econd, going to try v3.4 huh??? Tell me if its worth the trials of upgrading? (and considering I but a "noobie" on the whole "distro" upgrading thing, give me some clues on the process too [hehehe])
There's the problem -- since Knoppix isn't a "normal" distro, there's no CDs full of *.deb packages to upgrade from. So upgrading to v3.4 would be pretty much like installing it the first time. It'd reformat your hard drive and install everything from scratch. (You could back up your home directory, then install the new Knoppix, then restore it.) I haven't installed it to hard drive and I probably won't anytime soon.

If you were upgrading a "real" distro like Red Hat, you'd boot from the first CD, the installer would run, and it'd install or update everything from binary packages stored on the distro CDs. If you chose to update, it'd leave your existing home directory intact. Knoppix has an install script, but it's nothing like the Red Hat (Mandrake, SuSE...) installer. Nor does Knoppix have any *.deb archives on its CD to install from.

It'd be really neat if there was an upgrade script that would only, uh, upgrade a hard disk install from one "official" version of Knoppix to the next!

On cursory inspection this new version looks, acts and feels much like the old version, except it feels faster, espccially running kernel 2.6. It's got KDE 3.2, which is gorgeous (and has more apps than 3.1). It's also got the "klik and run installer" so you can install apps on it, even when running the live CD, as well as the Captive NTFS installer. It's supposed to have more/better wireless drivers and modem drivers, and better hardware detection, although I can't speak to those aspects.

When starting with kernel 2.6 it automatically boots in English, uses an English keyboard, and sets up the wheelmouse, so there's 3 "cheatcodes" you no longer have to use. You probably don't have to use "alsa" either, but I haven't verified that.

Like others have noticed, I have to use the "noscsi" cheat code when running kernel 2.6 or Knoppix hangs (segfaults) when loading "megaraid.o". (This doesn't happen when using the default kernel, so the boot scripts for 2.4 and 2.6 must be different.)

Saving configuration settings and saving a persistent home directory work just like they always did. The scripts seem to indicate that you can use a config archive and a persistent home file from the same partition, which hasn't been the case in the past. Have to experiment with that one, too.