Knoppix to HD? 2

[jurgen36]

Anybody has any experience with installing Knoppix to the hard drives? I just downloaded it (3 day,s on the net) and I am very impressed with the distro. Much faster as Mandrake and infinately faster then Redhead 9. Also it seems to identify all devices on the system. Regards

Jurgen

 

[stefanwagner]

Hey, yes.

I recently installed Knoppix 3.3 from a dvd.
I booted from the dvd, and copied the whole / root-filesystem to another partition.
Then I had to visit some links, to ensure nothing is pointing to /cdrom. As far as I remember, they all looked good.

Then I edited /etc/fstab.
And /etc/lilo.conf.
I rerun lilo, booted, and - surprise: Kernel panic.

Knoppix 3.3 had only ext2-support in the kernel, and reiserfs as module. So I booted my old peanut-linux (2.5 kernel), moved all the files from the partition, changed the filesystem to ext2, moved the files back, and tried again.

Voila!

Then I compiled my own kernel (2.6.1) with reiserfs, moved files, changed partition back to reiserfs, moved the files back, and: - voila!

Since I don't have a pcmcia-card, I commented everything off in /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig.
Similar steps for irda, isdn.
Changed the language to german.

This /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig - file is a big, big collection of everthing - I would suggest to make a backup of it, and change it step by step to your needs.

An annoying thing is, that knoppix made a lot of icons for every partition for kde/ gnome and reconstructs them at every boot. I don't remember where I disabled them, but in the end I found out how.

Then I switched to 'fluxbox' desktop, and now my machine needs 35 seconds to boot to console, and 12 seconds to bring up my X11 desktop.
That's fine. (Duron 1,100 Mhz)

You have to enable logging on your own - /var/log/messages, /var/log/syslog will stay empty otherwise.

And there are a lot of entrys for group 'knoppix' in /etc/group.

To deinstall some large packages I don't use (gnome), or where I got my own packages (knoppix: j2se, java: gcj - me: j2sdk1.4.2, java: java) I used the package-manager (apt-xy?) which I found in the KDE-Menu (System?).

A lot of unused stuff remained in /etc/ and elsewhere, but as far as I know other, normally installed distros, behave the same, filling your harddrive with empty directorys and default-configuration files, which you will never use.

When you make it, please give some feedback!

 

[jurgen36]

: stefanwagner
Thanks a lot indeed for his very complete info. I will try all your steps and hope that they will work on my system.
System here dual P4 HT EE 3.2 cpu's with 4 Gbytes of ram. So I do not mind if the os loads to ram. Wir koennen auch Deutch reden bin Australier seit 1958, lebe in Chiangrai Thailand und bin dean of computer science at a major university. Will retire end of this year but continue to live here. If you ever come to TH, you are welcome to stay with us. Vielen dank fuer das info. Kindest regards

Jurgen

 

[stefanwagner]

Two remarks:
I just found a 'knoppix-installer' script, located in /home/knoppix-installer and /usr/sbin.

Perhaps there are better installation-routines than those, I posted.

A second issue:
inittab boots directly to X, so I changed it too, and put the X-11 to standard-console 7 - not just 4.

And I replaced the the entrys for starting a login-free - bash for tty1-3 with tty1-6 and /sbin/getty instead.

And last: I'm not sure whether your knoppix-vanilla-kernel supports memory > 900 MB, but if you compile your own kernel, you will easily find the option to change this to 4 GB.

 

[jurgen36]

:stefanwagner
Thanks again for the extra advise. Will try tomorrow morning. It is now 3am local time. You have reason to memtion the 900 Mb limit, it actually uses at the moment 875 Mbytes as ramdisk.The only problems I try to resolve are modem and printer drivers, I also noticed that it does not find my two Sata raid 0 arrays. This is no problem as Knoppix finds the Ide raid arrays, I still have six drives to play with. I looked into the setup and it should be possible to use the good parts of Redhat and Mandrake. It will be a real mixture of 3 systems, but I have hopes. It might be a good assignment for our postgraduate students in the next semester. Ok enough for now . Will keep you advised how I go. Good night from Thailand. Regards

Jurgen

 

[jurgen36]

: stefanwagner
Sorry about the delay. Yes I used the installer script to install the Cd to the hard drive. Worked very well but had to many limitations for my liking. I also did not have the Debian SRC's so I could not compile a new kernel. There are many things I like on the Debian os but i also need other things on RH9. Finally I solved the problems. I had the RH9 src and downloaded the Debian as well, shuffled both sources around and compiled them. Had kernel panic two times in a row, but now the system seems to be working fine, I actually use it now on the forum. I do not know what you would call it, it accepts programs written for Debian and for RH9. I hope it stays that way, it cost me 3 sleepless nights. Greetings

Jurgen

 

[stefanwagner]

OK, thanks for the reply.
I will try the installationscripts on my mini-tower.