides.com/MrEd) It originally ran from 1961 to 1965, the years that I was in grades 1 - 5 after we moved to a new house.

So I was the new kid, and they called me Mr. Ed. It was supposed to be an insult - but the horse was smarter than most people, so I didn't feel insulted. Now I'm back in the same house. Those kids aren't around any more, so I enjoy calling myself Mr. Ed. :D

(By the way, they made the horse look like he was talking by putting peanut butter in his mouth. You can do this with other animals, too. They like peanut butter, so it's not really torture, but when it sticks to the roof of their mouth they have to smack their mouths open and shut to get the peanut butter onto their tongue so they can swallow it.)

So what were we talking about? Oh yes, Linux! :) I just remembered the fourth line of Debian releases, experimental. They don't mention it on the main page about releases, but you may see it in the download archives.

Quote:

---

I´ve seen also that Progeny doesn´t have support for AMD64, which is my mew PC. Does sarge have this platform implemented??

---

At this point, Progeny is sarge (plus Discover). The Progeny website may say what they'll do in the future when sarge moves from testing to stable, but I don't know. For now, just think of Progeny as sarge but lumped into groups of software packages.

Now about Debian and AMD64 - yes and no. Officially, no, according to their page at http://www.es.debian.org/ports/amd64. But now that I'm looking, there is a net-install iso for it. Hooray :!: :!: :!:

(You can also go to www.distrowatch.com and see what processors are supported by any of 393 Linux distros. Unfortunately, you can only search by the distribution's name, not by its features. Still, it's a great resource, even if it doesn't mention AMD64 for Debian.)

Sarge-from-Debian or Progeny Debian? (They call it this on their website.) For you and me and "i386," I think the main difference is how easy they are to install on our machines considering both hardware compatibility and any download problems.

Businesses may prefer Progeny because after it's installed they only have to update the modules they already chose - no decisions to make.

If you install Debian-from-Debian, it will let you pick which download sites are closest to you. Progeny has only one site, but after you install, it's very easy to edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change that to something from http://www.debian.org/mirror/list. (Or you can leave it pointing to Progeny, of course.)

Maybe someone will convince you that I'm completely wrong, and you'll find something much better! :D But if not, here's a suggested plan:

• 1 - try sarge-amd64-netinst.iso (128 MB) at http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/install-images - your connection may not be as good as to an official Debian site, but if it installs okay then the rest of your downloads can be from a Debian mirror in Spain;
  2 - if that doesn't work, try sarge-i386-netinst.iso (108 MB) from http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimag..._d-i/i386/rc2/ (that's an _underscore_ between sarge and d-i);
  3a - if you're having lots of trouble downloading from US sites, try mini.iso (8.0 MB) at http://ftp.es.debian.org/debian/dist...images/netboot - I don't know anything about this image, but it's a little older than the release-candidate-2 (rc2) versions;
  3b - if downloading is okay but hardware is still a problem try pd2de-rc2-1.iso (653 MB) from http://archive.progeny.com/progeny/linux/iso-i386.

True to the Wisdom of Unix, "There Is (Always!) More Than One Way To Do It":

• 1 - try sarge-amd64-netinst.iso;
  2 - if AMD64 doesn't work but downloading from the US seems okay and you don't want to face all the Debian-Debian choices, try pd2de-rc2-1.iso.

You may also see sarge-i386-businesscard.iso (34.1 MB) at http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimag...e_d-i/i386/rc2 - this is mentioned on http://www.es.debian.org/devel/debian-installer, but I don't know any more about it.

If sarge-AMD64 doesn't work for you today, it may in the near future. Then it's simple to just add it as an option at boot time, whether you are then running Debian or anything else - even with no Linux installed and just Windows.

Are those enough choices for now? :D If not, maybe you'd like to try a BSD Unix - they already have good support for AMD64:

• - http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64.html;
  - http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/amd64;
  - http://openbsd.org/amd64.html.

And you can also check http://www.amd64.org!

Need more "help"? :D Just ask!

-- Ed

Hi again¡¡¡¡

I have written down a lot of notes with your posts, and finally I´ve come up with a decision
(oncrebible ¡¡¡¡).
Of course noone has told me you are wrong, so i´ll take your words :)
To start, I´ve have decided to try Debian Sarge for i386 as the first option. I going to download
the first CD imagen complete, to install it without depending on the net. I can download it
quite fast at home. I hope I can cope with the installation process without problems¡¡¡
Till now, the distributions I´ve tried in my new computer have had different issues and I´ve
been unable to make them run (video card mainly), let´s see if Debian, updated weekly is different.
To learn, I am not worried about using an i386 distro, but I hope i can get a AMD64 debian when I
became a guru... :wink:

Thanks for all, your help has been wonderful.

Alberto

PD: This message is short due to i´m at work ¡¡¡¡

Hola!

For sarge from Debian, the updated images may not work. (They haven't for me.) But rc2 (or rc3 if it's available) is what they say should work.

Buena suerte!

-- Ed

Hi again;

I see you know a bit of Spanish, great surprise :D
I hope that the ISO version I have recently downloaded works. I´ve been redirected from the Debian site, and the cd image downloades has the name "arge-i386-1.iso" downloaded from the weekly updated versions. This ones are those that can offer problems??. There are 13 cd´s but I want to install from this one and complete the neede over the net (sounds difficult...)
Questions:
1.- With this CD... Will it be possible to install KDE?? Could you tell me the instructions to type to get a least this feature?
2.- I have a version on Mandrake (10.0) that doesn´t allow me to stablish 1024 / 768 resolution, I suppose that are problems with mi Video Card. Knoppix doesn´t recognize it either but lets me stalish this resolution in my monitor, because sees that it can support it. Can I copy the configuration files of Knoppix to get the same performance in Mandrake? Which files inside the /etc/ directory I must look at?
3.- Anyway, before I´ll try before with Sarge (help please installing... I´m a bit afraid....it´s not so easy as _Mandrake ) :?

To finish I would like to express that it as been very nice to meet you at the forum, good and funny explanations...I would like to keep in contact.

Bye now;

Best regards

Alberto

Alberto, lo siento - I didn't see that you wrote again.

¡¡¿¿13 CDs??!! ¡Ay, no, amigo! :D

Net install: http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimag...86-netinst.iso - 1 CD, 108 MB.

Todos: ftp.es.debian.org/debian-cd/current/i386 - 7 CDs - no es sarge ("testing"), es woody ("stable") - mejor, quizás, y tiene ia64: ftp.es.debian.org/debian-cd/current/ia64

También:

• - ftp.caliu.info/debian-cd/images/current/i386;
  - ftp.caliu.info/debian-cd/images/current/ia64;
  - ftp.cica.es/debian-cd/images/current/i386;
  - ftp.cica.es/debian-cd/images/current/ia64;
  - http://ftp.rediris.es/pub/linux/dist...d/current/i386;
  - http://ftp.rediris.es/pub/linux/dist...d/current/ia64

¿Bueno? :D

-- Ed, el bayo que recuerde unas palabras