Knoppix 6.2 Live-CD, DVD, vision-impaired versions released

[otropogo]

Klaus Knopper has released Knoppix .6.2 in three English versions, Live-CD, Live-DVD, and Adriane Live-CD for the vision-impaired.

http://distrowatch.com/

NB: the download sites may be very busy for a few days...

Knoppix has always been an excellent way to sample Linux applications, especially in the DVD versions.

Have not tried 6.2 yet, but 6.1 found and auto configured my hardware and net connection flawlessly.

NB: I don't have any printers or scanners connected to my Puppy system, so I can't vouch for those configurations, typically the most difficult for even the most powerful Linux distros.

Will test Knoppix 6.2 on both my systems and report here once I've downloaded and burned a copy.

Update: decided to test the waters with a DVD download from kernel.org this afternoon, and found it running at full speed. ETA is down to 10 minutes now, after about 3 hours for the 3.6G iso, downloading with wget at a steady indicated 347K/s. at 18:00 MT.

So either Knoppix has lost its popularity, or I just got in before the first rush.

Update 2: Have now checksummed, burned the iso, and booted from my Windows machine, running on a Celeron Mendocino cpu with 500MB of PC100 RAM.

It took about 5 minutes to fully load the desktop. There's the odd menu tab that's still in German, but generally it looks good.

Knoppix 6.2 a bit misbehaved, in that it attempts to go online when you try to the DVD under Windows. I had to slap it down with Zonealarm., and booted with it instead.

There's an icon for loading apps to the desktop, and I loaded Gimp 2.6 and xsane, but was disappointed that xsane could not detect my Brother MFC 8840D's scanner (as in every other Linux Live-CD or DVD I've ever tried).

As always, iceweasel is the default browser, this time version 3.5.5. And as always Knoppix managed to autoconfigure display, sound and network connection. But after closing the icon I couldn't find it again. Probably advisable to read the documentation first.

No time to do more today, but it looks like a useful tool for trying various Linux apps. Will try it next on my Puppy machine, with a faster cpu and twice the RAM.