First Look at Knoppix 4.0

July 6, 2005

This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar

The much awaited "maxi" DVD edition of Knoppix 4.0 was presented at the Linux Tag conference in Karlsruhe, Germany last week. As usual, this was a special edition and not a public release, but it didn't take long before the ISO image hit some of the popular BitTorrent download sites and it was even spotted on a few FTP servers a few days later. The reason for the high demand is not hard to understand - Knoppix 4.0 is the largest live Linux DVD ever produced, with a great collection of "the best open source software" available today.

First, some numbers. The size of the single-layer compressed DVD image is 4,122 MB. It contains over 9 GB of software in the form of 2,663 Debian packages providing more than 5,300 individual programs. Most of them come from the recently released Debian 3.1 "sarge", but there are several noteworthy upgrades, such as KDE 3.4.1. KDE is still the default desktop, but Knoppix 4.0 now contains ten other desktop environments and window managers, including the complete GNOME (2.8.1) and XFce (3.8.16 and 4.0.6), and even some exotic ones, such as LarsWM, Openbox, and RatPoison. Booting this DVD on a 4-year old 1.4 GHz Pentium 4 system with 384 MB of RAM took just under 8 minutes (from the GRUB boot prompt to KDE); for comparison, booting the Knoppix 3.9 CD on the same system took only about 3.5 minutes.

It needs to be mentioned that, starting from version 4.0, Knoppix will be split into two editions - "maxi" DVD and "light" CD. The light edition will essentially be the same Knoppix live CD that we have come to love and appreciate over the last couple of years, except that all development software will be removed and replaced with more general desktop applications. The public release of Knoppix 4.0 is expected within the next few weeks, with the "maxi" DVD and "light" CD editions appearing simultaneously.

The Knoppix 4.0 DVD contains many of the most popular open source software packages for the desktop, server, office, graphics, multimedia, and development. Compared to the live CD edition, users now have a choice of KOffice (1.3.5) and GNOME Office (AbiWord + Gnumeric), in addition to OpenOffice.org (a recent beta of the 2.0 series). On the server side of things, both Apache 1.3 and 2.0 are present, and, unlike the CD edition, the DVD also includes PostgreSQL 8. Some other interesting packages that have been missing from all recent Knoppix CD releases include Blender, Eclipse, GnuCash, Mozilla, LyX and teTeX. One downside of the DVD is that, with so many applications included, the standard Debian menus tend to be badly cluttered and poorly organized; as an example, the "Internet" submenu contains a total of 76 items, while the "System" submenu contains 88 items!

Besides adding new packages, what else is new in Knoppix 4.0? In the absence of any changelog we had to dig around the menus and file system to see what exciting things are hiding under the bonnet. The DVD has retained the Unionfs file system so extra packages can be installed on the fly - either from Debian repositories with apt-get or the newly included Synaptic, or via the web-based Klik installer, which also includes some non-free packages. A new feature is the ability to switch between the 11 desktop environments through a "Restart KNOPPIX Desktop" utility. Also, the DVD now contains a lot more documentation in HTML and PDF formats, including the excellent 133-page Knowing Knoppix and m23 Software Distribution guides.

There seems to be an increasing level of collaboration between the developers of Knoppix and other Knoppix-derived live CD and DVD projects. The Kanotix developers contributed some DSL network configuration and hard disk installation code (due to data decompression, a partition of at least 12 GB in size is required for installing the DVD edition of Knoppix 4.0 on the hard disk). Much of the newly included scientific and statistical software was accepted from the Quantian and Paipix live DVD projects, while a lot of educational software found its way into Knoppix from Freeduc, a distribution designed for schools.

Although providing a large number of applications on the DVD should please those users who missed some important pieces of software on the earlier CD editions, the size of the DVD presents its own set of problems. We have already mentioned the unsightly and difficult-to-navigate menus, but a potentially more annoying problem is the general sluggishness of the system while it runs from the DVD. Maybe a more modern DVD drive would be able to launch software packages in a speedier manner, but we were not impressed with a delay lasting several minutes after clicking on a PDF file in Konqueror. Likewise, OpenOffice.org Writer took 150 seconds to launch. Even navigating the menus was painfully slow, much slower than any of the CD editions. Of course, once an application is cached in the memory it starts a lot faster, but the first run of any large software package will likely test your patience.

This brings in the question about how useful a 4 GB Knoppix live DVD really is. Although it is easy to get excited over all the goodies available at a mouse click, many people will undoubtedly be put off by the long boot times, poor system responsiveness and cluttered menus. After having played with the system for a few minutes, we found ourselves craving for the much leaner and faster Knoppix CD - although not nearly as full-featured as the DVD edition, it contains enough applications to satisfy the majority of users. Whether you use Knoppix as a rescue CD, carry it around to boot computers in Internet cafes, or employ it to demonstrate Linux and open source software to interested parties, the CD edition of Knoppix will probably remain a more practical tool than the more complete, but also more sluggish DVD edition.

Index entries for this article
GuestArticles	Bodnar, Ladislav

First Look at Knoppix 4.0

Posted Jul 7, 2005 7:23 UTC (Thu) by Soruk (guest, #2722) [Link]

I like the dev tools being on the CD - and I'd need to upgrade pretty much my entire system just to be able to download the DVD (the old 2Gb filesize limit) so much as I'd like to try the new one, I'll be sticking to 3.x.

State of the Menu System

Posted Jul 7, 2005 13:56 UTC (Thu) by bkw1a (guest, #4101) [Link] (1 responses)

the standard Debian menus tend to be badly cluttered and poorly organized; as an example, the "Internet" submenu contains a total of 76 items, while the "System" submenu contains 88 items!

This is a problem that plagues every current Linux distribution I've looked at. It seems to me that there's a basic problem somewhere in the menu-generating philosophy now being used by KDE and Gnome.

In the "good old days" the menu was built up from *.desktop and *.directory files stored in a tree under /etc/X11/applnk (or someplace similar). Rearranging menu items was as simple as moving files and creating new categories required only creating new directories. (NB. The current menu system claims to still support this "legacy" system, but I've was never been able to make it work reliably.)

In the current scheme, *.desktop files specify their category internally, and the menu tree is built up dynamically as these files are read at login time. In principle, this makes things easier for system administrators by assigning the task of menu organization to software developers and packagers. When a sysadmin installs or uninstalls an rpm, the menu should just be automatically updated appropriately, with no thought required.

In practice, this fails because developers typically don't put much thought into which category their program belongs in (most end up in something like "internet"). This problem is compounded by the new complexity of the menu system, which makes it hard for system administrators to rearrange the menus in a better way and, once rearranged, keep them sorted out as new and upgraded rpms are installed.

It seems like a really useful community project would be to develop an application menu registry and a standard application menu. The process would go something like this:

Say you're a gimp developer. You submit a request to the menu registry group, saying you've got this graphics program that manipulates raster graphics. You say you'd like to put it into the "internet" category of the menu. The registry group e-mails you back and says, sorry, but this program isn't really appropriate for the "internet" category. How about the "Graphics/Raster" category instead? OK, you say. So the menu registry web site is updated, and your application is now officially assigned to the "Graphics/Raster" category. You create an appropriate *.desktop file in the rpm for your program, and distribute it.

Having the registry available on a web site would allow automated checks to see if your application menus were in compliance with the standard.

Is anybody working on such a project now? I'd really like to see something like this.

State of the Menu System

Posted Jul 14, 2005 19:25 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

You might try to work on this idea with folks of freedesktop.org, this seems to be currently the proper place for such initiative.

Use prelink to reduce process startup delay

Posted Jul 7, 2005 16:11 UTC (Thu) by jreiser (subscriber, #11027) [Link] (1 responses)

In KNOPPIX_V3.9-2005-05-27-EN the shared libraries have not been "prelink"ed. This contributes to slow startup of each execve() because ld-linux.so.2 must perform relocations based on the actual addresses occupied by each shared library. Prelinking the most common shared libraries (including ld-linux.so.2 itself) gets best-case performance usually, with fall-back to the old-and-slow behavior when necessary. Prelink is an application available on RedHat, Fedora Core, and other systems; it works with any Linux 2.6 or current 2.4 kernel version.

Detect successful prelink by "readelf --segments foo.so" and check for non-zero VirtAddr of the first LOAD.

Use prelink to reduce process startup delay

Posted Jul 10, 2005 19:49 UTC (Sun) by xkahn (subscriber, #1575) [Link]

So something like this:

readelf --segments /lib/ld-linux.so.2 | grep LOAD | head -1 | awk '{print $3}' | grep -q 0x00000000 && echo "No Preload" || echo "Preload"

4GB DVDs [ot]

Posted Jul 15, 2005 15:44 UTC (Fri) by Luyseyal (guest, #15693) [Link] (2 responses)

How do you burn a 4GB DVD image under Linux? I always end up with coasters if I try to burn anything with files over 2GB. I've heard this is a problem with a filesystem driver or something.

Any ideas?
-l

4GB DVDs [ot]

Posted Jul 16, 2005 20:38 UTC (Sat) by redoscar (guest, #31020) [Link]

Initially, I tried using a minimal Libranet 2.8.1 install with K3b, cdrecord, and growisofs from Sid. DVD coasters were instantaneous.

Then, using SimplyMepis 3.3.1-1, I was able to successfully burn the Knoppix 4.0 DVD on my first attempt. Mepis was using the 2.6.10 kernel, but it was a standard installation of the Mepis CD. And this is on an old 500Mhz AMD K6-2, 256MB machine. I used the Ext3 filesystem on the installs and preserved the /home partition from the Libranet install for use by Mepis (the DVD .iso files were on the /home partition).

I can't tell you why it worked, it just did.

Red

4GB DVDs [ot]

Posted Aug 10, 2005 16:09 UTC (Wed) by cbetan (guest, #10157) [Link]

The 2GB limitation applies to individual files you want to burn on a iso9660 filesystem.

In the case of Knoppix image -and this is the magic word: "image"- what you have to do is burn the pre-formatted iso9660 image into the dvd, not burn the iso file as a file.

If you use the program 'growisofs' (part of the dvd+rw-tools package):

bash# growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvdrw=knoppix.iso

The line above will do the job (given your burner is /dev/dvdrw). However:

bash# growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvdrw knoppix.iso

Without the 'equal' sign you will try to burn knoppix.iso as an individual file inside the dvd iso filesystem. For instance:
bash# growisofs -R -J -Z /dev/dvdrw *.mp3

That will copy your mp3 files to your dvd; if you mount the dvd, you will see your mp3 files.
However, if one of your mp3 files if bigger than 2GB, then growisofs will fail and you will make yet another coaster.

Hope that helps...