When you see the boot
screen, press Enter. When the DVD or CD boots, the following happens, respectively:
KNOPPIX starts up. A fully functional KNOPPIX desktop Linux system will boot
directly from the DVD. From that Linux system, you can do everything you??™d expect to
do from a modern desktop computing system: write documents, play music, communicate
over the Internet, work with images, and so on. If you have a wired Ethernet connection
that connects to the Internet when you start up Windows, most likely it will also
connect automatically when KNOPPIX starts.
Damn Small Linux (DSL) starts up. This small, amazing desktop-oriented Linux system
starts up directly from the CD that comes with this book. Besides being expandable
and adaptable, DSL runs on everything from low-end PCs to powerful workstation hardware
while being small enough to fit on a mini CD (only about 50MB in size).
Now that you have seen some examples of what Linux can be, read on to see what Linux is and
where it came from.
Understanding Linux
People who don??™t know what Linux is sometimes ask me if it??™s a program that runs on Microsoft
Windows. When I tell them that Linux is, itself, an operating system like Windows and that they
can remove (or never purchase) Windows, I sometimes get a surprised reaction: ???A PC can run
with nothing from Microsoft on it???? The answer is yes!
The next question about Linux is often: ???How can Linux be free???? While the full answer to that is a
bit longer (and covered later), the short answer is: "Because the people who write the code license
it to be freely distributed.
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