Heh.. talk about an impartial subject.. downloaded and burnt the Knoppix installation CD last weekend; in case you're wondering what this is, well.Its basically a souped up Debian installation, but with one crucial difference. It runs off the CD-ROM drive..
No hard disk partitioning, no klutzing around trying to figure out which video card, nudding.. it just plain freaking works.. whew.. that alone made me a HUGE fan..
You just boot with the CD, it autodetects hardware and does everything upto giving you a nice shiny KDE desktop to work with..
Now, my main use for this.. we have slightly dated Dell Optiplex machines at office.. they're fast enough, but unfortunately, you CANNOT upgrade the hard disk or any part without voiding the warranty.. so, we (that is, I) am stuck with a measly 10GB hard disk..considering that a window manager and the works are probably going to take a gigabyte or so out of the hard disk, its simply not worth it to repartition and install Linux or anything else.. apart from that, I dont want to risk blowing away any part of the HD (either by accident or plain ignorance :)..
but I still want something a bit nicer than Cygwin.. that's where Knoppix came in.. boot, set proxy in Konqueror (I prefer Konq to Mozilla, strangely enough), set mail server on Mutt and I am good to go for normal development stuff. If I do need to reboot at all, its solely for Oracle forms or Toad (a nice Oracle administration client). This thing even has Wine configured so maybe I can figure out how to run that too :o
All in all, I'm still finding neat things about this distro.. NOW, finally, I can begin converting the folks at home to Linux..
In other news: started playing Quake 3 again.. got my hands on The Damian's Object Oriented Perl and Bitter Java (cant remember the author, but its an AWESOME book).. Unfortunately, Manning books arent really in bookstores around this part of the planet, so I got them when I was in Malaysia..
