Knoppix for an AW m17x

So, I was looking through old CD's for OSes and drivers, and found the CD that a local computer repair shop burnt for me when I paid them $80 to save my music/ off an old HDD a bunch of years ago (had a hilariously bad smithfrog). It has an old version of Knoppix on it - which reinvigorated me and my yearning to learn Linux. Anyways, I did a quick google search and found an updated ISO for Knoppix that I plan to download over the weekend.

I'm too lazy to find out over at the Knoppix website since it's in German and translating it through Google is a pain, especially if I click a certain order of hyperlinks. SO I'll ask here. Will this installation contain ANY kind of relevant driver for the components of my Alienware laptop? Or is this distro one of those ones you really only use as a last-resort to save a partition or transfer files from a broken Windows installation? Because that's what it was used for before. The OS runs completely off a CD, so I'm guessing there's no way to install drivers for the computer through it?

I'm not looking for anything in specific with a Linux distro, just mentioning this one since's it's the only one I'm recently familiar with. I've been a Windows OS sucker for 15 years, and I'm looking to try something new. Perhaps if there's a Linux distro that does RAMdisks, Photoshop, or Source-engine games better than W7, I'd be open to it. Looking for suggestions and several links to articles on the matter. I've already read through all the guides and stuff on this site, but most of it is pretty vague.

 

Okay, well, apparently no one here is a fan of Knoppix. I tried booting from DVD with this, and MAN have things changed since the version I had from 3-4 years ago. I can't even get to the KDE anymore - it's all command prompt based! I don't know what I'm doing, and I don't have time to wade through the knopper forums to find out how to have a pretty GUI for simple things like web access and transfering files off a drive.

So, I'm open to easy-to-use distros that can be booted from DVD with good amount of concurrent network drivers. Can be under 4.3 GB ISO (DVD image - don't want to install to HDD). Any suggestions welcome.

 

Here is an article that explains a little bit about the most recent version of knoppix.

Also here is a link to the knoppix site in English http://www.knoppix.com/

They do not actively develop a live DVD any more,of course you can still burn the the 700 mb ISO to the disk but it wastes a lot of space.Not many linux distros maintain live DVDs for some reason.

The only two I know of that have live dvds are

Ultimate Edition http://ultimateedition.info/

and Sabayon http://www.sabayonlinux.org/

I have not tried this two but probably will tomorrow

Also if you don't mind wasting space on the dvd Linux mint in my opinion is one of the easiest to use distros, it is a live cd. http://www.linuxmint.com/

I'm kinda of in a rush so if my post seems rushed it is because it is.

 

That's great! Thanks a lot for posting. Wasting space on the DVD isn't a concern for me. I merely did it because I couldn't find my blank CD's.

I'll have to download some of these and try them out. Like I said, I'm using W7 and XP Pro, since those produce the best gaming FPS, but it's good to have something on a flash drive or CD to boot the computer up with, and fix things or at least browse the web/look at files on the harddisk. It seems a live CD would be perfect for this situation.

 

Quick question - I'm looking at the versions on the FTPs for the sites you listed to UE, Linux Mint, and Sabayon, and I see Sabayon offers the distro wit the KDE or Gnome environments. Which one would you recommend? I've used KDE before, but I'm open to to trying new things granted it works/has some advantage over the other. I just don't want to try them all because I can't be downloadng gig after gig, you know?

 

I can recommend you a good distro or three but Knoppix is a good distro. What do you mean you can't load KDE? It sounds like it could be your graphics card as Nvidia cards are notorious for being problematic initially. For Live media, at least, I have had some issues at times loading the disc with a Nvidia card. All you need to do is to change the settings to safe graphics mode. Some distros give you this setting in their menu while others you need to use a CLI style edit.

I would recommend Debian since Knoppix and Ubuntu are based on it. You have choices of having an upgraded package distro with 'Testing' (Squeeze) or a more stable system but not as recent software. In addition, many solutions to other debian-based distros would apply. As for other distros, Fedora 12 and Mandriva 2010 seem excellent but the package management is rpm which is different in various ways. Of course, there are Linux die-hards who will insist on Gentoo, Arch and Sabayon but these require more 'hands on' and unless you are really experienced or want to do a lot of reading, they are best used as an 'experiment' if you ask me. Then again, I think they are the best ones since you have more control and determine what your system is like and what's there. I'm a bit too lazy to use these right now but I would like to try Gentoo one day.

 

With the KDE vs Gnome question they are both good desktop enviroment and work good so it is really kind of like apples vs bananas, it boils down to which ever one you like best, look at screenshots online maybe. That said I tend to like KDE but gnome can be customized to where I like it, though I had a hard time doing customizing it. Linuxmint out of the box though, has gnome the way I like it, heck I even installed linuxmint to my hard drive because I like it so much.

Also I tried Ultimate Edition and Sabayon, Ultimate Edition was pretty good it had alot of graphical design stuff on it, which I don't do. Sabayon I couldn't even get to boot so it could be great or could be crap I have no Idea. Also while sabayon Might be a good live DVD it would probably not be good for a new person to linux to install to a hard drive.

@puter1 I love Debian, but the reason I did not recommend it is because the OP wanted a live CD/DVD.

 

Puter, what I meant is that the desktop simply wouldn't load. I couldn't find a option for it. I had wireless networking, openoffice, and detect devices options <-- I did not see how to load the desktop environment. I rebooted five times to try different things, and couldn't figure it out. Attribute it to my Linux green-ness or whatever, but Knoppix has changed too much since the version I had four years ago, so to hell with it. I'm scrapping that idea - not worth investing time to learn how to use it right now. When I'm less busy, I might do some more reading.

Thank you for the recommendations guitar. I'm currently downloading Ultimate Edition 2.4 x64, and will be downloading the other two soon (x64 versions) to try out. I'm going to do the KDE version for Sabayon because of your word and because I've used it before.

 

ALso, what do I do with the md5 check sum file? I looked it up on wikipedia but still got nothing.

 

just throwing it out that my M17x loves Fedora

offers live cd and USB drive ways to run

 

Here is an article on MD5 sums http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Md5sum

To check them I use hashtab here it is http://beeblebrox.org/

 

^^

*Update: I know what the checksum is now. It's to make sure your internet connection isn't crap when downloading. I have used it successfully now.

 

Just so you know, I downloaded Sabayon 5.0, Linux Mint 7, and UE 2.4 - all x64 variants based on your post. I am currently burning them to DVDs and am very excited to try them out!

I'm a slow learner, so I decided to do this without looking at the extra packages yet online. I'll have to figure out how to use this fancy "repository" online. From what I gather, it's a fancy Linux term for driver program database. Hopefully I can find a way to just drag and drop the files, rather than doing that command prompt based loading.

 

A repository means just a huge software warehouse with all the "official" software programs.
I'll illustrate for Win XP. Wouldnt it be cool if to install a program in XP, all you had to do was checkmark a software database in XP to install the program ?
Eg,
Sun Java
Openoffice
Music players
Video players with codecs.
Compilers
editors
Firefox
Email clients
.....

And ALL you have to do was o checkmark "install this" in XP, and the OS would automatically go to the poper site and download, t ogether with all the dependencies ?
No banging your head going to 50 different sites, figuring out which verson to download, what the dependecies are, rebooting 80 times, getting false positives from virus scanners etc etc etc.

THIS can be done in linux via official repositories
Checkmark what you want to install, and bam, you're done.

 

So I don't actually have to visit the repository? The repository is a proprietary conglomeration of software for my particular distro? And where in the OS do I do this 'checkmark' and get the software downloaded?

 

Thats right, the OS will interact with the repository, you dont have to manually go to the repository site.
Its not proprietay; its just that the softwares in the repository have 1)been compiled to work with the distro, & have library compatibility, and, 2) verified to have no viruses/trojans & been tested.

The number of packages in the repository is not small, for debian/mint/knoppix etc its more than 20 thousand

There are different frontends for "checkmarking" what extra programs(ie packages) you want, they are called package managers. I dunno exactly what they are called in Mint/koppix etc (but I know they are there).
In debian its called "synaptic" package manager