About Linux distros-
Knoppix is a live evaluation bootable CD of Debain. It is small since it all fits on one CD, but its really almost 2GB worth of stuff compressed down to 700mb. It runs from CD and puts nothing on your hdd's unless you want it to.
Linux comes in a wide variety of distributions all geared to a slightly different purpose and organized slightly differently. My scripts will work in any linux distro, though there are some peculiar details such as havinbg to copy the DC client exe's from one location on the CD into the ramdisk which would not be necessary in a hdd-installed distro.
The reason I made overclockix is so that it seti or folding can be run without a hdd in a cluster-style setup with barbones hardware. It's also been modified to include other burn-in applications, network monitoring and security apps, as well as filesystem and low-level hardware tools- so its a pretty handy system recovery disk if one takes a little time to learn how to use these tools.
Finally, my take on distro selsection for newbies has changed somewhat since I tried knoppix and remastered it into overclockix. I started out on redhat personally, and I still think that redhat, suse, and mandrake are good Linux distros for beginners. But I've also come to believe that knoppix or its variants like overclockix are also a good way to start out in linux. For one thing- configuration happens at boot-time and takes about 1 minute. At most, the user will want to set a few simple options called "cheatcodes".
These live evaultions CD's do not install anything to a hdd, and yet give the full functionality of Linux for as long as you're booted into them, hence the nickname Linux demo CD's. The fact that knoppix/overclockix include an install script is another push in the right direction for a newbie looking to try linux for the first time. Its not very hard to install an OS like this (expecially not compared to debian), and there's a pretty good guide for doing so on knoppix.net. Because Debian uses a system for managing packages called apt-get which is in some ways much easier to use than the rpm system found in mandrake, suse, and redhat- its live eval CD's like knoppix and overclockix have added appeal to someone new to linux. And lastly, overclockix comes with DC clients, burn-in apps, scripts to make running them easy, some advanced tools, and a fairly pimped-out desktop look. It might be just the thing for an overclocker to play with...
Its like entering a pool via the stairs instead of the diving board. You can play around with it for a long time before trying to install it. Its mostly pre-configured when you do install it. But ultimately you'll still wind up in the pool, and will have to learn to swim, same as in any other distro.
