Partitionless Magic
Simon Willison recently wrote about Knoppix. Knoppix is a complete Linux distribution on a single, bootable CD. After reading Simon’s account, I’ve been meaning to give it a whirl. Tonight I did. And am… this entry is being blogged to you from Knoppix 3.3.
I’m very impressed. Simon’s review was right on the money… it works great, right out of the box. Autodetects everything. Audio, video, USB keyboard & mouse, configured the network connection; beautiful. I love it when something Just Works™.
Since I normally run Windows 2000 on this pc, my drive contains a single NTFS partition. Knoppix has mounted it read-only. If it were FAT, I could write to it, even creating a swap partition within a file in the FAT filesystem. I’ve been planning to re-install this machine from scratch for a while; when I do you can be sure I’ll be leaving some room for (at a minimum) a nice Linux swap partition (right now, I’m running with 256K ram and no swap… nicely!). Of course, the beautiful thing here is that I’m running a totally useful Linux desktop without repartitioning my hard drive. For that matter, without any setup whatsoever. If Linux is ever to make a presence on the desktop, this is how it will happen… with a distribution that’s even easier to use that Windows.
So far, my only complaint is that it doesn’t seem to include tcsh. I really need to break down and learn to use bash, I suppose, but I’ve been using tcsh ever since college and old habbits are hard to break.
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If you get the LinuxDefender version of Knoppix you would have the option to install Microsoft drivers to allow you to write to NTFS if it does not find them on your system