Quote Originally Posted by lavaman094
is knx2hd what used to be "knx-hdinstall", or is it the abhorrent knoppix-installer under a different name?
abhorrent ? I have not tried a recent version of the script, but I don't remember it being that bad. Plus this being OSS and all, you're welcome to contribute patches rather than snide remarks.

Quote Originally Posted by eco2geek
Recommending that a newbie install Knoppix to hard disk is not a great way to introduce them to Linux (unless you're planning on doing it for them!). The Knoppix installer is an add-on.
Don't throw away the debian baby with the knoppix bath, though! Mepis or Kanotix are more suited to HD-install, because they strive to mix less different package pools than knoppix does for our fun and profit.

Realistically speaking though, partitioning and safe dual-booting probably are a tad beyond true newbies, i'm afraid. I have no recent experience with say Mandrake or SuSE (which I used to highly praise), and these distributions probably offer more foolproof and less intimidating tools and procedures regarding those initial hurdles, as you suggest.