Some questions about using Knoppix (Newbie)

[Dave6383]

I plan to switch to Linux someday. I used Mandrake for a few days, but dual booting really messed up my system. So, I formatted, and went back to Windows. Now I really am considering using Knoppix until I'm good at it, then maybe switching.

Here's my questions:

1. Does Knoppix run Wine easily, or do you need to do a setup process?

2. Will it auto-mount my USB keydrive?

3. Can I save my files and settings on said keydrive?

4. Does it have anything better than gAIM that Mandrake had? (I thought gAIM was horrible)

5. Does it support more fonts than Mandrake had? the internet looked terrible with the limited fonts.

6. Does it have a built in Mp3/video player? Mandrake's crashed upon startup.

7. Will it preserve my settings and files if I choose to format the drive and install Linux on it?

That's it. Thanks.

[Craig2]

Here's my questions:

1. Does Knoppix run Wine easily, or do you need to do a setup process?

Haven't tried it. Had bad luck with suse, but I have complicated setup, and that was an older version of wine.

If you need to run windows apps, but wine doesn't work for you, there are other options, but they cost money. Win4Lin, Vmware (if its still available/still works with Linux) are two solutions, and the commercial version of wine, crossover office/Codeweavers has support and may work better for you. You may have to spend some money, but it beats dual-booting, especially because once running Linux, you really don't want to shut down.

2. Will it auto-mount my USB keydrive?

If Mandrake could do it, knoppix should be able to do it, probably better because new versions of knoppix come out more frequently than Mandrake. I seem to remember some issue with this however. Someone else should be able to answer better. If auto-mount doesn't work, but the usb keydrive is recognized, it's probably trivial to mount the drive manually. You can save the configuration to the hard drive (if that's what you were planning on doing with the key drive), and copy the configuration over manually to back up or to use on another system.

3. Can I save my files and settings on said keydrive?

If you can mount it, yes.

4. Does it have anything better than gAIM that Mandrake had? (I thought gAIM was horrible)

Don't know which version of gaim mandrake had, but I can tell you that knoppix does have gaim. The previous version of knoppix was from about seven months ago (October?), and in the last few months, gaim was complaining about newer version being out, with much more functionality. The version I have now is 0.77 Other than that, I don't think there are other aim clients. There is Xchat, but I don't know if it supports any aim protocols.

Which version of gaim did your version of Mandrake have? You should check the changelog for new functionality between what you had before, and what it has now. Might be a big difference.

5. Does it support more fonts than Mandrake had? the internet looked terrible with the limited fonts.

On older distros, fonts were a big problem. This is no longer true. The font situation has improved quite a bit. Also, did you check if the font server daemon was runnign for mandrake? Did you check if the paths to the fonts were set?

You and other users need to be aware that fonts are available for download (someone supply links please), where you can download them to your system, but you also need to make sure that your system knows where they are. I've done this for Mandrake and Suse. Maybe someone else can describe how to do this with knoppix and a persistant home directory, or writeable partitions where you can set a link to the fonts from the correct directory to the partition with the fonts in it.

Also, GNU/Linux systems that are dual-boot, and possibly live-cd distros can make use of windows fonts, from the windows partition. You may have to copy them over, but usually this is not the case. Simply setting the correct configuration screen to the path of the windows fonts should be sufficient. Once this is done, you will have more fonts than windows, because you will have all the fonts that you get with your windows system, plus the fonts that are available in the public domain, plus the fonts from Linux. So you get MORE. More=better, no?

6. Does it have a built in Mp3/video player? Mandrake's crashed upon startup.

mp3s can be played with XMMS (what I use), manipulated with Audacity, and there may be one or two others. XMMS is fine for me. Video? I'm using Xine, which plays mpeg, avi, and a few other (or many other) formats. I do miss mPlayer though. There was another avi player on the previous version of knoppix which appears to be missing, probably removed for space reasons. Aviplay maybe? Xawtv is also available, if you have a tv video card. I've also hooked up a usb cam to it.

7. Will it preserve my settings and files if I choose to format the drive and install Linux on it?

Which settings? From Mandrake? No. You can copy /etc from Mandrake on to the key drive, then copy settings from your old /etc to the persistant /etc in knoppix if you save configuration. Will it save data? Backup, backup, backup. Put all the data on a separate partition, then install. And DON'T FORMAT THE PARTITION WITH THE DATA ON IT during the install. That means don't use the partition with the data as part of the filesystem for knoppix. If you create a partition equal in size to your /home partition, especially on two different disks, you will be able to mirror the partitions for redundancy, and with a separate partition, you can easily upgrade if you decide to upgrade later by installing knoppix again, instead of using apt-get-dist-upgrade or whatever the command is. And if you use separate disks, you can unplug the second disk during the install to guarantee you don't make a mistake during the install process.

Once you have knoppix installed to disk, it is essentially a Debian installation after that. apt-get tools work, you can install software, you can upgrade using apt-get, and all the other fun that comes with it. One of the reasons I stopped using other distros was because their solution to upgrades was forget your old system, install the newest version. Another reason was that one distro's answer to a broken part of their configuration setup that involved security updates was to buy a newer version, instead of offering a fix for the setup. I'm not a programmer, nor did/do I have the funds to fix the system, and buying a newer version is an unacceptable answer. And I couldn't find a solution to the problem anywhere online after months of searching. So I've switched to Debian. And am forcing myself to learn the system, which is a bit harder without the gui tools that come with a couple of the rpm based distros.

That's it. Thanks.

You bet!

[Dave6383]

Thanks a lot. No, I don't have Mandrake any more, I reformatted, because it was causing all kinds of problems, and mandrake wouldn't auto mount my keydrive.