Since there's been so many negative things about 6.01, I thought I'd post on some of the things that are cool so other people might take the time to check it out.

1. No KDE 4.0

I've been using a Mandriva/Knoppix hybrid DVD for Chinese users called B2D that came with KDE 4.0 and it totally blows. I have no idea what they were thinking with the new layout. It's really a step backwards in terms of usablility. I felt like they had a pretty good thing going with KDE 3.0 and they decided to completely screw it up. So, Knoppix 6.01 moved to LXDE. I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of this either but it is snappy and fairly intuitive. One question I have about LXDE besides the problem of the LXTerminal and the MC keybindings I mentioned in the Networking Forum is how to access the virtual desktops. I can see that there are four virtual desktops open by right-clicking an application icon but is there a hotkey combination to get to them?

2. IceWeasel 3.06

Finally, a LiveCD with a relatively recent browser. It was such a bummer being left out of the latest browsers. The rendering looks great except I do have a bit of a problem with what appears to be broken unicode support. I can't see any Chinese no matter what settings I use which is a bit of a disappointment, but hey this is supposed to be a postive post so I'll save that for another thread.

3. Elinks works great with Gmail.

This isn't really new as it worked before, but it looks cleaner to me for some reason. It really saved my ass to because I made the stupid decision to edit a big file in OpenOffice on a machine with no local storage and no samba and apparently not even FTP and then IceWeasel kept crashing as I logged into Gmail but I was able to get it out with Elinks which handled a paste straight from OpenOffice. Slick stuff.

4. OpenOffice looks great and is fast.

I'm not typically a big OpenOffice user, but I rely on it occasionally and I was surprised to see how fast it started and the latest version looked and responded better than I remember previous releases. If it was up to me though, this would be optional because some other stuff like samba seems more essential. I'd even put Wine before OO. Let the whiners use vi.

5. Gmplayer

Again, this is not new, but it's good to see Mplayer is in the mix. No XMMS though?

6. For those worried about K3B, there's genisoimage and growisofs which works even better in my opinon although I'm simply mouthing off on this point because I haven't actually tried them with 6.01 as this machine has no burner. But I looked and they seem to be there.

The biggest down sides I'm seeing so far is the apparent lack of basic networks tools like Samba or even FTP (tell me I'm wrong here, please) and the previous Knoppix Wine installations were so good I got sort of hooked on them and I was quite disappointed to see that get left out.

I had hoped to do a USB drive install as that seems to be hinted at as the way to go, so I picked up a drive this week and unfortunately after I got home it wouldn't mount. I'm not blaming that on 6.01 though because I couldn't mount it on other machines either.