[Discuss] Knoppix to the rescue

[Murray Strome]

I have tried quite a few different distributions of LINUX on laptops I 
have owned over the years. I recently downloaded the Knoppix DVD from:

http://knoppix.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/linux/knoppix/DVD/KNOPPIX_V5.1.1DVD-2007-01-04-EN.iso

I am quite pleased with how well it works on my Toshiba Satellite 100 
laptop, even though it does NOT support my Wireless card nor the sound card.

Also, it does not support the NVDIA GeForce 7600 GT video card on my 
(mainly) XP desktop (which I use mostly for video editing). However, I 
have Kubuntu installed on it, so can at least make a clone of my Windows 
C drive as a backup using "dd".

Unlike any other Live CD/DVDs I have tried before, Knoppix is reasonably 
fast and comes with all the applications I use most.  It fully supports 
NTFS, so I can have full read/write access to my Windows Vista 
partitions.  The persistent mode using USB Flash Memory stick makes it 
easy to keep desktop settings from one session to the next. The best 
thing about the live DVD is that the MBR is not touched, so just remove 
the DVD and the computer boots normally.

Probably one reason it is reasonably fast is that I had made a LINUX 
swap partition on the laptop hard drive, which Knoppix finds and uses.

All this is nice, but the best part is what really "saved my bacon" 
recently.  I was going away for a few weeks, so I decided to clone all 
my Vista partitions to an external USB drive before leaving. I used 
fdisk in Knoppix to make three partitions on the external drive 
corresponding to the Vista partitions: the first a small one type 27 
which I think is something for Toshiba diagnostics; and two NTFS 
partitions corresponding to the Vista C and D drives.

Problems developed with the Vista OS on the laptop, the most severe 
being that the normal system backup and restore quit working. Toshiba 
customer service could not give me much help -- their suggestion of 
using their System Recovery disk to return the computer to the original 
"as shipped from the factory" condition was pretty drastic and rather 
scary!  Fortunately, when I got home, all I had to do was use "dd" to 
restore that first small Toshiba Diagnostic partition to the state it 
was in before I left home to fix the problem. I did not have to restore 
either the C or D drives.

I have tried some backup and restore software for Windows in the past, 
but none were as reliable or simple to use as dd with LINUX. 

Needless to say, I now intend to do a complete backup of my Windows XP 
and Laptop Vista OS disks on a weekly basis using the LINUX dd.

Other data on other disks can just be burned to DVDs, as can data on my 
LINUX machines as there is no need to worry about disk geometry and 
other peculiar things like the registry that make the MS Windows systems 
so fragile and difficult to restore when thing go wrong (as they do all 
too often).

I would like to get rid of Windows entirely. Unfortunately, there are a 
few packages that don't seem to have LINUX equivalents that I can find. 
The ones I use most on Windows are:

Pinnacle Studio (for video editing -- even other Windows software like 
Nero, Cyberlink, Ulead, etc. don't come close to Pinnacle in capability 
or ease of use)
Quick Tax (for preparing and filing Income Tax Returns)
Gold Wave (for audio editing -- there might be something that would work 
OK in LINUX but haven't found it)
Pentax PhotoLab (for working with Pentax RAW images -- there are some 
LINUX packages that are usable, but not as good as the Pentax one)

Although it isn't all that important for me, I find that things like 
Totem do not work very well for lots of video clips that friends send me 
(often in .wmv format).  When I receive these, I try to open them, 
without luck, then forward them to my yahoo account and open them on a 
Windows machine.

Murray