Talk:Kanotix

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[edit] Claim about best hardware detection

The source for saying that Kanotix has the best hardware detection is on the homepage:

"(Kanotix) recognizes more modern hardware than any other operating system in use today."

I don't know how it has to be sourced but could somebody else re-add it? Thanks. 0L1 20:24, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

In my experience this is true, so I added the claim. --Widefox 10:41, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this here, I should probably have done it in the first place. I very briefly justified the removal due to the limit on the edit summary size. I know that there *is* a source for saying that, and the statement is even *correct*. However, there are still 3 issues about it:

• "It is claimed" is very vague on who claims that. The statement should at least be changed to indicate who/what claims that. In this case, the Kanotix website.
• The Kanotix's website's claim about this is itself unfounded. It is very similar to a random OS builder claiming "foo OS is the best in the world.". That may happen to be true. However, Kanotix's website doesn't appear to deserve being trusted. Just below the claim about hardware recognition, it is claimed that "[Kanotix] is ideal for use [...] as a server.", which is of course unfounded and pretty much removes all of the website's credibility.
• Even if the claim was right, it wouldn't be necessarily pertinent. For example, if Kanotix is "1%" better in hardware recognition than Knoppix, and 5% better on average than other distros, then it doesn't deserve being mentioned in this way.

I'm consequently removing the claim again until these issues are solved/discussed. Note that the article already states that Kanotix has "advanced hardware detection".--Chealer 20:17, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Looking at it again, I think you are right. 0L1 15:03, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

Having downloaded Kanotix 2006.1 RC4 a few days ago, I can say that it did much better at hardware detection than most livecds I've tried. The biggest problem with server boards is that the default graphics chip is the Rage XL, for which ATI has dropped support. It also seems that the Linux driver is broken. Most distros come up at 800x600 in vesa, but Kanotix came up at 1024x768, just like I would have set it. The shell script for setting the network card was easier to find than most and worked correctly. Overall many livecds are very sluggish, some because they read all commands (even ls) from disk, every time. Kanotix was one of the fastest and easiest to use out of the box that I have tried so far. I'll probably do a live install later and see how easily it handles updates and installation of new programs. I tried to update gentoo 2006.1 with Firefox 2.0 a few days ago and it took at least an hour and a half (I had to let it run overnight, so I don't know how long it actually took), which is absurd. Updating Red Hat took about 3 minutes, most of which was figuring out how the update worked. Is was is simple but not obvious or documented in the readme. I expect kanotix to be in this category.

Common linux install problems I've seen recently see are driver support for nvidia cards, livecds that choke with more than one ethernet port that's not set by DHCP, and inability to mount LVM volumes. Few livecds handle LVM today, and kanotix was not an exception. Some do have dm-mod compiled in, and you can modprobe it and mount the volume, not kanotix. Curiously, the OpenSuse 10.1 liveDVD would not mount a SLED 10 /boot partition, although it did mount the root partition, which was reiser if I recall. Interoperability is not so great among linux distros, and not always between releases of the same distro, which is just plain weird.

But overall my initial impression was very favorable.

64.172.115.2Rich