Knoppix-Installation
From Grokdoc
I've helped users in New York and in Brazil. There are different infrastructures in each place.
80% of the world's users are more similar to Brazil - they're poor, or in poor countries. That's a lot of potential users who won't have DSL/LAN for quite a while.
Many of them manage to get an old computer, a phone line, electricity. They use modems, and rather old computers. Not LAN's or ethernet.
It seems many distributions focus on getting ethernet up, and mostly ignore modems.
No modem means no internet access, which usually means linux has to go. Win95 cd's are for sale here in Brazil. It will run on an old pentium, and runs the required winmodem drivers, if the tech can install them.
Claiming 'go buy a real modem', 'winmodems are not modems' or 'go to linmodems.org, recompile the kernel, etc' doesn't help the beginner, or even many an advanced user.
The bottom line is, the user's modem works in windows, and besides, they're familiar with it.
I've used the Kurumin distribution, a brazilian distro derived from Knoppix, which allows, somewhat easily the use and configuration of many winmodems, many which xp didn't have drivers for. It can be done.
My girlfriend decided that she wanted to give Linux a try. As a Linux user of about seven years now, and as a witness of how much progress desktop Linux has made, I thought that was a great idea. It presented to me the perfect opportunity to see how Linux would be approached by someone new.
Installing Debian from Knoppix was a snap. The installation went very smoothly, especially since I had already imaged her old hard drive and was confident about deleting the old Windows partition. She handled the installation herself.
Once booted into Debian, she was presented with the desktop and immediately become attached to the KDE interface. She felt empowered by how easy it was to change the look and feel, and felt more confident about her decision.
There stands out to be only two areas of difficulty for her. One is installing new packages. She is now getting used to "su" and "aptitude", but hasn't quite got a handle on adding new things to the /etc/apt/sources.list. Improvement could be made by providing an easier, KDE program to manage Debian packages. The transition between a regular and superuser program should be handled by the GUI very much like how aptitude handles it now (ie, "enter root password now").
The only real source of frustration is the lack of support for multi-media. Basically, she wants to be able to watch video that she downloads, and in many cases she just gives up. Also, she likes to make photo albums on CD, and she uses the k3b program. This works great, but again, needing to become superuser just to burn a CD was a hurdle.
She's mostly over the difficulties. The confidence gained in those first few minutes, where she found it easy to customize her desktop, has proven to be the saviour that made her stay on Linux.
The most difficult aspects were:
- Installing new packages
- Being unable to view video
Similar experiences here. I was a full-blown mandrake user (because of the easy installation and the terrific hardware support) But needed more recent packages. Made a debian installation using knoppix and was astonished. First of all the install script is very very easy (easier than windows XP in my opinion) After an upgrade an a gnome installation I had a very good configured system which runs much faster than mandrake. Installation of the nvidia driver (which can be a pain in the ass) went terrific. All packages I wanted installed without any problems.
Problems I experience with knoppix are the same for all linux distro's .... People sometimes need specific software that is only available for windows or xp.
To summarize:
- Office I don't see any problems switching from MS Office to Open Office. runs out of the box
- Internet Browsing Mozilla and konqueror are great browsers, though I experienced problems with sites built for internet explorer.
- Mail As Knoppix has kde as basic window manager, kmail runs out of the box. Don\t see any problem migrating from MS Outlook. Don't miss any features. Second option is mozilla thunderbird which is a very nice mail client with great anti-spam tools.
- Video: With additional installation: support for real / wmv / quicktime /divx /xvid. Does not run out of the box (probably due to licensing problems)
- Instant messaging Important for a lot of users. Gaim is completely msn compatible and runs out of the box.
- Peer to peer Not out of the box, but with installation of additional packages (mldonkey) you can connect to any p2p service.
- Development Knoppix has great html tools (bluefish) For commandline freaks, knoppix has a good configuration (vi, mc, mutt, etc etc.)
