"Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night."
- Philip K. Dick

But... but... oh, why not? Being a night person, I didn't like reading that.

I downloaded Knoppix 4.0 today. It is a vast improvement over version 3.2. Why? Version 3.2 was ugly as sin. I mean, the background image had what looked like a media player stuck on pause. The first time I booted 3.2, I spent a few seconds clicking on the background thinking it would do something. 4.0 has a nice background, a highway with blurred street lights at night.

Looks aren't everything. But thankfully, Knoppix has never really been about looks. It's been about what can you do with it. And you can do a lot with 4.0. There seems to be a whole new batch of "networking" tools included with it. There are also updated versions of OpenOffice and Xine and your basic apps. I recently tried Elive, a bootable Linux showcasing Enlightenment 16.5 and 17 (which isn't ready, but I can't wait for). Elive seemed to have a few more flashy things, but that could have been the nature of Enlightenment. Knoppix, based on Debian, was a lot more stable than Elive and probably more usable (sorry Elive folk).

Unfortunatly, I do not have a DVD burner yet. So the version of Knoppix 4.0 I tried was the CD version. I would love to have the DVD version. For I guess more than a year now, I've always had a version of Knoppix laying around. It's been my go-to when I had to work on computers for people. I really do love it. It's free. And anybody can use it without installing anything.

Here are some bittorrent links for Knoppix 4.0:

CD Version
DVD Version

Download and have fun. It makes Billy Gates cry.

  ¶ 1:51 AM