how can one get at least it to ask for root password?
That is the exact question I've been looking into.
I'm not going to address using the Knoppix distro as your desktop system
I gather for reasons, probably beyond me, that Knoppix is not the right distribution for use for running desktop applications on a continual basis. Strangely enough, while ubuntu 11.04 worked find on my desktop, ubuntu 11.10 does not and neither does mint 12. (Both run fine on my laptop) I'm not sure I'm going to solve the issues on my desktop soon, so I I'm looking into knoppix which runs on not only my laptop and desktop, but also runs on an old pre wiindows XP PC that doesn't book with windows anymore.. I'm only one person, so I don't care about multi-user capabilities. I was thinking about Lubuntu (notice the L), but I see that the standard apps - Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP have been replaced by other lighter weight alternates. I just found the debian distro and it might be a possibility - would be interesting to see if latest version runs on my desktop. Seems like I saw someplace that straight debian was not the best for novices, but don't see anything about that in the writeup so maybe that's not true. http://www.osdisc.com/cgi-bin/view.c...vd-set-pc.html