On The Fly: Boot Knoppix Linux, Keep Windows Installation

Networking

Several good networking tools are included that will give you Windows connectivity, remote control, and network sniffing capabilities. Samba and LinNeighborhood will help you get connected to and share files with Windows machines. LinNeighborhood allows you to browse Windows shares, much in the same way as "My Network Places" on Windows machines.

Office Applications

OpenOffice 1.1, the Microsoft Office clone, is included in Knoppix. It's very slow to load (30 seconds on our Shuttle 41G2 with AMD XP 2500), because it has to uncompress from the CD. It looks like MS Office, and has decent compatibility with the file types. We were able to open most of our word and excel files with OpenOffice.