TAG | Knoppix: live CD par excellence |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 20 February 2009 | |
  
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And none shines brighter than Knoppix, the brainchild of German IT consultant Klaus Knopper; now up to version 6.0, Knoppix provides the best live CD and a DVD which is also installable. One of Knoppix' major strengths is its hardware detection; I have tried it on a range of PCs with all kinds of different hardware and never found it to fail. Another plus point of Knoppix is that it is based not merely on Debian, but on the bleeding edge unstable stream of Debian. The latest software is available in a well-crafted mix. Normally, when a geek has legendary powers in one area, one does not expect fancy and neat interfaces as well. Knopper is an exception in this regard - the guts of Knoppix are solid and it also has an extremely good-looking desktop design. The latest version of the live CD boots much faster due to a rewrite of the boot system - Knopper calls the new system Microknoppix. It has very close compatibility with its Debian base, a faster boot process and uses the lightweight X11 desktop environment (LXDE) for its graphical desktop. Microknoppix allows changes in the boot and start-up scripts through a persistent image. One can choose to boot into a text-only menu, the Audio Desktop Reference Implementation And Networking Environment or ADRIANE, named for Knopper's wife who has a visual impairment. ADRIANE has a talking menu system which makes it easier for even beginners with a visual impairment to use. The text menu offers options for web browsing, mail and so on; there are graphical options for using OpenOffice.org or Firefox with a graphical screenreader. And then there is the full graphical environment which uses the latest KDE and compiz-fusion. It offers a good taste of the desktop candy that is available for Linux. Another nice feature is that the CD can be used to create a bootable USB flashdrive by running a program called flash-knoppix - the speed at which this happens is amazing. It is well worth creating keeping this in your pocket for an emergency. Knoppix is another classic example of the innovation that can come about when good code is avaiable under user-friendly licences like the GPL. |
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