/[http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE+Community+World+Summit|aKademy] / [http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Talks+@+aKademy|Talks] / Knoppix Talk -=Why I use KDE in Knoppix by Klaus Knopper=- Why make a live CD and yet another distribution when there are already lots around. The main reason was wanting to learn something, as with many projects. He wanted to understand how you can boot from CD, what can be done with that and how to fit a GNU/Linux system on CD. There was the Bootable Business Card disk he got at Cebit which booted into a text system and you had all the tools to rescue your computer. He took that apart, it used a floppy image either on the CD or on a floppy disk if necessary and that is how Knoppix worked until 3.3 when the Linux build got too big. He wanted to put everything he needed in his daily work on the CD, rescue tools, office, so on. Soon it got too big for a 600Meg CD so someone invented a transparant decompresser for a gzipped filesystem, so Knoppix uses this to fit about 2GB on a single CD which makes a lot of space for KDE. He called it Knoppix for Knopper's Unix. Now there are lots of CDs with his name on it and gets lots of support requests so maybe he should have chosen a less personal name for it. He boots up Knoppix but the resolution on his laptop doesn't work with the projector so he reboots using a knoppix option to run X in framebuffer mode. This mode works because it synchronises what you see on the screen with the external VGA port. He is always amazed how well it works with almost all hardware, a lot of hardware doesn't follow any standards. His main reason to use a window manager and desktop environemnt is so he can open lots of shell windows. With KDE you can open lots of consoles in one window. One other reason is you can use cut and paste with the mouse. If you give a lecture to try and get people impressed with GNU/Linux they expect it to have the GUI functionality of other OSs. Hard disks are mounted read only by default for safety. KDE lets you add features to its menus and Knoppix has a menu option to remount drives read/write. This is not possible with TWM for example. You get desktop icons on the fly if you plug in a camera etc. He starts up KControl to change which icons are on the desktop and asks the audience if anyone knows how to find it. The audience tries and eventually get it. One of the main reasons for choosing KDE was fine handling of desktop icons without knowing too many details. Some people have tried to convince him to use another desktop environment which we'll call Dwarf. They said it was written in C which is a simple language but it is also object orientated which means actually it's not simple at all. He finds he has to know far too much of the internals compared to KDE. The other system probably has the same features than KDE but it was much simpler to get it working with KDE. Some people like KDE because it has nice icons and eyecandy and themes etc. Other window managers can do this as well so in Knoppix if you start a GTK application it should have a widget theme that looks the same. KDE lets you move windows and even close them which you can't do with TWM. He shows his first attempt at making a nice background which he drew himself and he was very proud of it. Later he got other people to make the wallpapers as they got more complex. Shows us some different wallpapers. He shows some Knoppix icons too, his hope is that everything will look the same. The first version of Knoppix was based on Red Hat because that it what he was familiar with. RPM was a good tool unfortunatly at the time you could not just update to the next version, you had to format your hard disk and reinstall. Knoppix 1.5 was the last RPM based version. He moved to Debian because it is stable (even Debian unstable) and easily upgradeable. Another reason is that Debian is not likely to be bought by another company and it doesn't exchange its admin tool all the time (because it doesn't have any). So he can write his own admin tools which are just scripts with dialogue wrapper so they work in text or graphical mode. He had kisdn which was a perfect ISDN configuration tool but it is no longer maintained and the sources were not released. If you don't like KDE you can use another window manager, he likes XFCE because it is very small, shows switching from KDE to XFCE. There is also larswm which is a window manager that actually manages the windows. You can not move or resize windows, that is handled by the window manager. It is really cool. Unfortuntaly it is not useable by people who havn't used the shell before so it is not the default. TWM is started by default if the computer does not have much memory. Sometimes the first step of KDE startup (in ksplash) takes a long time, he is not sure why. Another thing cool about KDE is it has a nice default browser. With the default browser of the Dwarf system he can not work out how to view HTML files which is strange for a browser. Question if there is a way to just take a snapshot of your Debian system and put it on a bootable CD. This is difficult because the CD is not writeable but your normal system is so things have to be changed. Someone has made a webpage where you select which packages you want and can then download the ISO, it dosn't work yet. Currently he does updates with shell scripts. Question about installing Knoppix on a hard drive. There is an installation program not available in the menus because the support effort would be too much. This tool was made by Fabian Franz who is at this conference. If you install it you get an almost 100% Debian system. -- Conference Close by Matthias Ettrich In the past 10 days we have had over 400 participants including 180 KDE developers. There are still t-shirts left to our big shame, limited edition akademy ones, very valuable in the near future, buy them on your way out. Have a safe journey home, don't hack and drive. See you next year.