Booted Knoppix 3.2 on a couple of machines just for fun. Having to type "knoppix" at the boot prompt before being able to get a "lang=us" in is yeaaars behind the times.
Box 1. A brand-spanking new P4 2.4GHz (wish it was mine). Thought let's see about all this jaw-dropping people cause when booting Knoppix. It started ok, played this startrek sound (way cool!!), then the 14" LCD screen turned black and all which remained to be seen was this little window saying "no signal" or something similar. Not much jaw-dropping there. Box 2. Boots fine. The graphix is certainly designed with a sexy-factor in mind, but personally I find shells with low-contrast and massive background images not useful for serious work, and bright cyan text on white background scores at the obnoxious end of the usability scale. No doubt that can be tweaked until the cows come home, so I didn't persue it. Trying to find out just how much software is on a compressed Knoppix DVD, I run dpkg -l but all I got was a "file XYZ contains MS-DOS ^Z EOF character" or something like that. It decided to run at 1024x768, although I run at 1280x1024 all the time, so the hardware sure does it. There is no obvious way to fix that - the KDE size-config changes resolution only within of what X allows. There's no X-configurator in the menu (or else it's well hidden). Thinking that X would have to be restarted (although its possible to change size without X restart) I hit ctrl-alt-backspace - got a cool reference to startreck, and the box turned itself off, at which point I decided I'd done enough quick play. Certainly not a bad system for something which runs off cd/dvd! I'll keep that in the toolbox. After 2 out of 2 non-optimal selections on hardware issues (1 doesn't even boot), both not easily fixable, I don't share the rave about its detection capabilities. For rescue jobs I won't be throwing out my SuSE disks yet either, because I can take that out of the drive once booted, whereas knoppix remains firmly locked in the tray, and I don't need open office to fix system problems. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
