Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Kanotix 64-2005-03 – An excellent Debain based Linux distribution.
Though I like my Gentoo installation the most; especially for the control that it offers, I tend to keep it bare and start up in console mode all of the time. However there are times when I dislike the “compile from source” way of installing stuff. These are times, when I long for distributions that work out of the box with easy installation of binaries. Kanotix is one such distribution based on Debian-Sid with up-to-date packages, fantastic hardware recognition, simplest ‘n fastest hard-drive installation and of course a great Live-CD. It also has a 64 bit version called Kanotix64 which is a delight to work with.
First impressions:
Though at first glance, Kanotix resembles Knoppix and is even based on it, what sets it apart is its ability to painlessly install onto hard-drives and more importantly update it. When I booted it first, I was surprised to see a GRUB loader instead of the standard LILO that we are so used to. I started the Live-CD version with an up-to-date 2.6 kernel and was pleasantly surprised. It detected almost all my hardware flawlessly except my Broadcom (BCM4318) Wireless adapter, and brought up KDE 3.4 GUI that we’ve grown to love. I was so impressed with the Live-CD that I decided to install onto my hard-drive immediately. That’s right Kanotix comes with a very impressive list of packages including K3B for burning DVDs, OpenOffice suite, PPPOE client, DHCP client, Instant messaging, browsers and more. The complete list of packages for Kanotix 64-2005-03 can be found here.
Hard-Drive Install:
This has to be one the most pleasing things about this distribution. The hard-drive installation is so painless and one of the fastest I’ve ever seen. I generally opt for Grub-Install on my root partition, loading it from my NT loader. Since I was in the terminal for installing, I could do this easily by mounting my C:>, creating the boot loader file, and modifying boot.ini. After a quick reboot, Voila! I had the exact installation of the Live-CD on my hard-drive.
Wireless:
As I mentioned earlier, Kanotix couldn’t detect my wireless adapter which is a Broadcom (BCM4318) Airforce One 54.g 802.11g wireless adapter. I wasn’t surprised as I already knew native drivers for this device didn’t exist. So I fired up ndiswrapper, loaded my xp64 wireless driver. Much to my annoyance the driver failed to load. A quick inspection showed me the version of ndiswrapper to be 1.5. Since this driver works only with ndiswrapper 1.2, I uninstalled ndiswrapper 1.5 and installed ndiswrapper 1.2, making it from source. As expected, I got my wireless adapter working and connected to my access point. Configuration of my wireless connection using kWifiManager proved to be painless. After adding ndiswrapper to my kernel modules and a reboot later, I had wireless connectivity at startup. Nice.
Conclusion:
I think this is one of the most underrated distributions. The quality of this distribution is very impressive and will appeal to end-users and power-users alike. Hardware detection and package selection is one of the best available. Being Debian based, installing/updating packages using apt-get/kPackageManager/Synaptic makes package management a breeze. Kudos to developer Kano for making such an awesome distribution.
Related Links:
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First impressions:
Though at first glance, Kanotix resembles Knoppix and is even based on it, what sets it apart is its ability to painlessly install onto hard-drives and more importantly update it. When I booted it first, I was surprised to see a GRUB loader instead of the standard LILO that we are so used to. I started the Live-CD version with an up-to-date 2.6 kernel and was pleasantly surprised. It detected almost all my hardware flawlessly except my Broadcom (BCM4318) Wireless adapter, and brought up KDE 3.4 GUI that we’ve grown to love. I was so impressed with the Live-CD that I decided to install onto my hard-drive immediately. That’s right Kanotix comes with a very impressive list of packages including K3B for burning DVDs, OpenOffice suite, PPPOE client, DHCP client, Instant messaging, browsers and more. The complete list of packages for Kanotix 64-2005-03 can be found here.
Hard-Drive Install:
This has to be one the most pleasing things about this distribution. The hard-drive installation is so painless and one of the fastest I’ve ever seen. I generally opt for Grub-Install on my root partition, loading it from my NT loader. Since I was in the terminal for installing, I could do this easily by mounting my C:>, creating the boot loader file, and modifying boot.ini. After a quick reboot, Voila! I had the exact installation of the Live-CD on my hard-drive.
Wireless:
As I mentioned earlier, Kanotix couldn’t detect my wireless adapter which is a Broadcom (BCM4318) Airforce One 54.g 802.11g wireless adapter. I wasn’t surprised as I already knew native drivers for this device didn’t exist. So I fired up ndiswrapper, loaded my xp64 wireless driver. Much to my annoyance the driver failed to load. A quick inspection showed me the version of ndiswrapper to be 1.5. Since this driver works only with ndiswrapper 1.2, I uninstalled ndiswrapper 1.5 and installed ndiswrapper 1.2, making it from source. As expected, I got my wireless adapter working and connected to my access point. Configuration of my wireless connection using kWifiManager proved to be painless. After adding ndiswrapper to my kernel modules and a reboot later, I had wireless connectivity at startup. Nice.
Conclusion:
I think this is one of the most underrated distributions. The quality of this distribution is very impressive and will appeal to end-users and power-users alike. Hardware detection and package selection is one of the best available. Being Debian based, installing/updating packages using apt-get/kPackageManager/Synaptic makes package management a breeze. Kudos to developer Kano for making such an awesome distribution.
Related Links:
- Kanotix Wiki - English
- Great review of Kanotix in Distrowatch.com by Robert Storey
- Another great review of Kanotix in Linux.com by Preston St. Pierre
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