3. Trying Out Knoppix

Downloading Knoppix

Downloading is not all that difficult, you just need an url for an iso image, and you download the iso image on your favourite machine. As long as it has a cd burner in it, you are fine.

You can find the url for the iso image on the knoppix website mentioned earlier. You can download the most recent iso image, knoppix does not release that frequently, but if you plan on following the tutorial, it is good to know that it is mainly based on Knoppix 3.3, but it has also been known to work on Knoppix 3.2. Take an http link to a mirror close to you, that generally works best. Don't take an rsync link, unless you know what you are doing. Also check the md5 sum on the downloaded iso, that can save you some trouble in burning invalid disks.

I have yet to find a tutorial on burning iso images for various platforms, but it should be easy. On windows, if you have Nero, you can find a "Burn Image..." button in the File-menu. On a Mac, you can use the "Disk Copy" utility in the Utilities folder of your Application folder, and drag and drop the iso on the main window, then select "Burn Image..." from the File menu. On MacOS X you can check the md5sum by opening a terminal window, and typing md5sum, a space and then drag and drop the iso image on the terminal window and press enter in it. After a while you should see the calculated sum and it should correspond to the one you can find on the mirror you have downloaded from.

Booting Knoppix

Insert the cd you just burnt into your pc. After starting up, if your bios is configured to first boot from cd, then from hard disk, as most bioses are, you should be booting knoppix in no time. If not, go into your bios and change the configuration.

The initial boot screen already features a graphical screen, and you are prompted to type the boot image and parameters. Just press enter to boot the default and you are fine. Knoppix start booting and after a short period of time, in which the hardware is detected, the X server is booted, and the KDE is initialized, you are presented with the info pages in the default browser, konquerer.

Figure 3.1: Initial Screen After Bootup

All hard disk partitions known to Knoppix are shown on the desktop, even NTFS partitions. When clicking on them, they are automatically mounted. You should be able to browse the internet if you are on a network that has a dhcp server on it. You should be able to use your mousewheel etc... all these things that are sometimes so hard to configure in linux, right there!

Using Knoppix

As promised, you can enjoy the full Knoppix distribution without it even touching your hard disk. Granted, it is a bit slow, but keep in mind you are running it from a CD. Some of the nicer tools to play with:

Tool	Description
OpenOffice	This office suite has charmed a lot of users, even so much that some governments are switching to it. I think the GUI is still a bit clumsy, though, especially compared to ubertools like vi.
The Gimp	A graphics emulator like Photoshop, but cheaper. I use it, next to the infamous GrapicConverter which came registered with my Mac, to manipulate images, since I can and will not afford PhotoShop.

But that is just a small sample of the great long list of software that comes on that cd you have in your computer. Go ahead and try out anything you like, see if it is useable for you.

Editing Text Files

One thing you will have to learn is to use a text editor on linux, since editing text files, more specifically configuration files, is one thing that we are going to do frequently while installing our Knoppix box.

As always with linux, you have a variety of possibilities. However, if you have used a text editor in linux before, chances are that you already have a favourite text editor. If you don't, I could recommend the nedit program, which is like notepad on windows. You can find it in the KDE menu in the toolbar, in the section "Editors".

Another thing which is still a bit unavoidable, even though we will try to avoid it as much as possible, is going into the command shell. You can do this by clicking on the shell icon in the toolbar, that's the computer screen with a shell on top of it. You get a command-line prompt. What you do next is type "ne" and press the tab-key twice shortly after each other.

You get a list with all programs that are executable and that the shell is currently able to find for you. Amongst them you see nedit listed, and typing nedit and then enter will bring up the editor in a new window. From there on, you can use it as if it was like notepad.

Figure 3.2: Starting nedit

When Things Go Wrong

Well, I hate to admit it, but sometimes things do go wrong, mainly in detecting your hardware, and that is when the linux trouble could start for you. However, there is never a reason to panic immediately, because there are still a lot of options open even if everything does not work as it was described here.

Those options mainly exist in giving extra hints to knoppix when it boots as to what kind of hardware it will encounter and what it should or should not do with it. They are called Knoppix cheat codes.

There is a long list of knoppix cheat codes, and generally what you can do is think about what is special about your hardware and search the wide internet or just the knoppix forums, using google for instance, to see if anyone has ever encountered a similar problem, and what may be the cheat code to use to tackle it.

Last time, and the only time, I had trouble running the Knoppix cd, I figured it should have to do with the hyper threading on the new P4 box I just brought from the hardware shop, maybe also because I was using a SATA hard drive, both of which are rather new technologies. Anyway, it was a neat new box, and after a bit of searching I found this link on the knoppix which explained a lot to me. Not that it solved all of my problems immediately, but it helped me a lot. This just to say that since Knoppix became popular, there is a lot of activity on the forum there and a lot of information can be found.

But, as said, chances are high you won't be needing any of that.