Hello. I currently live on campus at a college which has nothing but WinXP machines everywhere. I spend a great deal of time in one of the many computer labs as part of my work/study program. I'm there to offer tech support for students who don't know how to do basic things.

In other words, I'm paid to read Slashdot.

But I'm tired of using WinXP at work. It's clumsy and makes developing my PHP projects hard. Especially since Unix and DOS files are formatted differently. So I have considered putting a Linux partition on the computer I use at work.

Unfortunately this is not possible. There's some kind of "centurion guard" which resets the contents of the entire hard drive back to their original state once the machine is rebooted. And the college reboots every machine once a day after it closes. Even if I format the hard drive, centurion guard restores the original WinXP.

I've heard of how Knoppix can "get you from zero to Linux" in a short period of time and how it comes with KDE et al. I have a few questions.

All I need in my Linux installation is KDE, gaim (or equivs), Mozilla, some kind of FTP program, and something to code PHP in (such as KWrite... so tired of notepad with its no syntax highlighting!)

These requirements are lax. My question is does Knoppix have all this? And if so, when I burn a Knoppix CD, how quickly can I boot it into a nice KDE enviornment to develop in? Remember, I'm going to have to be doing this *every* day. Furthermore, since Knoppix is a CD and the HD will have a Windows NTFS file system, how will I save my work? I would hate to have to format and repartition every day. Can I edit and save my work on the web using my webserver directly (the webserver is Gentoo Linux ext3 filesystem)? That would be ideal.

I appreciate any advice.