why knoppix ship without dhclient?

[paradigm_shift]

it would be useful and process of network connection would be 100% automatic if dhclient is present in live cd.

[Harry Kuhman]

I boot my live CD and I'm on the Internet as soon as the boot finishes. I have no idea what more you think is needed. Sure, there may be support issues with some hardware, particularly wireless cards, but I don't understand what you think is missing.

[paradigm_shift]

I boot my live CD and I'm on the Internet as soon as the boot finishes. I have no idea what more you think is needed. Sure, there may be support issues with some hardware, particularly wireless cards, but I don't understand what you think is missing.

don't get me wrong. for a newbie like me knoppix is awesome not only as livecd but also as desktop OS. autodetect version of kanoppix is awesome dude. virtually everythign is properly detected. what i don't understand is why such mundane and small application like dhclient was ommitted. because without it i could not connect to my wireless network since it is configured with DHCP.

[Harry Kuhman]

Lets consider the issues. Wireless support is much further behind because the manufacturers (card and chip) will not release good hardware register information to the developer community. They make their own drivers for MS systems, and most care about little else. When they do release drivers for the Linux world they are often a bad joke. My 802.11b Dlink pcmcia cards have "linux drivers" that are nearly 2 meg in size, for example! I've seen many full and very complete OS's that are smaller than that, there is absolutely no sane reason way a wireless driver should be so huge, and no sane way that a live CD like Knoppix could contain many such bloated drivers. But more importantly, Knoppix is a Live CD and intended to run as a live CD. A wireless network is intended to be configured with security to allow authorized users access, not everyone. If Knoppix was expected to boot from CD and access a wireless network with no configuration, it could only do so if users were encouraged to leave their systems wide open. This is hardly a reasonable thing to expect or for Knoppix to promote.

So, for the sake of security, it doesn't seem unreasonable for Knoppix to not access your wireless system on boot with no configuration at all. Just the opposite, it's bad form to set up a network system so this could be done by any live CD.

And this discussion certainly belongs in the network section, so I'll move it.

[TimWhite]

Surely though, it has pump, which is as good as dhclient, and it has the tools to wlcardconfig / netcardconfig tools to allow you to connect wirelessly (at least, 3.3 / 3.4 does, I've never bothered going to the later versions when apt-get dist upgrade is sufficient), so what's the problem?