I have the accessability version of Knoppix booted off the dvd drive of my new Compaq system. If does text to speech; which is annoying but would be useful if my vision detorioirates more. I am running an xterm and one of the on-going difficiencies of Linux is crappy fonts. I am ediding this in Vim and must save it to a stick as my user's files are all volitile as they live only in ram. But I have enough ram for quite a bit of stuff, still the size of the user's file space, prehaps enforced by a quota, is about 100 MB. I have to see what I can do about this small and crappy font.
Leafpad is a little better than the xterm font-wise, and I could not find the classic xterm or emacs with which I could make a bigger font. I got annoyed enough with the text to speech that I turned off the speakers. BTW the speakers sound very nice on this new system as the audio output has enough power to drive them effectively. The Mac Mini did not have as much gain.
I guess that I must open a terminal and go exploring on /usr/bin for programs, and I have to remember to save this file off on a stick if I want to keep a record of what I saw here.
Xterm is in /usr/bin/X11, but it has none of the standard hooks. The other terminal emulations are are based on this one. Too bad!
At least, this distro could get my network up correctly without me having to intervene, and it mounted both of the Windows Vista partitions on the harddrive. It is a good rescue system, but I wouldn't install it on my hard drive to use everyday. I don't appreciate anyone, even Klaus Knopper deciding what UNIX applications I can't have in my distro. I still use a xterm with big fonts and emacs. I could even live with vim, but having a terminal in which I can't change the font sizes is totally losing, and even more so in a distro that has accessibility features. Not having big clear fonts on a system that does text to speech doesn't make much sense.
This looks like the editor in pine, which I havn't looked at in a couple of years. In fact, I found a security hole in pine on Solaris 10 that made it possible to run a script out of a mail message without approval. I stopped using it right away. This is a pico workalike since appearently pico and pine aren't free in this distro. As far as I know is is open source in the US, but since Knoppix is German, it may not be free under the laws there. This is still running in the terminal program that came with this version of Knoppix ( v. 6) and so has the crumby font. I haven't found any of the font size hooks that come with the classical xterm. In fact I haven't found xterm, yet.
This is PCLinuxOS booted off a live cd image from a dvd into 3 gb of ram. It has xterm with the standard hooks so I can make a bigger font. I didn't see emacs, but this is vim.
This system autoconfig'ed the network and I was able to go out to the internet with mozilla right away. I have to see if it mounted the windows partitions on the harddrive and if it can deal with USB sticks, so that I can save this file.
It is possible that because of the space restrictions of a live CD image that there are things in the full distros that cannot be put on the CD image, such as emacs, which is really not that big in toto, maybe about 25 MB.
I saw that some familiar image viewing and audio progrsams are here and I was able to run a video from excite.com with no effort. At the moment this distor does better than Knoppix 6.