A Short Review of KNOPPIX v6.0.1
What can I say but Knoppix is a great distribution! Always has been. Even back when I was in college I used to use Knoppix on the Microsoft Windows 2000 client desktops just so I can remain somewhat sane and continue to work in an environment I was more comfortable in. Even when I used to be a service technician, Knoppix was always around to be able to perform data recovery/transfers from one medium to the other. Over the years I have continued to use Knoppix as the excellent tool for data recovery that it is. To those less familiar with the GNU/Linux operating system, Knoppix is based off of Debian and designed to run from a CD/DVD. It is a good way to run an operating system without installing it, which also gives you access to all your hardware. The latest CD image is only 661 MB.
With version 6.0.1 I must admit that I was extremely impressed with the load time. It literally took 1 minute for the CD image to be loaded into memory and have me running with my work on the desktop. This is much quicker than what I was used to working with years ago. The desktop environment that you are loaded into is the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) which I will add, runs beautifully with Compiz Fusion on top of it. All 3D graphically appealing features over Compiz Fusion was extremely impressive for the lightweight GNU/Linux distribution. The great part is that they made available the Compiz Fusion Configuration Manager so you are able to customize even further from its default settings.
Knoppix recognized all of my hardware with zero problems and came packed with the iceweasel web browser, the Open Office Suite, Pidgin, GIMP, XSane, MPlayer, VirtualBox (which I am interested to see work from CD; note that you are given the option to install Knoppix to your local hard drive), and plenty of more. Navigating the LXDE was simple and smooth along with its native file manager: PCMan. As always, you also have access to your traditional terminal with a wealth of command-line binaries.
I had decided to download and use Knoppix to quickly run a clone of a failing drive using dd_rescue. From the very beginning everything worked great. Knoppix, as I mentioned above, recognized all hardware including the failing and new disk devices. Dd_rescue did its job and saved the day. I am glad that I decided to use Knoppix. I am really impressed with how far it has come along.
Hi,
check out dd_rhelper. It’s a script based upon dd_rescue and make the rescue process more efficient and even resumable: http://freshmeat.net/projects/dd_rhelp/
I wrote about it here:
http://linux-tipps.blogspot.com/2009/02/resumable-fast-and-efficient-hard-disk.html
I have been using this distro on bootable USB for my laptop and on my home PC for a while now, but coming from a microshaft environment I have been unable to use it in my work not because it can’t do the job but because none of us are developers, just users and we can’t get our PC Fibre Channel HBAs to work. This is totally simple in windows as the path to drivers and installation thereafter is intuitive. This is why Linux is slow to penetrate the business world unfortunatly. Power is useless if it cannot be accesed. sigh.
Ephemeron,
Thank you for your comments. I do apologize in advanced if my response comes off as a little biased. With regards to the FC HBA support, you will find that GNU/Linux has been much more superior in not only support but also in the management of volumes (i.e. high availability, fault tolerance, snapshot/archiving, etc.). The only problems/limitations that you will come across is distribution support/packaging. Most vendors such as Qlogic, Emulex to even LSI Logic and Adaptec will support no more than Red Hat and Novell and in some more extreme cases Ubuntu. Seeing how Knoppix is Debian based, you may be able to find something supported in the Debian repositories. GNU/Linux servers hosting external storage arrays is all that you will see (next to Sun servers) in Chicago and New York (to name a couple of cities).
A great example of good vendor support comes from Qlogic and their DMP driver to work on top of their HBA driver. Qlogic had written a DMP driver for Windows (QLDirect) and it worked horribly. At the same time they also wrote a multipath driver for Linux. The most user friendly way of managing the Windows driver was through SANSurfer but it was buggy. Back in 2005 or so Qlogic announced that they stopped supporting the QLDirect driver but to this date they continue supporting the superb multipathing implementation integrated in their Linux driver.
Ok, maybe I’m just missing something. Let me preface by saying I’m a software developer of 25 years but have only a modest amount of experience w/ Linux. I can certainly work my way around the UI, but tend to stumble a bit when forced to deal w/ the command line. Yet, I do manage to get things done one way or another. And I occasionally use Knoppix for recovery purposes.
So I downloaded Knoppix 6.0.1 and agree with the reviewer regarding the improved performance. But at what price? Folks, either I’m totally clueless when it comes to Linux, or something has dramatically changed here w/ Knoppix 6.0.1. Yeah, it’s faster, but it seems completely NEUTERED too! Where are all the previous tools? Where is Konqueror? I wanted to use Knoppix to recover files from a Windows installation (NTFS) and copy them to a remote Windows share but quickly discovered I was going to have problems establishing that connection when I couldn’t locate Konqueror. Instead, it seems many tools have been replaced w/ far less powerful ones. Case and point; PCMan file manager has no clue how to connect to a remote Windows share (for read/write). Nor could I find any other GUI application that could. In frustration, I turned to Terminal and tried to mount the remote share (mount –t smbfs …) and it reports “unknown type” (a search of “man mount” says something about mount not understanding the type “smbfs” and needing submount, yada yada, again, I’m no Linux expert here). Grrrr. And mind you, the instructions in the FAQ tell you to use Konqueror and/or a mount command. In fact, it seems that now many of the answers in the FAQ no longer apply w/ 6.0.1 since there are numerous references to applications that are no longer supplied in the new distribution. For a live CD targeted for recovery/rescue, this is particularly disconcerting and confusing.
What happened here? I’ve searched Google for others w/ similar comments but I’m finding very little. Again, did I miss something? Is there some secret “thing” about this latest Knoppix distribution that I’m missing? I just don’t get it. In frustration, I’ve decided to return to the much richer environment of 5.1.1 (I’ll live w/ additional 30 second performance hit). I almost get the impression the developer ran into some licensing issues and decided to avoid them by outright elimination and/or resorting to poor substitutes. Just run through the menu of installed applications and you’ll quickly discover that 6.0.1 is a mere shadow of what Knoppix once was. I suppose if ALL you want to do is read your installed HD and browse the web, it works. But if you’ve used prior versions of Knoppix like I have and need to move beyond the most basic of operations, you may be disappointed. Count me out of 6.0.1. It’s a serious regression imo and I suspect many other ppl will be returning to v5.1.1 as well.