hokay, so I'm doing ok with this knoppix stuff, and I've just had to knx-hdinstall some p1 166 machines with 64 M ram (tip: boot into run level 2 with 'knoppix 2' at initial boot prompt, then do the hdinstall).

The reason for all of this is that my work needed to get some computers happening in russian (cyrillic) for a coupla russian pensioners over here in oz, and the locale set when you login each user for the first time was a godsend - two users, one english, one russian, with english in root.

Then, they wanted printing. That's been a pain in the arse - all the documentation is outta date, or in russian, or both.

Eventually I got a response from a dude (d.coffin@cybercom) that did some work a few years ago:

Anyway, times have changed. Stay away from KOI-8,
CP-1251, and other 8-bit encodings. Unicode, and more
specifically UTF-8, is the way of the future.

If your secondhand computers are fast enough to run
KDE and KOffice, your problem is solved. The other day
I needed to print some Russian text, and did so with no
more difficulty than a Windows user would face.

Run KDE. Switch the keyboard map to Russian. You
can choose a couple of layouts -- ITsUKEN is the standard
in Russia, while YaVERTY maps Russian letters to their
phonetic equivalents. A Russian flag in the lower right
corner indicates which keymap is active. You can click
it with the mouse to switch back to English.
So I thought I had solved all my problems. But no, we are not happy - while almost everything on the desktop is in russian, and large parts of kde menus and the control centre are in russian, I cannot for the life of me get russian chacters in OO/abi or the recommended kword.

does anyone have any ideas? Is it because the knoppix I used (3.2, circa may 03, I think), while locales are very well organised (I can get the russian flag that I was informed about, and I can use KOI-8/UTF etc), does not actually come with russian (cyrillic) fonts?...I mean, the control centre offers a lot, but it bloody will not come out, on screen, in russian...

btw, knoppix.ru looks cool, but once again, wrong language, and these ppl we give computers to are not brain surgeons, ya know...