[Discuss] Knoppix to the rescue

[John Blomfield]

Murray Strome wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at vlug.org
> http://ladybug.vlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
Can't help with the video card but what type of wireless card do you 
have? I have an ASUS laptop Z71A, which has an Intel 2915 wireless card 
and it works fine with Fedora Core 6 after installing the correct driver.

Like you I have found Totem useless! It seems to come as standard with 
many distros. You might want to try mplayer which I have found works 
perfectly with all .wmv formats and many more.

John Blomfield