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Knoppix 3.3 Is Out

Posted by timothy on Mon Sep 22, 2003 09:59 PM
from the ausgezeichnet dept.
Software Debian Linux
maedls.at writes "After 6 months of development, the latest version of Knoppix 3.3 is out - Kernel 2.4.22 with HIGHMEM (4GB) support, KDE 3.1.3, XFree86 4.3, OpenOffice 1.0.3 (German and English), KOffice 1.2.1, new boot options for RAM or hard-disk preload of the CD. Possibility to create a persistent homedir with personal data and desktop settings on a memory stick or similar, optional with AES encryption." The main Knoppix site is still down in protest of European software patent legislation (click on the link inside the English paragraph to get to the meat of the site), but the excellent knoppix.net has a detailed changelog.
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  • DVD Knoppix? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Comsn (686413) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:03PM (#7030680)
    when will the dvd knoppix be released?

    and start including mplayer on these cds ;\

    • Re:DVD Knoppix? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jasonditz (597385) on Monday September 22 2003, @11:00PM (#7031026) Homepage
      I asked Klaus about mplayer support a long time ago, and he basically said there was no point since most of the codecs are non-free.

    • Re:DVD Knoppix? (Score:4, Informative)

      by mabhatter654 (561290) on Monday September 22 2003, @11:49PM (#7031226)
      The Knoppix DVD was a special one-time-only deal for LinuxTag in germany. There are places you can get it online [extra copies] and if someone is willing, you could download it.

      Mostly, it's to hard for the One Guy [Klaus Knopper] and a couple friends to keep up more than 1 offical version. So for quality-sake, they don't do that, and try to keep one version they can test throughly and do a really GREAT JOB on! It's better that way.

      • flaming debian-legal list=legal issues? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Cid Highwind (9258) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:51PM (#7030989) Homepage
        Mplayer has too many legal issues, but Xine is OK?
        *rolling eyes*

        If that's Xnoppix's reason, they've been reading debian-legal too much and comparing the code too little. If Mplayer has "legal issues", then so does Xine. Both players can decrypt DVDs, both can use borrowed win32 codecs, both use algorithms that are subject to patents (in the US). Where's the difference? The Mplayer devs got into a nasty flamewar with debian-legal people, and the Xine team didn't.

  • Fix for nvidia chipset? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by I_am_Rambi (536614) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:08PM (#7030705) Homepage
    I've looked but couldn't find if they have fixed a problem with the nvidia chipset for the AMD platform. I've tried to boot from the previous version of Knoppix, and it died. Does anyone know if this has been fixed? I think this is a major bug and needs to get fixed.

  • how about a patched kernel (Score:3, Interesting)

    by the_2nd_coming (444906) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:10PM (#7030721) Homepage
    with ACPI included for all those who have ACPI laptops but want to use Knoppix every now and again but can't get sound working because of the damn ACPI system.

  • Dammit! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kethinov (636034) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:10PM (#7030724) Homepage Journal
    Dammit! I just burned a 3.2 CD on a nonrewritable disk! GRRR

  • Hurry up and make my download go faster! (Score:3, Informative)

    by jdawg (21639) <jmf@CHEETAHmac.com minus cat> on Monday September 22 2003, @10:13PM (#7030743)
    http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~koppen/knoppix-en.to rrent

    That's for the English image. V3.3-2003-09-22.

  • worked for me today (Score:4, Informative)

    by jab (9153) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:14PM (#7030751) Homepage
    I installed Knoppix 3.2 this morning on an FIC E-Cube, in all its blue glowing glory. The biggest change to my eye is easier access to Knoppix-specific configuration; that now has its own root menu on the task bar. I also like the new desktop wallpaper which looks like an industrial cave painting. For some reason today's Knoppix didn't see hyperthreaded Pentium 4 as an SMP machine, which Knoppix 3.2 had no problem recognizing. Other than that, no real problems. I went ahead and used Knoppix as installer for Debian - this is definitely my preferred way to install Linux these days.

  • Get it in Canada (Score:5, Informative)

    by millette (56354) <millette@wag[ ]com ['lo.' in gap]> on Monday September 22 2003, @10:14PM (#7030757) Homepage Journal

    If you don't have access to a good pipe, you can always order it from Nattor the Little CD Vendor:
    http://www.waglo.com/nattor/ [waglo.com]

    P.S.: don't complain that my sig is redundant - someone probably has them turned off. Thanks :)

  • Why no OpenOffice.org 1.1.0? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Revolutionary (694752) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:16PM (#7030772) Homepage Journal
    That's dissapointing. I had hoped to see OpenOffice.org 1.1.0. OpenOffice.org 1.1 is available in Debian unstable (contrib). Seeing as Knoppix is a modified Debian system, I can't imagine what the holdup might be. Does anyone have any insight into the situation?
    • OOo 1.1.0 is still in the release candidate state.

      Knopper is very limited by space. Perhaps he didn't want to include software that's still in the testing phase? There's alot of software available in Debian unstable (contrib) , but not all of it is production-ready.

      RC4 only came out a few weeks ago, and it does take some time for the Knoppix folks to put out a release ("... After 6 months of development... ").

      • Re:Why no OpenOffice.org 1.1.0? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Micah (278) on Tuesday September 23 2003, @01:38AM (#7031701) Homepage Journal
        > OOo 1.1.0 is still in the release candidate state.

        Yes, but the OOo folks have said that it is production-ready. I think they did at RC3.

        OOo 1.1.x, even in its current RC form, is light years ahead of OOo 1.0.x, and very stable. No new distro release should ever ship 1.0.x again, period! :)

    • It **IS** on there.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by imag0 (605684) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:33PM (#7030873) Homepage
      Just as soon as you put it on there. Here's a link for the remastering HOWTO:

      http://www.stirnimann.com/mystuff/doc/knoppix.tx t

      It's open source, man. Have at it. Be sure to send a link to Slashdot and let everyone know how much a l337 haX0r you are. ;)

  • Knoppix still king of bootable CDs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by proxima (165692) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:19PM (#7030786)
    Though other bootable CDs like morphix [morphix.org] look promising, I'm impressed with the rate at which Knoppix moves forward. Knoppix has consistently displayed nice polish visually and in terms of usability.

    As it's debian-based, I'm hoping some more of the hardware-detection, auto-setup, and visual polish can make it to stock Debian (yes, I know you can "upgrade" to full Debian after booting knoppix). The boot process is cleaned up and functional for new users to Linux, and the speed is remarkable for loading a compressed image off a CD (so long as you have 128+ megs of RAM).

    Kudos to those who work and contribute to Knoppix for producing such a quality assembly of open source software in such a useful form.

  • Sweet. brltty support (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gmhowell (26755) <gmhowell@gmail.com> on Monday September 22 2003, @10:28PM (#7030838) Homepage Journal
    A bit unusual, but knoppix has included brltty support from their live CD. That, quite frankly, is cool as shit. Props to the coders, and the fanboys who keep 'em coding.

    (brltty is a driver that allows text to be output to braille displays, typically used by the blind and the deaf-blind. Read my journal for a little bit more info.)

  • Virtual Knoppix (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bucky0 (229117) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:30PM (#7030853)
    Hey, I thought of a cool idea, I don't know how practical it would be though.

    Include a virtualisation program(s) which would let you run knoppix in a virtual machine. Then, you don't have to reboot PC's, you just plug in the CD, have it autoplay(or manually run it) and nearly instantly, the linux system boots up.

    Is there anything that would be difficult about that?

  • Knearly Knice (Score:3)

    by donnz (135658) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:32PM (#7030870) Homepage Journal
    Knoppix is a great marketing tool and bloody good at working out hardware and network configurations. It is surprising how often you stumble across it.

    My main problem with Knoppix is the OpenOffice install not being able to get out of English US (changing the language for spell checking in OO is a major pain even in 1.1). This is an issue when doing a quick demo of how great the GNU/Linux office tools are.

  • Jesus (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 22 2003, @10:36PM (#7030887)
    They're just now coming out with HIGHMEM [sic] support? MSDOS had HIMEM.SYS like 15 years ago. Great, now I can load my Lunix mouse driver above 640k! Thanks a bunch!

  • Polish? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Feztaa (633745) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:41PM (#7030923) Homepage
    My biggest gripe with 3.2 was very petty; it was simply a matter of polish. Version 3.2 was the first to incorporate X 4.3, and the knoppix guys had done no work with the mouse cursors, so what happens was that X was trying to use the whiteglass cursors, the fancy png-based ones with 16-bit alpha. Though, when you moused over certain widgets, the mouse would revert to the screwy 2-bit mouse cursors that the knoppix guys made for 3.1 (1 bit for alpha, 1 bit for color).

    It was kind of annoying, but other than that knoppix itself was great (in fact, it came in handy when my HD fried and it took me a week to replace it, knoppix was the only distro I could use... otherwise, my PC would have been a paperweight).

    Of course I can't get to the changelog, it's slashdotted. I'll have to wait for the download to finish so I can boot it.

  • Hardware Support (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MalleusEBHC (597600) on Monday September 22 2003, @11:56PM (#7031263)
    I couldn't find this on the site, but how wide of a range of hardware does Knoppix support? I work as a network technician at my university, which entails a good number of calls where I must go out and troubleshoot a resident's network connection. Many a time I will run into a spot where I can nail it down to either being a problem with the OS or a problem with the NIC. For the Macs, I just use my iBook as a Firewire boot drive, however the Windows boxes prove to be somewhat of a pain. It would be a dream if I could just boot from Knoppix and be able to remove the potentially problematic OS from the equation. However, given the wide range of hardware I see out there, I wonder if a standard Knoppix setup would be able to support all the hardware I run into.

    • Re:Pack it next time you go! (Score:4, Informative)

      by mabhatter654 (561290) on Tuesday September 23 2003, @12:49AM (#7031478)
      Give it a try. It doesn't always work 100%, but it works most of the time. Also, read up on the Cheatcodes...They let you modify it right from the boot screen to cope with difficult hardware.

      Most PCs that can boot from a CDROM should be able to run knoppix. The only way you'll know for sure is to try it out [no harm in trying!] or to read up on specifics on the forum if there's a particular piece of hardware you know you need to support.

      Please, try it...You can't really HURT any PCs with it so it's always worth a try!

    • Re:Hardware Support...networking (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mabhatter654 (561290) on Tuesday September 23 2003, @12:52AM (#7031499)
      as a network tech...

      I happen to know for fact that Knoppix [3.2] works with the 3Com USB/ethernet networking dongle! That is an absolute lifesaver when you have PCs with no/broken nics. The ability to at least capture work from a borked HDD is worth it's weight in gold [ok it's a CD..that's not very much]

  • Knoppix and Laks Watch Sav ed Me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rossz (67331) <{ten.rekibkeeg} {ta} {ergo}> on Tuesday September 23 2003, @01:37AM (#7031695) Homepage Journal
    Actually, it saved my wife. The hard drive in her laptop died. Normally, there's a 3 year warranty on them, but Hewlett-Packard being the cheap fucktards that they are OEMed the drive and reduced the warranty to 1 year. So my 15 month old drive is useless. Oops, I digress.

    Money is rather tight, so I wasn't able to get a replacement drive immediately. However, my wife needed internet access at the minimum. Knoppix to the rescue. She was able to get full blown internet access and email. With the addition of my Laks watch with its 128Meg of memory, she had a persistent home directory so her settings (e.g. bookmarks) weren't lost.

    I definately feel Knoppix was worth the money I spent on it. Oh wait! It was free! Damn. Such a deal! Seriously. Keep a Knoppix CD handy at all times. Its a life saver.

  • Knoppix as a diagnostic tool (Score:5, Interesting)

    by grolschie (610666) on Tuesday September 23 2003, @02:11AM (#7031765)
    I have been fixing a computer that shows all the signs of a stuffed motherboard. Tested RAM and PSU, cpu seems fine. The machine running XP has started to lockup when left for more than 2 minutes. Nothing dodgy installed. Drivers and stuff all sweet. Everything looks peachy on the XP install. The system only started locking up a months ago, and lockups are increasingly more frequent. Temps are fine also. No viruses. Patches, bios and drivers all up-to-date.

    I was so damn sure it was a crook motherboard until I threw in a Knoppix 3.2 cd. I opened nearly every app I could at once, and left Pingus and other things runnng over night. No freezes! I could not get Knoppix to crash this system no matter what I played with.

    Solution: format c:

  • Knoppix is a lifesaver/NTFS recovery (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lerxst Pratt (618277) on Tuesday September 23 2003, @07:59AM (#7032968)
    Two days ago, I performed disaster recovery on a friend's Windows 2000 box. Suffice it to say that his computer would not boot into the recovery console nor would the hard drive allow me to reinstall Windows 2000 on it. Fortunately, I had a Debian Jr. [debian.org] Knoppix CD.

    I popped it in, booted up, and was ready to amaze my friend. Both his NTFS hard drive and his USB FAT32 hard drive appeared on the desktop automagically after boot. I set the USB drive to read/write by right-clicking and selecting the read/write mode. I opened both drives in two separate windows of Konqueror and performed the data recovery right before his eyes by dragging files from one drive to another.

    When the backup was complete, I showed him a few other things like the games and that he was completely internet capable. His jaw dropped in awe. He asked if I would make him a copy of the CD so that he could be internet functional on his computer until he could get a new hard drive. I told him to keep the CD. It was his very first experience with Linux... and a very positive one.

    I will reiterate one thing I have already read under this topic. No one should be without a Knoppix CD. Go find yourself a torrent or a mirror and get Knoppix now!!! You never know when it will save your a$$.

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kethinov (636034) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:16PM (#7030768) Homepage Journal
      Uhh because Knoppix is better than WinXP will ever be. I'm a lab assistant at my college and I run Knoppix live CD to do my every day stuff at work. It's perfect for taking over Winblows computers without ever having created existence of it being there. When I'm done I just shut it off, reboot, and 2 minutes later the original WinXP OS is back and no one cares that I've been using a good OS.

        • Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)

          by be-fan (61476) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:50PM (#7030987)
          Heh. I'm sure our IT guys were glad that we were not running "bug-laden hobbyist software" when they had to remove msblaster from hundreds of machines on the network...

          • Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)

            by hdparm (575302) on Monday September 22 2003, @10:46PM (#7030949) Homepage
            It denies you root access

            Try Ctrl+Alt+F2. Replace F2 with F5 to get back to GUI screen.

          • Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)

            by Feztaa (633745) on Monday September 22 2003, @11:06PM (#7031057) Homepage
            It denies you root access

            ROFL.

            There's a root shell right in the KDE menu, and from there you can run 'passwd' to change the password. Bam, now you have total root access to the entire knoppix box.

            Congratulations, you just rooted your own box.

    • Re:Unfortunately (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kethinov (636034)
      Since Windows XP has been released already I don't see the point of this? Is there really a need for more operating systems? XP is all I use, and it does everything I need.
      The sad thing is I know people who actually believe in that argument.

        • Re:Unfortunately (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Anonvmous Coward (589068) on Tuesday September 23 2003, @12:34AM (#7031412)
          "Having Knoppix with Windows XP is like having a spare bicycle tire for your car."

          Can't say I agree with that. If XP is infected with a worm or something, and you can't risk getting on line with it, then you can boot into Knoppix. and find the patch/fix you need. Then, when you go to reboot, unplug the network cable and run the patch. Problem fixed.

          I had my computer lose power in the middle of a shutdown process once. Win2k was busy updating the registry and hadn't closed the file when the power went. Doh. If I had Knoppix then, I could have gotten online long enough to find out if there was a fix. Or, better yet, I could have done some disk cleanup in order to reinstall Windows. Oh well.

          Spare bicycle tire? I think not. Linux is not my favorite OS, but Knoppix would have saved my butt a couple of times.

      • Re:After you get it, Help Advertise Knoppix. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by mabhatter654 (561290) on Monday September 22 2003, @11:59PM (#7031286)
        Great idea, but you have to help the newbies out! Knoppix is GREAT for new users. Most modern [not bleeding edge] hardware works right away. You can even setup Web, email, samba, etc. all from the disk.

        It's great to show Bosses, because you don't have to wreck a computer to use it! But an AOL style mass mailing would be a really, really bad idea. It still requires somebody to SHOW how to use it, otherwise people will hate it rather than like it!

    • FCK YOU (Score:5, Informative)

      by EdlinUser (50699) on Tuesday September 23 2003, @12:07AM (#7031319)
      AC flamebait gets moderated +3 Informative. *sigh*
      This is informative:
      1. PII = P6
      2. Your 3.2 Knoppix will continue to boot.

    • Re:Learn before you Graduate...again (Score:4, Informative)

      by mabhatter654 (561290) on Tuesday September 23 2003, @12:44AM (#7031444)
      Don't ever trust something important to a program you've never used before. That's just stupid computer usage!

      Frankly, you didnt' give this nearly a fair trial. I read other posts, and you didn't take the time to even learn what Knoppix was, or how to work it before you trusted you life's work to it. Had you read up a little before jumping in, you would have learned how to do everything you wanted in about an hour. Been running from start to configured in 10 minutes, and not lost a thing! Even been able to save that file so you could open it in windows!!! Knoppix is meant to "Do no harm!' that means it doesn't write to ANYTHING without you giving it express permission...on NT boxes writing to a drive is lethal--It couldn't assume that you wanted anything saved.

      Read up at Knoppix.net! Check out the FAQs, and browse the forums for an evening before trying it out again. You might find that you'll like it!

    • Time to switch to Apple, buddy! (Score:4, Funny)

      by zonix (592337) on Tuesday September 23 2003, @04:12AM (#7032093) Homepage Journal
      Anyway it was to my surprise that even though I saved this file to my 'Desktop', the next time I booted Knoppix it was nowhere to be found.

      So, it was like ... it devoured your paper? :-)

      z

    • FYI (Score:5, Informative)

      by orv (398342) on Tuesday September 23 2003, @02:55AM (#7031883) Homepage
      From that changelog [knoppix.net]:

      "Please don't use knx-hdinstall any more!
      I won't support it any longer and its just there as uhm, its not my project, but those of Christian Perle.
      knoppix-installer should now work in both modes (see below) and give a fairly stable system. "

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