KNOPPIX( was Re: [H-GEN] Resizing partitions)

[Tony Nugent]

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On Wed Jan 22 2003 at 15:41, Trent WADDINGTON wrote:

> We managed to get Knoppix to boot on a pentium machine with 48 meg
> of ram at the Saturday meet.  Slow as a dog.

Oohyeah, sure thing... it's running from a 1.7Gb compressed
filesystem packed inside a 600Mb loop-mounted file on a cdrom :-)

Feed it more ram and it works much, much better - although it does
take time for apps to actually load first time they are used.

On a p2 or better with a high-spin cdrom and ~128Mb ram or more, it
is quite useable as a no-install linux desktop/demo... I have a
(non-linux-savvy) friend here beside me right now using it on a
(temporarily) diskless box doing some heavy web surfing, not a
problem.  She is impressed.

It is definitely the first one I've seen that has been so
desktop-oriented, packed with so many features, and worked so well
"out of the box"... I am considering giving it to several people as
an easy way to introduce them to linux.  (It's docs/faq claim that
it is possible to install and run it permanently from hard drive,
eg, a small ~1Mb partition or an old spare drive, then customise it
as you want).

I'm not saying that it's the ant's pants, but it is still an
impressive effort and a generally useful tool.  On low-end boxes, I
would imagine that all bootable cdrom-based runtime systems that
boot into an X server would be relatively slow, some better than
others.

For serious repair and rescue work, there are many other solutions
(like the floppy-based tomsrbt, the rescue-mode functionality of
many distro installers, ltsp, and so on).

> Trent

I note from the next message that Sandra now has a copy of it, cool.

Cheers
Tony

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