By Lou Dolinar
Last in a series
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

Time to catch up with email this week. After our last four columns on Linux, operating systems are on the front burner, along with some general interest questions.

The Knoppix version of Linux, which reader Howard Bates alerted me to a while back, seems to be stirring the most interest. Knoppix, as you’ll recall, fits on a single CD, boots, detects hardware, and installs itself without ever touching your hard drive. To the extent you can make a case for desktop Linux, you can make a particularly good case for Knoppix. I’ve heard from perhaps a half-dozen readers who have tried it. The following is typical:

“I love Knoppix…I just take the CD with my personal settings also burned onto the disk and away I go. No longer do I have to deal with how someone else sets up their PC. Plop it and presto!
“My mom got tired of her Windows PC and all the problems she has with it. Too slow, error messages everywhere, no one available to fix it (she lives far away from me). She is 74 so is not interested in upgrading to XP, buying a new machine, or anything else that involves money or learning the ins and outs of a new system. She just wants something to use to read her mail off Yahoo and browse the Internet.
“So I sent her a Knoppix disk. She loves it. No matter what she does she can just restart the machine if she thinks she messed something up (she never does mess it up but is concerned that if she does no one will be around to fix the problem). I love my mom but I also love the fact that conversations no longer begin with "Can you help me with my PC - I think I messed things up again."
“She now spends more time messing around with her computer since she knows no matter what she does - the damage is never permanent.
“So, I'm sending a disk to my brother so his kids can hammer away at their PCs without him needing to reinstall the software once a month after they totally nuke the system in their desire to remove, install, "fix" or otherwise improve what they believe can always be fixed by Dad.”

Not everyone loves Linux, however. One such was Richard P. Carpenter, of Danvers, Mass, who adds a warning against over enthusiasm:

“Inspired by columns such as the one I just read via Goggle's Sci-Tech page , I installed SUSE 9.0 as a double boot with Windows 98. The partitioning went fine. SUSE recognized by cable broadband connection but not my modem. My printer ran but my scanner did not. The system ran dog slow and was unattractive despite my changing some of the default settings. No matter what I tried, I could not download from the Internet. Every question I asked tech support was not "covered" by the purchase agreement. Much as I'd love to sing the praises of an open source system, I concluded that SUSE, and probably Linux in general, was not for the average user (me) and did not install it when I bought a new computer. I think glowing reviews should be tempered with reports such as the preceding.”

Lack of driver support is the soft underbelly of Linux. The way to avoid the kind of problems Mr. Carpenter had is pretty simple, though I probably should have emphasized it a bit more: Download one of the free, cd-bootable distributions of Linux. Right now, there are at least two good commercial versions, Xandros and SUSE, and two free ones, Knoppix and DSL Linux, that you can use to test hardware compatibility. My advice: If it doesn’t work on your system with the freebie disk, wait three months and try again. That’s how fast driver support is increasing. It probably will take you at least that long to hack your own solution.