knoppix live

I played around with Knoppix live CDs when I was first starting out with Linux. Knoppix sold me on Linux more than anything else did. I decided to take another look at Knoppix this week; the live session is still great for "demo" purposes, and of course it's also a great maintenance/rescue tool to have sitting around in the toolbox.

I downloaded KNOPPIX_7.7.1DVD-2016-10-22-EN.iso, the English language Knoppix 7.7.1. It's a hefty 4.3GB download.

Supposedly, you can now run flash-knoppix [iso name] from within another distro (from Debian, for example) to get Knoppix onto a flash drive. I didn't find any good documentation for this procedure, so I didn't try it. But users can also run flash-knoppix from within a running Knoppix live session, and that does a fine job of creating the bootable Knoppix flash drive.

Or you can order a flash drive from an online vendor such as OSDisc:

The default LXDE desktop in Knoppix 7.7.1:

LXDE is the default desktop, but GNOME and KDE sessions are available. The GNOME session failed to boot up for me, but I did get a KDE Plasma 5 session with the knoppix desktop=kde boot option. For some reason, there are no application icons on the default panel, but the Application Launcher works ok. Here's KDE in Knoppix 7.7.1:

Knoppix is loaded with apps -- probably more apps than I've seen shipped with any other distro. The Accessories submenu alone contains too many items to show in one screen shot:

Here's a link to the release announcement at DistroWatch: https://www.distrowatch.com/?newsid=09610

You'll want to check out the release notes, for sure: http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix771-en.html