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Using Knoppix

I know I've already gone on about how good Knoppix is, but today I really found out how good it is. Since being back from India, I've been using my own laptop for work, for three reasons:

1. It took two weeks to find me a permanent desk for my PC and when I did get it back, it was whisked away again to temporarily replace someone elses that had broke.
2. I'm running Linux on my laptop, which is perfect for the new system I've been working on; Windows is just not capable of giving the same performance or ease of use.
3. It's faster and the desktop effects make it look a darn site sexier than Windows on an old P4.

Thing is, today I'd not only left my brain at home, but also my laptop charger, which I realised to my chagrin when I got to work! So, the first few hours were not so productive, as I'm busily both hunting for a charger that will work on my laptop, or a replacement should my first search prove futile. Finding a charger was not too fruitful, which is only to be expected, as the laptop was a Philips, a company not widely know for their laptops. I did find one charger, but it was only a 12V when what I needed was 19Vs (I had to look that one up just now!) Finally, with only 20 minutes to go until the battery had died, I managed to get hold of a PC with a near dead hard drive. Thankfully, I had my Knoppix disk kicking about the office (used to retrieve files on the very same computer last week!) which started up nice and quickly, recognising all the hardware, and giving me all the wonderful Compiz gloss.

It did take me a little while to figure out how to get it connected to the network, as Knoppix uses its own network manager, although the cryptic messages on the normal network manager gives no indication of this. I even managed to get Flash Player running as a plugin for Icemonkey (Knoppix's version of Firefox) to look at the occasional funny video on YouTube! Frankly, I was just amazed at the speed of the OS, especially when you consider that it is running only off of a DVD and RAM, and further considering all the graphical effects it's implementing with Compiz.

Much as I liked it though, I still think you can't beat an installed OS, as I did miss some of the more obscure programs which I use, and I know that after a few days of using the live distro, I'd soon get tired of having to enter the networking information each time i restarted the computer!