[CS-FSLUG] Debian, Knoppix, Kanotix, etc.

[Ed Hurst]

Jerry Van Brimmer wrote:

> http://www.freenet.org.nz/misc/knoppix-install.html
> 
> Doesn't look to hard to me. :-)

Installing isn't hard. Getting away from packages wholly unsuitable for 
actual use after installing is what I have found very hard.

>> As far as I can tell, 
>> apt-get (package manager) has to know what constitutes a legitimate 
>> replacement of installed packages. Since Knoppix uses such recent 
>> release numbers, and testing branch is mostly using lower numbers, I'd 
>> be waiting a long time for replacement to turn Knoppix into standard 
>> Debian. With the selection of oddball packages, I suspect the first time 
>> I ran apt-get after changing the sources.list over to testing, if it 
>> worked at all,
> 
> I thought that's what you wanted.

No, it's not. I want to be able to install Debian on other people's 
machines. I don't want it to take hours, which it would even if I had 
broadband at their location. That is, IF it worked. So far, my 
experiments with Knoppix from about 3.3 up through 3.7 indicate it is 
progressively unlikely. It's a great run-from-CD distro, but a lousy 
installed distro. Knopper has told me he's not really interested in 
making it work better installed.

Yes, I could use Kanotix, but it shares one major flaw with Knoppix -- 
you have to turn around and uninstall a bunch of stuff which would never 
be used, and which doesn't belong on a harddrive install. Those disks 
are designed to run from CD, and installation to harddrive is just an 
afterthought. The word "installing" means copying the CD to the 
harddrive, with a couple of tweaks to make it run like Linux on a 
harddrive. The Kanotix folks have warned me it is usually quite a 
convoluted process to getting from Kanotix to Debian Testing.

Again, I simply wanted to know if anyone knew of a project to use the 
hardware probing of Knoppix/Kanotix with standard Debian. I really need 
the hardware detection; I really need the option of choosing package 
sets; I really need it to be generic Debian (preferably Testing Branch); 
I really don't want to use other distros for this particular purpose. My 
own beloved CentOS is not suitable for this, because it's really a 
server distro, which has some additional options which can eventually 
make it a desktop.

-- 
Ed Hurst
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