Quote Originally Posted by mbgb14
I hear so much about how its better for people to "have a base system and apt-get the applications they need" -- well.
Yea, well. That's certainly true of Debian. Apt-get is well known to break things in Knoppix. So I don't know where it is that you hear this, but you are not getting good advice.

Quote Originally Posted by mbgb14
Often I find I don't know what I want until it's too late and I'm looking for it. Like, when I looked at the Knoppix DVD for the first time I was astonished. "Wow how in the name of ____ did they get all this ____ in here?!"
Another good thing about live CDs and DVD, they give you a chance to try a lot of packages before choosing to install one to your Linux system (but they don't give you the package to install). At one time, for example, Knoppix had at least four different spread sheet applications on the Live CD. I don't know how many it has now, but the Live DVD might have even more. There is no one program that is right for everyone and this gives you a great chance to try several. Or even just a way to have copies of applications that can open documents that are in formats that you normally don't use and can't open with your normal choice of software. But there is hardly any good reason to keep that many spreed sheet programs on your system, as well as that many or more word processors, several Power Point like presentation programs, and a dozen or more text editors. So it really doesn't make a lot of sense to install Knoppix and all of it's included applications when you can install a base line Debian system and then apt0get the applications that you want (even if you could install Knoppix cleanly).

As for how they got it all on there: two things help a lot: Compression (the CD would take about 2 gigs if not compressed) and by picking and choosing carefully from different distros that generally are not intended to be mixed and may otherwise have problems wroking together). When you apt-get update you do things that break this delicate balancing act. And while the CD is full, the 4.0.2 DVD had plenty more space available on it (I don't know the status of the 5.0 DVD, or if it can even be downloaded and burnt on a Win98 system).