So, your over at a buddy's place on a Saturday night having a few brews and
pizza, when he asks you about Linux.
You pull out a CD, insert it into HIS computer and within two minutes he's
jivin' to some tunes and exploring the KDE3 desktop - dazzled by all the eye
candy! You leave him the CD, of course, so he can explore Open Office 1.01,
GIMP 1.2, Bluefish, Mozilla, Python, WINE, and lots more. And the next day
he's bragging 'cause he's running Linux, too!
What Knoppix is, is a Linux distro that runs entirely from the CD and a file
system created on a RAM disk nothing is put on the hard drive nor is the
installed OS disturbed at all.
This isn't new, of course, but what makes Knoppix different is that it is a
lot faster that SuSE LiveEval and much more modern than DemoLinux.
Lots and lots of current packages (over 900) lets you explore KOfiice, Open
Office, OCR software, scanners and digital cameras, development languages
like Python and KDevelop, too. Even if you run another distro now you can
explore some packages you before actullay installing them on your computer -
maybe Karbon 14 (vector graphics) or Scribus (DTP).
Knoppix is internationalized, too. Click the flag on the right side of the
panel to switch the keyboard from English to German to French!
And with lots of eye candy (less that a second after booting there's a
graphic) it dazzles!
Knoppix is useful for checking out the hardware before installing a distro
that has less thorough hardware detection.
Anyway, I think you get the picture. Knoppix is what I'm using to show off
Linux at its best!
You can find Knoppix at
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/ . There is a link at
the top of the page to the English language page, if you must. <g>
Dennis Kibbe
PS - Sorry, I'll in my "Madison Avenue" mode. <g>
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