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Grokking Knoppix

Posted by michael on Sat Jan 01, 2005 08:23 AM
from the learning-to-love-linux dept.
Software Education Linux
chronicon writes "Knowing Knoppix is a beginner-friendly, 134 page freely downloadable book (released under the GNU Free Documentation License in PDF format) designed to familiarize new users with the Knoppix LiveCD distribution, GNU/Linux in general, and (as listed first on the description) Windows disaster recovery using Knoppix."
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  • Remastering? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Roland Piquepaille (780675) on Saturday January 01 2005, @08:28AM (#11233227)
    It seems quite complete, and it's released under the GNU Free Documentation License. Those are great. But even if it's a "complete beginner's guide", I wish the author had touched a bit on remastering, and the possibility of customizing Knoppix. I know it's not for beginners, but still, if it's explained well, I believe it's accessible to most.

    • Re:Remastering? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      you can "know" your KNoppix CD-R if ya want, that little hole in the middle might be a rough on your tool though...
    • GFDL as this particularity , you whant to add something you do it ...

      If you know how to write just make the text addition and send it to the autor with a letter of thanks for his book and a note why you think your text is a good addition to his work.

      If you dont but have seen the remastering text somewhere explained in a fantastic simple way , ask the author for a copy and send it to the author of the book.

      I think you have a great idea and I encourage you to see this tru.

  • Damn (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout (579035) on Saturday January 01 2005, @08:31AM (#11233234)
    I thought they meant knowing in the biblical sense and I was gonna get some action early this year.

    • Well... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The CD does have a hole...

  • Beginners' Knoppix (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lachlan76 (770870) <lachlan.gunn@int ... et minus math_go> on Saturday January 01 2005, @08:33AM (#11233240)
    What would be interesting is a customised knoppix, made for beginners who are trying to learn to use Linux.

    I'm thinking of things like tutorials, instructions, etc, all available on startup, so that people who don't know what to do have an easy way to learn.

    I guess it goes on my to-do list...along with a graphical front-end to portage, untainting my kernel, and recharging my iPod ;)

    • point and click linux (Score:5, Informative)

      by zogger (617870) on Saturday January 01 2005, @09:26AM (#11233361) Homepage Journal
      roblimos book "point and click linux" is what you want then. You get simply mepis on cd, then a dvd with instructions that you can run simultaneously with booting the live cd if you use your normal dvd player hooked to the TV for that part. Just recently got one for my GF, it fits what you are looking for, linux for beginners.

  • Not bad, but also consider... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ewanrg (446949) <ewan.grantham@nOSPaM.gmail.com> on Saturday January 01 2005, @08:39AM (#11233254) Homepage
    This is a nice cover of the basics for Knoppix, and some of the reasons someone new to Linux might want to use it.

    However, if you're looking for something that gives you more detail on how to use Knoppix and extend it, you might want to check out the O'Reilly title Knoppix Hacks [oreilly.com]

    ---

    Blogs [blogspot.com] celebrate the New Year too :-)

  • 350mhz minimum? (Score:5, Informative)

    by BeneathTheVeil (305107) on Saturday January 01 2005, @08:46AM (#11233274) Homepage Journal
    I was using Knoppix on a 333mhz K6-2 for quite a long time, and it was very much usable, and even speedy. Although, to be fair, the machine had 256MB ram.

    Of course, I'm not putting down the author, or the book, I simply wish to point out that one shouldn't underestimate the power of older hardware. Knoppix is still a great tool for those who simply cannot afford a more 'modern' machine, and this fact should not be left out.

    • "...one shouldn't underestimate the power of older hardware."

      While a little OT, I want to emphasize this. Shortly after I put up Gentoo on a 128MiB 350MHz machine, I was impressed at the responsiveness of the Linux 2.6 kernel. I found myself simultaneously emerge-ing OpenOffice, encoding a CD, browsing the 'net, and listening to a compendium of Who oggfiles... and XMMS wasn't missing a beat. That new dispatcher is cherry.

      Yes, it takes 39 hours to emerge OpenOffice on that beater machine, but who car

  • RTFM? Who does that. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 01 2005, @09:14AM (#11233329)
    Buddy: "My XP is trashed and I can't get any of my files."

    Me: "Here's a Knoppix disk. Put it in your CD and hit the reset button. Save the files you need then re-install XP. In the meantime, you can check your files using OpenOffice."

    Buddy gets his files back, uses OO, is too lazy to re-install XP, calls me up to get him back on the web. He never ever reads any manual but we have a new linux user.

    Most people never read manuals. The beauty of Knoppix is that they don't have to. It usually detects everything beautifully even on 'not-quite-up-to-it' machines.

    I, on the other hand, do RTFM but giving a geek a manual is basically preaching to the choir.
    • Something similar happened to a friend of mine.

      The copy WinXP on his machine decided to lose the ability to boot up properly. It would show the XP screen....and right before it would go to the login screen, it would reset itself.

      Okaayyy. Well, he stuck XP on another drive to try to recover his data. XP on the second drive could see the first drive, read any of the data, except for -his- data, because his data was in "My Documents", which apparently windows will only read if it is the copy of windows it
      • "because his data was in "My Documents", which apparently windows will only read if it is the copy of windows it was created with.
        So, can't get to his data, now what?"         Well, now you learn how to use NFTS file permissions and click that really complicated couple of tabs and buttons that take ownership of all the files, giving you full access to them.

  • Gnoppix (Score:4, Informative)

    by petteri_666 (745343) on Saturday January 01 2005, @09:16AM (#11233336)
    If you like Gnome more than KDE you should really try Gnoppix [gnoppix.org].
    • Ubuntu is another Gnome-centric distribution with a live CD. It also comes with an installer disk, so if you like what you see with the live CD you can install from the installer CD.

      Yes, I know Knoppix and Gnoppix have installer scripts, but this is a real installer. And it's quite easy to run...in the territory of Mandrake and Fedora.

      Free pressed CDs can be had for the asking. This is a good thing, because some old machines have CD-ROMs that don't read CD-Rs so well.

    • I always thought that line was, "If you like Gnome more than KDE you should really try therapy".

      cLive ;-)

      (it's a joke dammit. "Some of best friends are Gnome users and they're lovely people." :).

  • Choosing knoppix versions (Score:3, Interesting)

    by aacool (700143) <aacoolNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Saturday January 01 2005, @09:26AM (#11233360) Homepage Journal

    Does this book evaluate the various versions out there? I played with the standard knoppix a bit, and as a new year's present have just started a torrent download of the Games Knoppix. I have never seen such a fast torrent dl

    So, what lies ahead for Linux/Knoppix this year? Will it be the year that let the ant finally cross over the elephant's back? Or will it be another slogging inning, cricket as usual?

  • released under the GNU Free Documentation License in PDF format.

    Kind of amusing that open source documentation should be released in a proprietary format.

  • windows recovery . . . (Score:3, Informative)

    by BilliamBlake (843780) on Saturday January 01 2005, @10:19AM (#11233485)
    FYI:
    The last time I used the official Knoppix 3.6 for windows recovery, captive-ntfs, which enables linux to use the native ntfs drivers on the windows system for rock solid reliability, was broken. Although reading is possible, you should never write to an ntfs volume without captive-ntfs.

    fix: http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=60253 [knoppix.net]
  • Must be a quick start guide.
  • Ok, I just completed the dnload of the games knoppix, burnt to cd and slipped it into the CD Drive of my Dell Latitude laptop.

    It boots, asks me to select a video mode or press space. I pressed space, it boots the kernel, scans for USB, enables DMA acceleration, then just sits at the next step:

    Looking for CDROM in: /dev/scd0

    Since it is booting from the CDROM, what can be wrong? How do I proceed?

  • Glad to see it talks about the current 3.3 version of Knoppix
  • That was a Robert Heinlen classic.

  • Using OpenOffice [openoffice.org] is admirable, but for a 134 page document? I stay away from office suites for documents longer than a handful of pages...

    They never heard of LaTeX [latex-project.org]? :)

  • Downloads via alternate method (Score:4, Informative)

    by patelbhavesh (735074) on Saturday January 01 2005, @12:49PM (#11234031) Homepage
    In order to reduce the slashdot effect on the author's server please consider downloading via coral links or via p2p networks like edonkey/gnutella.
    Here are the coralized links
    http://www.pjls16812.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk.nyud.net :8090/knowing-knoppix/pdf/knowing-knoppix.pdf/ [nyud.net] Main Content
    http://www.pjls16812.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk.nyud.net :8090/knowing-knoppix/pdf/cover.pdf/ [nyud.net]
    http://www.pjls16812.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk.nyud.net :8090/knowing-knoppix/pdf/back.pdf/ [nyud.net]
    The source of the book cannot be coralized as it is more then 4MB.

    Basically the above URL's are coralized.That means that the content is cached to a nearby location.You can read more about coral's at http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/overview// [nyu.edu]

    Here are the edonkey/magnet links to download via p2p networks

    magnet:xturnsha1LNDDBUSI3H5ECNTIUP5RLSEX5GMLV44Edn knowing-knoppixpdf [magnet] Main content via gnutella network.
    ed2k:7Cfile7Cknowing-knoppixpdf7C40002537C349dd9c2 7aef6b60e65b231cecdb140c7C [ed2k] Main content via edonkey network.

  • There's no mention in this of klik [atekon.de] which allows you to simply download and run other software with knoppix (and other systems). Klik even gave everyone a christmas present of a 100M download of openoffice2 (well 1.9.65 or something similar) which allows you to try it simply and without installing, no need to upgrade your system and risk impacting anything else.

    A second quick point is that it doesn't seem to provide useful information on encrypted DVDs. It is quite easy to download and extract libdvdcs

  • Hi, I'm the author of Knowing Knoppix (Score:3, Informative)

    by paj1234 (234750) on Sunday January 02 2005, @08:56PM (#11241162)
    Wow, I always wanted to submit a story to Slashdot. Now, here I am *in* a Slashdot story. More than I ever wanted! It certainly had an amazing effect. In two days, an extraordinary 25,327 visitors downloaded, or attempted to download, the PDF. Thank you, all those who took the trouble to post comments. In a few days there will be a new version, dated 2005-something, that will take the comments into account.

    > "The only people plugging in a knoppix cd are nerds who #1: already have a considerable working
    > knowledge of linux & 2: don't read...this."

    Yes, I know, that's pretty true. But everyone has to start somewhere. I hope at least some people might find it useful.

    > "[if it doesn't work]... you've lied to them saying it was plain and simple... he never says anything
    > like "and if THIS doesn't happen, THEN do.."

    Guilty! I have changed certain sections about reading the hard disk accordingly. I have already made some attempts in the "Quick help" sections to address some of the errors I have encountered and mistakes I have made while using Knoppix myself.

    "Kind of amusing that open source documentation should be released in a proprietary format."

    Yes. I plead guilty again. But it is at least an open source format that is built into OpenOffice.org, and GNU Ghostscript, both of which are GPL.

    >"Using OpenOffice... for a 134 page document? I stay away from office suites for documents
    > longer than a handful of pages... They never heard of LaTeX [latex-project.org]?"

    Indeed. Using OpenOffice.org for a 100+ page document is getting kinda horrible... I tried LaTeX but I never figured out how to get the kind of presentation control that I wanted. :-(

    > "I think the book bounces back and forth between good "So You Want To Be A Linux
    > Consultant" material, like the stuff about hda, fd0, boot process, init, and so on, and
    > good "Grandpa Computer User" material, like the stuff about KDE ("click on things
    > to start them", "you can lasso many things at once"). This makes it difficult for either
    > group to use."

    That is an excellent comment. See here the power of peer review. I could never have thought of that myself, yet it seems so obvious now it's been pointed out to me. I have moved the material about "device names" and "user accounts" almost to the back of the book.

    > "wasn't necessary to go into detail about the bootup process... as soon as people see "SCSI" or
    > IDE" or "PCMCIA" they'll go into idiot mode and fail to grok the rest of the paper, and
    > resort to throwing feces at the monitor"

    Good point. I have taken out the detailed description of the startup process. I have replaced it with an one-line explanation and a few examples of how long the auto-detection process takes (between 40 seconds and 2 minutes depending on the speed of the machine).

    • Re:LOL, "familiarize new users" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jjares (141954) on Saturday January 01 2005, @08:57AM (#11233293) Homepage
      And that is exactly the kind of attitude that drives away users. If this book exists, it might be usefull to someone. If a friend of mine comes to me asking the best way to see linux, I will show them this book, and hopefully turn them away of fedora and into debian (or gentoo) before it is too late. And they do come and ask.
        • Why no just respond to his critique? Also-- attitude: a complex mental state involving beliefs and feelings and values and dispositions to act in certain ways. Your observation is part of your beliefs and feelings that you hold, and as such part of your attitude towards this issue. Whether or not it drives sers away, I don't know, but if you are seeking to covince anyone of, well, anything, there are beter ways.
        • I would also recommend something other than Fedora to somebody (new). Maybe not Gentoo or Debian (because they both involve the scary/evil command line, and are hard to install), but probably Ubuntu (okay, it's Debian based, but much easier). Fedora is a big bloat. It's got too much availible in the installer, and it's sluggish when the system is up and running. Why do you need four CDs for a system? It's a waste of space, particularly if you have internet access to grab what little is missing. It's n

    • Re:LOL, "familiarize new users" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by oskard (715652) on Saturday January 01 2005, @09:03AM (#11233304)
      Why would you call this material 'shit'? That's a very closed minded attitude. That says a lot about someone who would narrow down the use of anything to the realm of only TWO possibilities.
    • Well... Lets see... First off... There was a time that I had heard of linux, but never used it. And in those days I spent a better part of a month reading about the different distrobutions. I finally settled on setting up Mandrake 7.1, dual booting with my comfortable windows.

      I am still no expert with linux, however I'm comfortable enough with it for most tasks. But a book like this may help me learn more about linux in general to go from a basic Luser, to power user.

    • Re:LOL, "familiarize new users" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by shish (588640) on Saturday January 01 2005, @09:16AM (#11233339) Homepage
      And all the people who know said nerd, or have seen said nerd's screen and been curious; and people on various forums who've heard about linux but don't want to do risky partitioning and such. 90%+ of people who I know who've used knoppix could be considered noobs who'd be interested in this. Your statement reeks of your parent's basement :P

    • Re:LOL, "familiarize new users" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kjella (173770) on Saturday January 01 2005, @10:04AM (#11233435) Homepage
      *rewind 10-20 years*

      You know, the only people plugging in a [computer] are nerds who #1: already have a considerable working knowledge of [computers] & 2: don't read shit like this.

      Now, you might argue whether it was bad or good to let AOL-monkeys out on the net, but books like "Computers for dummies" certainly made it accessible for more people. Introductionary material like this isn't made to supply the market, it is made to create the market.

      Let's for arguments sake say your claims are true. Is it then possible that the reason is because there are no books such as these? That this is in fact what is needed in order to change it? Now I know there are other hurdles for a newbie than just that, but it is certainly part of the problem. This is part of the solution.

    • Re:LOL, "familiarize new users" (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MadFarmAnimalz (460972) on Saturday January 01 2005, @10:11AM (#11233452) Homepage
      I'm not sure what dork modded this insightful.

      I've got my 14 year old baby brother using linux with knoppix (zero linux experience) and I've also given it to an MCSE friend of mine who, like any MCSE, knows jackshit about proper computing and now is TRULY learning.

      Yes, anonymous dork, knoppix is often used to familiarise new users.
    • Insightful? What a joke.

      I've never used Linux. After my old desktop stopped functioning (due to RPCSS crashing on startup), I decided that I might switch it over to Linux. It's an NTFS partition and my friend, a Linux zealot, told me that Linux can only read from NTFS, not write. I didn't want to back any of my stuff up or lose any of it, but I had remembered seeing him use Knoppix at school before, so I asked him about it. He didn't have too much info on it, so I checked out the site.

      The Knoppix webs

    • Re:LOL, "familiarize new users" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NoData (9132) <_NoData_@yahBLUEoo.com minus berry> on Saturday January 01 2005, @12:17PM (#11233937)
      Completely false. I happen to be exactly the kind of person this book will be perfect for. I am a scientist, a veteran computer user and programmer, but a complete novice system administrator. That makes a HUGE difference in the set of skills and knowledge I have. I can write C code for data analysis 'til the cows come home, but that doesn't mean I can ever remember the basics about lilo, grub, disk partitioning, dd, fdisk, kernel compiling, package management, driver tweaking, and all that other crap that only comes up with a new linux installation. I am not a linux hobbyist so it's not practical to keep that kind of trivia fresh in my brain, as old hat as it is to many of you. This is why *nix has such a long way to go on the desktop, because even someone with my relative computing sophistication is always freshly intimidated when it comes to "trying out" linux at home.
    • May you be spat upon by a camel.
      • please don't reply to the parent post with how you know a newbie who used knoppix to try out linux; every rule has exceptions.

        Sounds a lot like "Please don't argue against me, I know I'm wrong"

        If I were to say I knew *a* newbie who used knoppix I may be proving your point, but in my case I've found that the *majority* of knoppix users are newbies - a majority is rarely the exception side in the rule vs exception debate

        • I agree. The beauty of Knoppix is just handing a disk to a newbie saying "try this". After assuring them that nothing bad will happen to their computer, nothing at all really, they are bound to try. Getting a newbie to install linux and possibly wreck their window install? Much scarier.

    • Re:Real world vs. fanboy fantasies (Score:5, Funny)

      by scottv67 (731709) on Saturday January 01 2005, @10:11AM (#11233451)
      Mod parent "Score:-1, Cracksmoker"

      Dude, are you for real? I mean really, who brags about having certificates from the "largest software company in the world"?

      Quantity does not infer quality.

      I can honestly say that the astounding number of vulnerabilities in Windows pays my house payment, car payment and for all my toys. There is no shortage of work when it comes to compensating for or trying to repair the damage done by the software from "the largest software company in the world."

      Long live Microsoft! (.....at least until I have enough money to retire comfortably. :^) )

      -Scott
    • Unlike most people who spout off at this site, I have the certificates to prove this ...

      You can't possibly have statistics about Slashdot posters and what certifications they hold.

      It's in your head, dude. You fabricated your own pseudo-facts, based on your opinions.

      I don't mind if you promote Windows and insult linux. I make my living on Windows, and I don't use linux -- it's all the same to me.

      But you'll only get a reputation for bone-headed idiocy, if you keep fabricating "most people" stat
        • ... fabricating "most people" statements ... can get you an +5:insightful

          People get modded up for all kinds of bone-headed idiocy.

          I myself have posted sarcastic comments (Karma-whoring for Funny, with a twist of Flamebait and Troll) and gotten modded up +Insightful and +Interesting. Result, I felt cheated -- I didn't deserve +Insightful, what idiot would call my sarcasm "Insightful" ...?

          With mod points as with everything else in life, I guess there's no accounting for taste ....

          -kgj
    • Can you tell me where I can find the Linux 7.0 webserver? Got any links?

      Since you know soooo much about the LinuxOS I figured you would know.
    • Copyright (c) 2004 Mike Bouma, MCSE, MCDST, MS Office Specialist, widely respected Amigan, Amiga community representative Let's do a Google Search [google.com] on this guy, eh? Dude, can I buy a house [reidrealty.com] in LA? Please... ?

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