Knoppix 3.3 Is Out

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.

Re:Why?

[Kethinov]

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:Unfortunately

[Kethinov]

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:They dropped support for x586

[Anonymous Coward]

The Anonymous Coward is right!

In the article Karl Knopper says "I will not compile for anything lower than a Pentium 1GHz, as we are concerned doing otherwise will hurt the reputation of Linux, which is still considered slow by first time users, so we try to make it as fast as possible"

Re:Why no OpenOffice.org 1.1.0?

[stefanlasiewski]

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:Software patents in the US?

[zymano]

How can you call look and feel/gui,plugins and hyperlinks as inventions ?

Re:What you don't look at the page first?

[Feztaa]

Hooray! This is exactly what Bram Cohen wanted. Up until now, the usual way to get linux ISOs on bittorrent was for somebody to get it off the FTP and then post a torrent link.

It looks like linux distros are 'getting it' and posting torrent links to help curb their bandwidth bills.

Now let's hope the next version of RedHat is available from an official RH bittorrent link... :)

3D games, no accel?

[Trogre]

Does anyone know why he still includes games which require openGL acceleration (eg Chromium), when Knoppix doesn't come with any hardware-accelerated drivers (that I know of)?

It seems to me that it will just result in thousands of introductions like this:
"Hey cool, a 3D game! (click)
(0.5 fps game menu displays)
Wait, this is crap, Linux sucks!"

Re:What you don't look at the page first?

[Feztaa]

Because my university doesn't have anything newer than redhat 7.3. And the other universities are too far away to be fast anyway.

I got RH9 off bittorrent and my download was 600kB/s, while my upload was 900 kB/s. That's why I want an official bittorrent link, instead of just the university links.

Re:What you don't look at the page first?

[Anonymous Coward]

"the other universities are too far away to be fast anyway."

What? Bandwidth is not reduced by distance, only latency. I am in Japan and downloaded my Mandrake ISO's from MIT, about as far away as you can get.

Re:What you don't look at the page first?

[Drakonite]

What you don't look at the page first?

Amazingly enough, the story isn't an article to go see, it's an iso to download. So should everyone go hit knoppix's server to slashdot it for a while? Or should the smart ones of us realize there are torrents available, and click one of them so as to not slashdot the website?

Hardware Support

[MalleusEBHC]

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:After you get it, Help Advertise Knoppix.

[mabhatter654]

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!

Re:Wow, you ate lead paint as a child, didn't you?

[yerma]

Dude, whatever. If I wanted to read a couple hundred pages I'd spend my time on some great piece of literature, not manuals which require hours of pouring over and result in my learning to do something I could have done in Windows Millenium Edition simply by intuition.

Re:Unfortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

Your first example is rather silly. If you have a net card that is obscure enough that Windows XP, which has a huge driver library supporting every piece of common PC hardware, won't detect it, its unlikely that Linux will have support for it either. So Knoppix is useless.

In the second case, there is Personal Web Server for 98/ME, which is free, as well as apache. And there are lots of freeware ftp servers for Windows, that just shows your ignorance of the windows software scene. Of course, if you need a professional grade web server you are running 2k Server or 2k3 server already.

Finally, every time I ever needed to recover my system the XP recovery disk worked for me, and it was easy too. I doubt the average Windows user would be able to make heads or tails of Linux, even on the off chance Knoppix detected their hardware correctly, so it wouldn't be all that useful. Much better to hire a professional technician to sort the problem out.

Re:Wow, you ate lead paint as a child, didn't you?

[Anonymous Coward]

heh-heh ... intuition he says. try 'learned pattern' instead. you know how to use some windows system - and it so happens that you probably fit the intended target for it (point and click). you certainly don't fit the intended target for knoppix - since it requires the user to actually understand some things 'under the hood'. otherwise you can play around with it and that's about all. if you're willing to learn, fine - read, ask around, you'll find plenty of people more than happy to help. and you'll end up with some linux knowledge that you can later label as useless or useful (*). if not, stick to what you know and be happy. there's no problem with winME being all you need - heck, for some people cp/m is all they need, so what? but bragging about how you don't understand something and how you are actually not interested in changing that situation only makes you sound stupid.

(*) afaict knowledge is usually useful - at least from the point of view stating that a better understanding of a tool helps one make a more efficient use of it. but that varies from person to person.

Re:Why no OpenOffice.org 1.1.0?

[Micah]

> 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! :)

Re:Not to ruin the mood...

[ahfoo]

Well, you know D. Buddy, it's not always necessary to look at these things as a zero sum game. That's the strict, unwavering market based thought process where competition is distorted into a kind of moral value. In a market scenario, it's kill or be killed, one man take all. Go ahead and hate your neighbor. Go ahead and cheat a friend. As long as you get that money, you are righteous and damn the means.
But a Debian distro like Knoppix isn't in the market. It's outside of that mundane game and on a higher plane. It's like Obi Wan: you may strike it down today, but it will return more powerful than you will ever know.
There is no need for contingency when you have faith that you're doing the right thing. You simply persist and in persistence there is joy, peace and maybe even euphoria.

Re:My problems with Knoppix

[hecky]

As Heraclitus would have said, "you can't boot into the same Knoppix twice."

*ducks*