Starting applications

[lablom]

Hi-
I have booted the Knoppix CD and can navigate all about, and the HD is mounted, and I can see program files just fine. However I am unable to start an application, because when I click on the appropriate exe file, I get a message saying
"Are you sure you want to execute this file?" To which I reply yes and then I just get a blank window that does nothing.
Is there a trick to starting and using the HD applications?

Thanks. I am newbie, using Dell inspiron laptop.

JB

[Harry Kuhman]

when I click on the appropriate exe file, I get a message saying "Are you sure you want to execute this file?"

Could you better explain just what you think you want to run? There are plenty of programs in the Live CD and Live DVD menu systems, they are started right from the menus. There indeed are many less commonly used programs that are on the discs but there are no menu entries for; they can be started by typing their name at a command shell prompt. But my guess (and this is only a guess) is that you expect to click on Windows programs and see them run under Lnux. The simple answer is that this is not the intention of Linux and that this is not going to happen. These are different operating systems and programs interact with them differently. Programs are designed for the operating system that they run under.

That's not quite the end of the story, however. There is some work done to be able to force programs written for Windows to run under Linux. Do some research on programs like Wine if this is what you think that you want. But Wine and it's kind can not run everything, and there is often a performance ht on the things that it can run. I personally don't fool with it so I can't tell you much more.

[lablom]

Harry
Well, the lightbulb turns on! Indeed I was expecting that the existing programs would run, but silly me.
What I want to do is scan the whole HD for viruses and adware that may be slowing things down. It takes forever to boot and change programs and I worry that there may be some badguy lurking where the usual Norton and Spybot cant detect. Thus my interest in knoppix to scan from CD while the HD is not in use.

May I assume there is a program or two on the Knoppix disc to help me?

Many thanks for your thoughts.

JB

[Harry Kuhman]

There are some virus scanners for Linux and I think that one may be included with Knoppix. But again there are some issues: Knoppix 4.0.2 is almost a year old now and 5.0 is not officially out on the Internet, so any virus definitions that are included on the disc would be out of date (they would likely be out of date on the 5.0 disc by the time that you get it also). And depending on what version of Windows you have it might not be able to do anything more than tell you that you have a virus; Knoppix can not safely write to NTFS partitions (there are rumors of technology in 5.0 but I'll wait for the official release before considering this more). There are good free scanners available that run under Windows, I suggest using these if you can get Windows to boot at all. If not then I suggest a complete reinstall. Mamy times there are things that one proream like spybot don't find, try several.