Quote Originally Posted by rollo11
...So downloading and burning CDs is always problematic under standard Knoppix? And there's no fix to make it possible?

This is turning into an ordeal... The problem with net installations is that I have to issue a command to change the MAC address of my ethernet card. This wasn't possible for the net install of Suse. And when I tried a net install of Ubuntu (which is basically Debian, right?) I got an error during the installation ("Permission denied" when trying to run ./debootstrap). I have no idea what I am doing with Debian.

At this point I am just looking for the path of least resistance to a HD-installed Linux. It's in order to keep my sanity. Downloading and burning a user-friendly distro looked like the best idea, but even that turns out impossible...

Thanks for more pointers, I do appreciate you helping me.
Downloading and burning under Knoppix is not always problematic under Knoppix, but there are issues one must consider. The most obvious is that Knoppix is a Live CD, intended as a way to introduce people to Linux or use as a portable or emergency system. But by it's nature it is normally in the CD drive, so if you try to burn a CD you have an issue if you remove the Knoppix CD. There are ways around this. If you have enough memory then you can use the toram cheat code to copy the entire Knoppix CD to memory (and then the CD can be removed to free up the drive). If you have multiple optical drives this may not be an issue at all. Or if you don't have enough RAM or multiple optical drives you can use another distro that is smaller like the Knoppix based DSL and the toram trick (yes, this doesn't reslove the issue of how to burn a DSL disc if you only have Knoppix). And if downloading and burning any ISO is an issue and you still have a floppy drive then you can even install Debian from the Internet with just a few Floppy disks to get you started. See http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst