Usage

After the events with my display, it was good to see that KDE 3.1 started up very nicely. I was delightfully surprised at the level of customization available when it came to the look and feel of KDE. There was a large assortment of available desktop wallpapers, and I felt at home with all of the themes and panels available. It wasn't quite as nice as KDE 3.3 which I have on my Yoper install, but 3.1 was still nice. (Hopefully the next release will ship with KDE 3.3)

Knoppix 3.6 comes with an amazing amount of software, including:
-Mozilla Suite
-Wine
-xine
-XMMS
-Kview
-The Gimp
-gaim
-OpenOffice.org
and many more!

The start-up speed for these applications was incredible, and I felt more like I was using a Pentium IV running Windows rather than an ancient Pentium II, speed-wise. Even the Internet seemed faster! The multi-tasking was very smooth, and there was no real noticeable delay even when runningmore than six programs at once. At one point I was listening to my Cowboy Bebop OST Collection with XMMS, reading Megatokyo archives with Kuickshow, running the Desktop Config, and had Mozilla running with 5 tabs! The sound was smooth and ran at a normal speed, the graphics rendering was astounding, and the font-resolution was breath-taking. In a nutshell: FAST.

Many people also wonder whether you can still interact with your hard-drive, even while using a Live-CD. The answer is yes. By default the hard-drive is mounted as read-only, but you can unmount it and remount it as read-write. By doing this, you could effectively turn Knoppix into your primary distro.