Common Sense for the Biochemist

Wouldn't it be great if there was a computer operating system that was small enough to fit on a CD, including all the essential programs like Word, excel, outlook, and a web browser like Firefox. And what the heck, lets make all that available for free. With any computer that has a bootable CD-ROM drive you could drop this CD in it and have your own personal operating system up and running on that computer. Oh wait, you can do that. You know, I try to keep up with technology but looking at what is available these days, I have definitely slipped a little. So what is this great little CD I am talking about, it is Knoppix. Knoppix is what is known as a live CD and contains a version of the linux operating system along with several open source programs such as the MS office clone, Open Office and that great web browser, Firefox. So I now have the option of booting to a linux operating system without having to worry about partitioning my hard drive, which is not for the faint of heart. The only real tricky part of this whole experience has been burning the CD-image that I downloaded correctly onto a CD, which involved a little bit of special software. After that, I had to contact the "computer guru" of our department to set my CD-Rom drive as the first drive the BIOS looks at when booting because the previous "guru" had password-protected changes to the BIOS system. After that, I was in business. Knoppix, or any linux OS does not like to share hard drive space with Windows XP, so in order to save anything the easiest option is saving to a USB drive (I am currently working on that). Because Knoppix is open source, there are several customized versions available, including Gnoppix which uses a different GUI, and a version I am looking forward to sniffing around in - BioKnoppix, a version that comes loaded with Bioinformatics software. Hopefully I will never have to use this disk for this reason but Knoppix can be used as a recovery disk to recover information from a hard drive when your Windows OS crashes. And did I mention it is free!!!! By the way, this post is the first (maybe of many) written using the firefox browser running on a Knoppix/Linux operating system. Alright, back to learning this new OS.