Editor's Note: Our own Professor Knopper has another life as the creator and maintainer of the popular Knoppix Live Linux distro. With its large collection of troubleshooting and diagnostic tools, Knoppix is a trusted companion for system administrators and other IT professionals, but Knoppix also comes with a vast collection of desktop tools, which means it is fully functional as an everyday Linux system on a live disk. In this article, Klaus offers some thoughts and tips on the new Knoppix 8.1, which is included on this month's DVD.

After months of preparation, the English language version of Knoppix 8.1 is finally available [1]. Due to the increasing complexity of applications and dependencies, as well as the strategic decisions of software developers, every year it gets more difficult to make everything work together smoothly. All the changes and redesigns in recent Debian releases mean I now spend more time on testing and workarounds than I do on development and programming. (For an example of the kinds of problems I face, see the box entitled "Labor-Intensive Workarounds for Small Bugs.")

Knoppix 8.1 (Figure 1) contains 4,100 software packages (including libraries and supporting shared data), which results in around 4,500 executable files. Only a small fraction of these programs appear in the desktop menus; many of the latest and greatest tools for data rescue or advanced networking are only found at the command line.

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