Quote Originally Posted by markb
See, this is where I don't really understand why people use the Debian installers compared to a live CD....... the live CDs get you to that point much quicker and easier than the Sarge installer. As far as I'm concerned, the modern and most efficient way to install Debian is via a live CD.
You just have to read through the hdd install forum (and a lot of the posts about broken things in other forums that end up being about a hard disk install) to see why people do it. Yes, I like the look and feel of Knoppix much more than that of any Linux I've installed from an installable distro. Yes, Knoppix (and it's deravitives) does the best job of hardware detection I've yet see in Linux. But the one underlying truth is that Knoppix is a mix of stable, testing and unstable, and maybe even with some other stuff thrown in too. It's well tuned for running from a Live CD. But from all I can see it does not work as well when installed to a hard disk.

I'm frequently seeing posts about things like basic internet access that worked find when running from the CD but broke when the CD was installed to hard disk. And from what I have read if you try to update all of your packages once you have Knoppix installed to HD things will break down completely (implying that any update might break stuff). So while Knoppix is great as a live CD and a quick install to hard disk might seem attractive, many of use are asking ourselves if we want it done quick, or if we want it done right.