KANOTIX - The Knoppix Improved [LWN.net]

June 1, 2005

This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar

Is there a little-known Linux distribution consistently rated as one of the best by a large and varied spectrum of Linux users? If we were to name one, it would surely have to be KANOTIX, a Knoppix-based live and installation CD, which was, until recently, one of the best-kept secrets of the Linux distribution world. Launched in early 2004 by Joerg Schirottke, a computer science graduate from Kulmbach, Germany, the fame of the increasingly popular KANOTIX project has spread mainly due to the many time-saving improvements over its better-known parent. Here is a list of some of the more interesting features of KANOTIX:

KANOTIX has improved considerably Klaus Knopper's hardware auto-detection and auto-configuration module. Users report that KANOTIX is one of the very few distributions that boots into a graphical desktop with touchpads on most notebooks working straight away. Many digital cameras, PDAs, and storage devices are configured on the fly, while wireless networking, both for network access and printing, is also ready for use right after the boot. Granted, some of these modules are experimental and might cause problems in certain hardware configurations - this is why Klaus Knopper has been reluctant to include them in Knoppix. But for many novice and medium-skilled Linux users such superb autoconfiguration of their hardware is a blessing, and a welcome surprise, compared to most other distributions.
KANOTIX has been optimized for notebooks. We have mentioned the automatic configuration of touchpads, but that's not the whole story. The distribution also includes PowerNowd, a daemon which works as a client of the CPUFreq driver and which has an ability to adjust the speed of the CPU depending on system load.
KANOTIX can be installed on one's hard disk with a simple graphical installer. While this program was originally developed for Knoppix, the KANOTIX maintainers have made a number of behind-the-scenes improvements. As a result (and in the true spirit of the GPL), the KANOTIX installer is now used by both KANOTIX and Knoppix, where it has been given preference over the original installer.
As with most live CDs nowadays, KANOTIX also provides a way to save user's configuration and preferences to a variety of storage media, including floppy disks, USB pen drives, and hard disks. An interesting variation of this task is that if the settings are saved to a hard disk partition, specifying "myconfig=scan" at boot time will make KANOTIX search all hard disks for the settings file and load it automatically, without the user having to remember the location. Needless to say, the ability to set a persistent /home directory is also present in KANOTIX.
The latest version of KANOTIX uses the Unionfs file system. While this is also true for the more recent releases of Knoppix, the KANOTIX developers have made a number of unusual enhancements to the concept. Firstly, Unionfs is optional; to activate it, "unionfs" has to be added to the boot prompt. However, if the KANOTIX hardware detection program detects the presence of ATI or NVIDIA drivers, it will enable Unionfs automatically - this way the users can easily install any proprietary ATI or NVIDIA graphics drivers, if they so desire. Unionfs can also be loaded either as read-only (unionro) to prevent files from being overwritten, or as read-write (unionrw), and it can even be activated after the CD is fully booted, although this will only set the Unionfs into the home directory.
KANOTIX comes with a selection of applications that is probably better suited for an average home user that those included in Knoppix. Firefox has been the default browser for several releases and many will find the presence of the Guarddog firewall or the Skype telephony application a pleasant surprise. Firefox also comes pre-configured with the Java plugin. The best of all, however, is the ability to install more applications through klik, a sophisticated web-based interface for installing software on Knoppix and KANOTIX. New programs can be installed either with a single mouse click while browsing the applications on the above-mentioned web site, or by typing "klik://program_name" in Firefox. The range of available software is surprisingly large, including many non-free programs, such as the Flash plugin, Real Player, Acrobat Reader, NVIDIA and ATI drivers, just to mention the more obvious ones. Beta versions of certain popular software packages, e.g. OpenOffice.org 2.0, are also provided for one-click download and installation.
The developers of KANOTIX have also written a large number of specialist bash scripts for various tasks. These are located in /usr/local/bin and although they are not well commented (or documented), most of them have self-explanatory names. The scripts vary from configuring hardware drivers to starting services, fixing problems, and installing software.
A 64-bit edition of KANOTIX has also been released. This is one of the very few live CDs providing native support for the AMD64 and Intel EM64T processors. The live CD is based on the "pure64" branch of Debian Sid, with a compatibility layer to run certain 32-bit applications, such as OpenOffice.org.

It is hard not to be impressed with KANOTIX. We know of several users who have tried dozens of Linux distributions before finally settling on KANOTIX (because KANOTIX just works, they declare confidently), with no more interest in trying other distributions. The project's success formula is simple: take all the hard configuration work away from the users - instead, present them with a complete and pre-configured desktop ready to be enjoyed to the full. Whether as a live CD or a full distribution installed on hard disk, KANOTIX beats the competition by including dozens of under-the-hood improvements that makes Linux equal, if not better, than any other desktop operating system available today.

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