|
Post by unclemark on Jun 11, 2010 21:07:27 GMT -5
I see a Live BSD DVD with a Gnome DTE and a very nice complement of apps.
What sets KNOS apart from the pack?
|
|
|
Post by Kevin McAleavey on Jun 12, 2010 1:18:05 GMT -5
I see a Live BSD DVD with a Gnome DTE and a very nice complement of apps. What sets KNOS apart from the pack? Greetings! So many differences from anything else, from top to bottom. Where do I start? First, you might not have seen our official homepage yet - we explain it there in a reasonable enough "executive summary" here: www.knosproject.com/ (redirects to our temporary site on yola.com) KNOS is based on FreeBSD, and not Linux. No offense intended to Linux or its followers, but Linux is *emulated* Unix whereas BSD is the real thing. The problem with BSD for ordinary people however is that it's intended for use on servers rather than desktops and is rather obtuse and user hostile for ordinary computer users as well as geeks. It's just not intended to do what you see KNOS doing at all, and in fact BSD purists really don't like the idea of what we're doing. If I hear "why do you want to do that?" out of the community one more time, I'm gonna slap somebody. Heh. While folks here are seeing KNOS as yet another "live cd" that's not what KNOS is actually about - you're seeing the "end product" of the KNOS Project, a customizable disk which is generated *by* the KNOS Project. KNOS is actually a toolkit and resources which are designed to produce what you're using on a custom basis for corporations, government, military, yada yada. The output of the KNOS toolkit produces a highly specialized, customized disk which can then be reproduced and distributed for specific purposes and with highly specific configurations that the KNOS toolkit customer would wish to generate. In this beta, we're testing the technology that we added to BSD and Gnome and the usual stuff you'd see on something like Ubuntu. KNOS comes with Flash, Java, and full multimedia support as well as the customary applications one would expect of a disk to be used "on the road" but it also contains a number of other not so necessary features as well. What we're testing here though is how good our hardware detection is and what we need to see about fixing. KNOS differs from other livecd's in the memory management we provide which allows all of these applications to actually function properly without ever needing to write to hard disk ever - including "swap memory" which was one of the bigger challenges in our extensive modifications to BSD for this purpose as well as fast memory recycling, privacy features and working around so many serious bugs in the open source applications found in Linux and some of the more desktop-oriented BSD's. That's why this took nearly a year from the time we said we intended to do this to actually releasing a working beta ... folks who have known us since the PSC/NSClean/BOClean days know we don't release crap or foist breakware on people like my "former employer" does. Took a lot more work and patience than I ever thought would be necessary but this is good enough to hand out finally. I've been using KNOS instead of Windows since 2007 when I knew there was no longer any way to secure Windows, and having seen the innards of the antivirus/firewall "industry" close-up, knew that this was the only way I'd have more time to surf than cleanup windows. Been a happy KNOS user ever since then ... I'd better stop yammering for now, but here's hoping you folks are somewhat impressed with this laborious exercise, and there's a whole lot more behind what you're playing with now yet to be explained. I see KNOS as a very serious solution for security, privacy and safety and we have a lot more work ahead once we can find the funding to go the rest of the distance ... but despite the similarities to other things most here have seen, the entire basis of KNOS and all it stands for yet to be seen is something thoroughly unique.
|
|