Has anyone here heard about Knoppix? I happened upon it in one of my EWeeks mags. It supposedly an easier to use form of the Debian distro. It also is rumored to run/install from a CD-ROM...I can't think of having an entire Linux Distro that will run right off the disc...There has to be some catch...does anyone know?

Yeah, actually quite a few people here use it. It works great as a rescue/demo disc. Impress your friends. It runs straight from the ROM so no worries about screwing up the HD to view linux

Cool

Ah! that is good to hear...I am thinking of running a test on an old 486 I have lying around...also...I have been on this download the new distros kick. So far I have all 3 discs of Mandrake 9.1, Slackware 9.0, Knoppix 3.2, and am trying to get SuSe....does anyone have any ideas of how to get ahold of the RH 9.0 ISO's, the Caldera ISO's and the best place to get the latest SuSe ISO...I have been randomly hitting some FTP servers, but can't find much of the others without paying. Also...are there any Disrtos that I should try that aren't listed?

Suse will be a no-go. The others you should be able to find from their respective homepages or linuxiso.org

As for ones to try that aren't listed:
www.distrowatch.com

Cool

Knoppix may be a waste of your time and effort if you are going to try to run it on the 486 you will need a fast cdrom and at least 96mb RAM to run KDE you should be able to boot to a terminal though. I would recommend at least a pentium and 128mb see Faq General.

Knoppix is also good if the other os you have on your system blows up and you need to get data off of your HD before you reformat, trust me it works for that

you can also try linuxiso.org that's where my friend got his RH9 iso's i believe...

You might want to try the Morphix Lite GUI distro to see how it works on that 486. It's similar to Knoppix (debian based, auto-boots from CDROM), but the GUI and progs were selected for their low resource usage.

http://morphix.sourceforge.net/modules/mydownloads/

hth

Shane

I changed my mind on the 486, too much trouble to ressurrect it anyway. But I did load it on my 1.2G AMD laptop, it worked awesome! It is a very clean and fast moving distro, even from CD. And I DO know what you mean about the fact that it is good for a rescue...my lappy has XP with SP1 on there, and is formatted with NTFS, as soon as the kernel booted it found and mounted that HD without a problem and I was browsing my XP Hardrive and listening to my mp3's! I like!! So far I am happy with what I saw...got about 7 other distros downloaded and am going to play with them as well.

Ok...I WAS very happy with Knoppix...now I am not so sure, I test it and played with it on my laptop, but when I went to run it on my main system...ERROR... it mentions something of a VFS Kernel Panic, cannot mount hde0 (8,0). From what I recall...a kernel panic cannot be helped, but this is really screwing me up. Any ideas on why I would have recieved that error?

System Specs if it helps:
AMD Athlon XP 1.8G
NVidia GeForce 2 MX 440 64MB
Maxtor 80G Hard Drive
ABit K7 Raid MB
Creative SB Live Value SC
Logitech Trackball mouse

Thanks in Advance

I like Knoppix but I had trouble playing MP3s from NTFS. Is there a way around that?

Playing music files will depend on the codec.
Most (all ?) linux distributions will not have wma or mp3 or indeed any other proprietory codecs on the system by default.

Ogg Vorbis is an open source codec that is pretty much garanteed to work with open source programs

If you have ntfs partitions I assume you have xp loaded, winamp3 will be able to read ogg files on xp.

You can get the RH 9 off Bit Torrent- go to Google and type in "Bit Torrent" it's new and different from to other things. (Learning curve here).
Also any one heard about the new Ip diguiser r program that is out that is suppose to keep people like RIAA out of your business?

Thanks