This is very helpful. It's been so painfully quiet around here. I think I'm just one of many people who check in here every few days and wonder what happened. I was meaning to ask, but afraid to sound offensive on whether Klaus was sort of hinting that he wanted users to move to Ubuntu. I really love Knoppix and I use a variety of different releases.

One thing that makes me sort of depressed about the release situation beyond my personal preference is that Knoppix has been sort of a core for a wide variety of other projects. In particular, I closely monitor the traditional Chinese distributions that have been based off of Knoppix and the silence from Knoppix has led to a sort of follow-on effect there. Last year when the Knoppix updates were coming fast and furious the energy sort of passed down the line and they were pumping out localized distros like mad too. Since things have slowed down upstream, things have dried up considerably on the downstream side as well.

That would have been okay if things were in great shape before that happened, but since the wifi driver situation is still pretty bad up to 5.1 it was a bit of a bummer. That has potentially slowed down the uptake here in Taiwan where wifi autodetection is something users really expect and it sounded like this was going to be addresed in the latest kernel releases. Other notebook issues like power management would also make a huge difference.

Anyway, I don't mean to be in whiner mode. Obviously this process is not need driven and I woudn't want to be mistaken for making such a suggestion. All is praise and thanks for what we have. It's good. In fact, looking back we can see some real high points.

Of the English releases so far, I actually find 3.6 to be the most stable Knoppix release to date but obviously this is because the 2.4 kernel was fairly stable at that point. By the same token, the 2.4 kernel it has its limitations when it comes to some more recent drivers so that's not a solution that fits every situation. But for machines that don't need the 2.6 kernel or UNIONFS then 3.6 is a rock solid base. For the large part I run 5.0 with a modified sysconfig so that includes myconfig=scan. (On a side note --why isn't this the default? If the user has no config it will just be ignored and if they do then they probably would like to use it.) I use 5.1 sometimes too which is nice for the Mplayer and the FreeDOS is nice for doing a quick and dirty Loadlin hard drive install but I've had problems getting samba to work in 5.1.

But now that I've heard it from the man himself. Perhaps it is time to take a look at Ubuntu. It's just that I really prefer the LiveCD approach. The LiveCD which has been exemplified by Knoppix is such a simpler approach to software management. Ever since I got into Knoppix I found life was so much simpler. Hard drive installs seem grossly primitive to me at this point. I understand that Ubuntu does have LiveCD versions but that's not the primary focus of Ubuntu as I understand it. I don't know. I should probably stop thinking outloud and just go get into it.

Of course, when 5.2 and 6.0 etc finally do show up you know I'll be waiting. I'd probably rather wait than switch.

Okay, I've been taking out loud here long enough. But one more thing --I want to just say here that some of the Chinese mods of 5.1 that are more up-to-date have had some great stuff. The new K3B with the DVD transcoder built in is great and there was another one prior to that with another DVD transcoder called AcidRip which wasn't too bad. These, of course are just front ends for ffmpeg and mencoder but very nice additions. Here's hoping that the much anticipated wifi kernel updates are reflected in the 5.2 CD version when it does arrive.