[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
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Another thought, why not use rsync for you backups instead of dd, it 
allows you to do incrementally backups, synchronize your files and back 
up over your network (assuming you have your laptop and desktop on a 
home network). I think it could be a little safer and more secure than 
dd.  Fedora 7 has a live CD now; one for Gnome and one for KDE but if 
you install from either you can then download the other desktop or any 
other application that you desire. I have dual boot on both laptop and 
desktop but use FAT file systems for Xp and Win 2000 so I have never 
tried to mount NTFS with Fedora. For backing up Windows I use "True 
Image" software which is supposed to backup Linux but doesn't work at 
the file level, although my version is a bit out of date, maybe the 
latest version works better on Linux?

John Blomfield