Tread lightly on the things of earth

In planning to play with the Knoppix Linux-on-a-CD distribution some more — I just spent time with O’Reilly’s fascinating new title Knoppix Hacks at the bookstore — I also stumbled on Gnoppix. Gnoppix is essentially Knoppix but with a GNOME desktop instead of KDE.

I saw that Gnoppix is “based on Ubuntu Linux,” but what I didn’t realize until now that I’ve burned the image to CD is that Gnoppix is byte-for-byte exactly the same thing as the Ubuntu Live CD (as of GNOPPIX 0.8.2 Warty, that is).

I’ve recently become enthusiastic about Ubuntu as a starting-point Linux distribution for people less propeller-headed than me. I’m already lined up with its guiding philosophy, even:

“Ubuntu” is an ancient African word, meaning “humanity to others”. Ubuntu also means “I am what I am because of who we all are”. The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.

John concludes in his GNOME Journal piece concerning whether the GNOME desktop (and Ubuntu) meets “the liberal arts major test”:

With Ubuntu [relative to Debian sid], you get a stable, up-to-date desktop with fewer updates between releases, so I believe [my liberal arts major friend] should be able to administer it on her own.

I believe this two year experiment shows that the GNOME desktop is definitely user-friendly enough to be used by the average user. The administration side of Linux is not quite ready for the Liberal Arts Major, but Ubuntu is making some fairly large strides in this area.

More:

• Theantix reviews Ubuntu at Kuro5hin
• ArsTechnica gives Ubuntu its “Distribution of the Year” award for 2004

Bonus point of interest:
I see Kevin publishes The GNOME Journal using Textpattern, as I noticed here.