The Present

Today, with thousands of Knoppix downloads per day and with about a dozen derivatives, each with a special focus group , language, or supported architecture, it seems that my experiment has gotten a little out of hand. I'm trying my best to keep up with the technical development, and I provide regular updates of the download edition and add new features and gimmicks. And occasionally, there are "Special Editions" like the LinuxTag Conference DVD, which contains a maxi edition of Knoppix with a lot more software than the CD version.

By saying this, I'm probably fitting the clich that says programmers are naturally lazy in writing documentation, but, lucky for me, it seems that others are now writing manuals and documentation for Knoppix, which means I can stay focused on development. It's really useful to have a book at hand that not only contains technical information about the structure of a system, but also explains some of its components in detail, and I have learned a lot from this book about Knoppix. (In particular, I've learned that some things are not really as complicated as I thought they were.) Had I read this book earlier, I probably would have created Knoppix differently!

There are so many things you can do with Knoppix. The primary design is to use Knoppix as a desktop system platform for tasks , such as office work (using OpenOffice.org, for example) and Internet connectivity; power users and system administrators may use it for rescue operations ( grabbing data from a defective or nonbooting filesystem on a different OS), or ad-hoc installations of web, file, or print servers, with or without hard-disk installation. With the terminal server utility (which is just a shell script that creates configuration files for DHCP, NFS, and squid, and starts all of them), you can boot an entire classroom of PCs over a local network, using just a single CD-ROM, which comes in handy if you want to run an Internet cafe, for example. It's also a good tool for learning about operating systems or for functioning as a base if you want to customize your own bootable GNU/Linux CD.