No problems with the Knoppix install tonight. Very nice interface and I love the way it detects everything. It really lets you see the detection process and how it goes. This makes you really think that Knoppix is something different from most distros…however, it didn’t detect my monitor and sound card. It was the first distro to not detect the monitor…odd considering that all others did. But other than that, it seems to be a very solid distro…an excellent way for people to try out Linux.
I don’t think this distro has anything special as far as the Linux desktop is concerned. It is very plain…but I did appreciate the languages options and the menu layout. It was a bit more organized than a default install of Debian. Wine was another added bonus. I’ll have to play around with this a bit more to get used to it. A very solid distro. I can see why so many like it.
My experience with Knoppix is the same. I have Suse 9.2 and put it on my laptop but I prefer knoppix. Knoppix also failed to detect my old time laptop Thinkpad 600e sound card. However I found a script to get the sound up.
Originally i preferred Suse because it has such powerful repair tools and hardware tools. However with knoppix on a fast computer it takes only 9 minutes to install … and you can re-write their install script very easily to leave your home directory alone. You can graphically remove the whole operating system leaving only your data. The set the script to format=NO … the script is fully documented to make it easy to change.
My wife has been running Knoppix for about 1.5 years on her hard drive. I use apt-get to expand on the bare bones Debian install to add stuff I need. Seems great to me that it is a minimal system … and that apt-get magically gets you all the software you need. Actually in Knoppix 3.7 there is a KDE program called k-package that automatically lists some 8000 programs with descriptions. It automates the process of adding software.
Great operating system. I never repair it. If there are problems I am quicker to erase the operating system and re-install. The whole process is over in less than 15 minutes. Your data is preserved.
Ian
The problem that many linux distros have with the detection is mostly around on board sound cards. Most of these cards are not very generic. An example HP’s rockwell sound/56k modem combo.