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2. Why Knoppix? Because I like it, mainly! Apparently I am not even alone. There are a lot of people out there these days that have turned it into their favourite distribution, and this for various reasons. The main reasons as I see them, however are twofold. Firstly, it has the most excellent hardware detection there is. Usually, you can just download the cd and put it in your computer and chances are high it will just work. That is an amazing feat. Generally, people use it to just try out a linux distribution without actually installing it, or to try out new linux software that one is not just willing to install yet, like a new linux kernel or a new kde or gnome distribution. Second reason is that it is a debian distribution. Now, debian has the name of being the geekiest of distributions, but this is mainly because of it's reputation on the installer part of debian. Debian however, has one of the nicest and historically oldest package management systems in the linux world. It also has a very nice model of distributing the software, in that it comes in three flavours: the stable, the unstable and the testing. The experience is, however, that even the testing distribution does not give much trouble compared to what I used to get when installing RedHat before up2date came around, and using the stable and unstable distributions hardly ever gives any trouble at all. Installing new software is almost always a one-command step. Recently it has come to my attention that knoppix-like and sometimes knoppix-based distributions are gaining momentum. Some of them might be worthy to check out, like Gnoppix and Ubuntu, but for now we'll stick with what we know. Since October 15th however, it seems these two projects might merge into one. That's something to look forward to.
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