Quote Originally Posted by pizzat104
...but if I wanted to permanently switch to use Knoppix or another distribution like Ubuntu (I'm a newbie with this stuff), how should I set up the installation?.....
There are two types of people in the world. Those who think that installing Knoppix is a good idea in spite of all of the problems that are well known to come up when this is attempted and those who do not. I am not in the first of these two groups.

I see no reason to install a Live CD rather than a Linux distro intended for hard disk install. I have not evaluated Ubunto vs. Debian, but I have been pretty happy with a Debian etch install. Don't get me wrong, it's still Linux and cryptic and most of it is a mystery to me, but every once in a while I can grasp some of it. I kind of expect that either Debian or Ubuntu might install cleanly for you, but you are the best one to evaluate that. The nice thing is that all of the distro are freely available and you can install them and give them a try, then delete them and try something else if you want. It's not like paying big bucks to try a version of Windows only to learn it is worse than what you already had.