Saturday, April 23, 2005

Blogging from KNOPPIX

knoppix
Its incredible, My PC is now running from cd-rom, that's right, the whole Operating System or OS as they call it plus other vital programs that you use for web browing, word and image editing is all in the cd-rom and guess what, Its FREE, curtesy of the nice folks from the Open Source Community. The market value of all the programs inside the CD about 1900mb in all compressed into a 700mb CD will run into thousands of dollars.

KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software. Hmm Linux is for geeks you might think, well it used to be but what I am seeing on my screen looks like windows XP and mac OS X. Everything works like in Windows minus the blue screen of death that you see so often in the former.

I downloaded KNOPPIX using the BitTorrent software and burned it into CD using nero burning software. You can also download knoppix straight from the website Please visit KNOPPIX download page to get the software. If you run into any problems using KNOPPIX or just would like to know more about Linux in general, please visit the forums atknoppix.net

The only problem I had was due to my own mistake. Once I downloaded the knoppix.iso file, I simply burned it as a data cd in Nero. You should not do that as it will not boot up. You have to burn the cd as an 'image file' option in Nero or any other burning software. After you have burned the cd reboot you pc and while the pc is rebooting press F8 to enable the pc to boot from the cd-rom. knoppix will start immediately and start identifying all the hardware in your pc. All my hardware was reconised and the system booted up in less than 10mins.

I could use the internet straight away using the Firefox browser. My pc is connected to cable broadband using an ethernet card. Those with ADSL modems should visit the manufactures website to get the Linux driver if the modem doesn't work.

Immediate advantage of using knoppix is my pc used to shut down itelf atleast 3 times and giving alot of error messages before it stabilizes. Under Knoppix the system was very stable. I am really impressed with knoppix and you should really try it as it is very simple to use. Simply take out the knoppix cd and reboot and wola you have your windows back. Simply Fantastic!

This is my first attemt in Linux and the first impression is really good and I will update the blog as I get deeper into Linux. And oh yes, I am typing this blog by using the knoppix OS.