Knoppix Questions

[Someone28624]

Knoppix is the only Linux distro I have ever used, since I wanted to try linux, but have a hard drive formating phobia. Now I think I may be ready to try a hard drive partition is linux, if someone would be willing to walk me by it step by step.

A few questions.

1. I know Knoppix is meant to be a live cd, and not installed on the hard drive, but I know it's not unheard of to do so. Has anyone installed Knoppix on their hard drive? Experience?

2. Should I stick with Knoppix, or try a different distro on the hard drive. If so, which one? I have heard good things about Suse. Experiences?

3. I read through the Firefox is Linux thread, but when I used Knoppix I installed Firefox in it no problem, but it was gone when I restarted. Did I install to the RAM? How can I save it? I have basically been sticking with Konquerer and Mozilla provided on the cd.

Thanks for your input!

 

[Anti-Trend]

1. I know Knoppix is meant to be a live cd, and not installed on the hard drive, but I know it's not unheard of to do so. Has anyone installed Knoppix on their hard drive? Experience?

I have, just out of curiosity. To me, it felt like a somwhat broken installation of Debian (which is the distro from which Knoppix is derived). I didn't like it very much, and I found the installation scripts to be clumsy and primitive. I guess you could make it work, but if I personally was to use a Debian-based distro, I'd either use Debian itself or SuSE.

2. Should I stick with Knoppix, or try a different distro on the hard drive. If so, which one? I have heard good things about Suse. Experiences?

Like I said in my last quote, I would recommend SuSE over Knoppix for a HDD install anyday. I like SuSE, and find that it runs very well on modern hardware. In addition, it has a very professional and cohesive look & feel on the desktop.

I myself use Mandriva Linux, which is IMHO the most desktop-ready Linux distro to date for at least semi-modern hardware (a Pentium Pro or better). It's easy to use and maintain, has a great mechanism for package management, plenty of powerful administrative tools, and is compatible with most RPMs for Red Hat Linux. There is a completely free community version of the OS, and you can easily add thousands of packages from their various software mirrors around the globe with just a few clicks.

If you're working with low-end hardware, Vector Linux is a very good choice. It's basically Slackware Linux with a friendly installer and a pretty sane default configuration for day-to-day desktop use. It is one of the only distros I can think of that actually runs fast on a Pentium1 with 32mb RAM while using a pretty GUI and surfing the Internet securely. Easy to work with and maintain, with some nice custom system management tools included to make your job that much easier. These tools are rudimentary compared to those found in Mandriva or SuSE, but they do get the job done.

3. I read through the Firefox is Linux thread, but when I used Knoppix I installed Firefox in it no problem, but it was gone when I restarted. Did I install to the RAM? How can I save it? I have basically been sticking with Konquerer and Mozilla provided on the cd.

If you're just booting from the CD, any software you install is only installed to a temporary RAM drive. When you reboot, all changes are lost.

-AT