[sf-lug] Virtual meeting notes for Sun 10/3/2021, pair of own suggestions

[Rick Moen]

Quoting aaronco36 (aaronco36 at SDF.ORG):

> While linuxmafia's awesome Rick M has graciously included several
> links to Knoppix in his Debian Knowledgebase of [05], [most of]
> those links don't seem to have been updated in quite some time.
> IMHO, a better source for more up-to-date Knoppix information is
> rather the Knoppix Wiki; see reference [06].

Just a brief note to say it'd be a real miracle if those six links were
still current, since I (variously) wrote and collected them in 2003,
almost two decades ago.

One thing that I'm sure hasn't changed is that, although Knoppix is
appealing as a self-contained desktop system and multifaceted utility
toolkit, it's very questionable as an _installed_ system.  It's just
not designed for that, e.g., it doesn't maintain well from subsequent
binary distro package updates.

I'm guessing you mean, instead, just running it as a live system, which,
sure, I guess, but there are also gobs of other live distros.
Distrowatch lists 147 active ones for x86_64:
https://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=Linux&category=Live+Medium&origin=All&basedon=All&notbasedon=None&desktop=All&architecture=x86_64&package=All&rolling=All&isosize=All&netinstall=All&language=All&defaultinit=All&status=Active#simple

[Update:  Or maybe you do _not_ mean run it in live mode.  We'll get to
that shortly.]

So, well, I don't know _why_ Knoppix specifically.  But OTOH, I have
nothing against.  (As you may recall, I was pretty chuffed when Klaus 
launched it and credited the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card a bunch of
us created in 1999 as its parent distro, being the very first "live"
distro of them all.)

> Besides performing a _full_ installation of Debian GNU/Linux or
> another distro for the purposes of programming/development under
> Linux -- whether that's as a virtualbox machine, a dual-boot setup
> alongside Windows, or as a replacement-for-Windows installation --
> another feasible method for installing+enabling such
> programming/development without significantly disrupting a previous
> Windows installation on Victor's 8 GB and others' comparatively "low
> RAM" 5yr+ machines is to use a Knoppix liveCD/liveDVD/liveUSB as an
> optimized Poor man's install [07].
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Um, SRSLY?  Just because you _can_ install Knoppix onto mass storage
as a no-longer-live-media system, doesn't mean you should.

Anyway, IMO people who are not confident in their data backups and their
ability to reinstall from scratch, if necessary, their OS and
applications ought not to play around with repartitioning, multibooting,
and complex, replacement bootloader setups on their fragile production
systems -- using Knoppix or anything else.

I keep saying this, and you guys keep not wanting to hear what I'm
saying.  Well, I sure hope nothing bad happens, and things work out.

-- 
Cheers,                          "To make error is human. To propagate error
Rick Moen                        to all server in automatic way is #devops."
rick at linuxmafia.com              @DEVOPS_BORAT
McQ! (4x80)