trying new applications without remastering

[carolus]

The synaptic menu lseems to list only applications that are already on the disk (5.1.1 CD). Is there a simple way to install arbitrary applications from the debian repository (temporarily, just to try them out) using the live CD, without either remastering or installing to hard disk? Is the knoppix code identical to the debian, or is some modification required to work with knoppix?

[carolus]

I discovered that hitting "refresh" in synaptic gave me a much wider choice than the initial menu, which answered my initial question.

But that led to another question. I marked "gfortran" and the installation proceeded (with some warnings about some unavailable files - how critical I don't know) until it reached a point where a message came up instructing me to stop xdm before proceeding, and restart xdm manually afterward.

I don't know how to stop xdm and couldn't figure it out from the manpage. I assume this is some daemon related to xwindows that one can start and stop, but I don't know how.