External hard drives have always been slow, because of the speed of USB, but with new hard drives using eSata the speed is almost as good as with an internal hard drive. If I change the boot order in my BIOS so it tries to boot from the eSata first, I could install the operating system on an external hard drive. If I had Knoppix on this external hard drive I could bring the hard drive from PC to PC.

This means that when I go away to visit some friends, I don't need to bring a PC to be able to use my PC, I could just bring an external hard drive. When I borrow a PC I don't know I would still get the same settings that I have at home - the hard drive is the personality of the PC. I would have the same programs I use at home, and I would have my whole e-mail (in- and out-box) with me.

In a few years may be you would even be allowed to boot a PC in an internet cafe with your own external hard drive. This would let me do my job even when I am in a town where I don't know anyone that would let me use their PC. I could sit for hours on a PC that looks just like the one I have at home, and has all the software and settings I am familiar with. (For this to work, we would probably need a BIOS that lets you boot on an external drive, but disconnects the internal hard drive if it boots on an external hard drive, so the external hard drive don't start a virus that infects the internal hard drive)

At home I could buy one hard-drive for each family-member, so I would not have to worry about what other family-members installed on the PC. This means that we don't need one PC for each family member.

Knoppix is an ideal operating system for this use, because it is good at finding out what hardware it is running on. I would love if there was a hard drive version of Knoppix that saved hardware settings to the hard drive. When I boot on a PC, it will check to see if this is a hardware profile it knows, and then it will use the settings I made for the hardware last time. If it doesn't recognize the hardware, it should create a new profile. Another alternative is that it asks the user at startup what hardware profile to use, and the user will be allowed to create a new profile if it is a new PC. Every profile will need a name so the user can recognize it.

As this would be used for different PC's with different processors and memory, it would be nice to be able to set the level of the PC, so the operating system would be able to disable some services if the PC is too slow.

I think Knoppix is great, it was my first meeting with Linux.

F.