Still Looking for a gnopix-style CD

[Martin McCormick]

Jan and Bertil Smark Nilsson writes:
>Part of the problem finding your iso could be that you're spelling it 
>incorrectly. If you do a search, it won't come up. It is spelt knoppix.

	Well, there was that problem plus finding one that I could
start in some form of accessible manner.  I was pleasantly surprised
to find out about the oralux knoppix disk and it did the job very
well.  The computer in question is a 400-MHZ Pentium Gateway computer
with 65 megs of RAM.  The sound card did not come up at all using the
default setup on the oralux disk, but I did try the knoppix alsa boot
command and the rooster began to crow.

	I su'd to root, mounted the system's hard drive and there was
enough room on that drive to make a tar ball of what was already there
so I got a break there.  The ssh client in oralux copied the roughly
2.5-gig tar file to another system so I can now give this old Gateway
a new lease on life.

	It seems to run the oralux software synthesizer well enough.

	I was under the impression that oralux is a commercial product
and I was ready to buy it if it was reasonable, but I guess that is
true only if you want to purchase an already-burned CD from them.  I
did try it unsuccessfully on a Dell computer both with and without the
alsa option.  It booted, but with no sound.

	That is quite an impressive disk.  If one has the type of
sound card that supports multiple processes, I don't see any problem
with the software speech option assuming you like it, but many sound
cards can only play one stream at a time and I bet that would cause
problems.  The SoundBlaster Live at work can play at least 2 streams at
once if you can stand it, but the yamaha sound card that is built in
to the mother board of the Dell Dimension I have at home will only
play one stream and block all others until that first stream is
finished.

	As a final warning to anyone who needs to know, Windows
supports long file names so I imagine that by making the tar ball of
the Windows file system, I have probably lost all but the DOS-style
8-character file names.  In this particular situation, that is not a
problem, but I sure wouldn't do that to files that still needed to run
on a Windows box. If there is a way to see the long names, I would
like to know for future reference.

	Again, I thank all of you who answered my questions and have a
great holiday season.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group