[CLUE-Tech] Installing Knoppix

[dave price]

Jed,

I have installed Knoppix onto a hard drive, several
times.  You wind up with a nice stable variation on
Debian's "Testing" distribution.  Requires at least
2GB free space last I loooked.  When I say
'variation', I mean it,  Klaus does take some real
liberties with regard to binary only packages and "the
Debian way".  Some Debian purists may indeed "look at
you funny" if you admit that your Debian system
started out as a Knoppix CD.

If you do decide to go down that path, you will want
to tweak the apt-sources a bit and do a little house
cleaning, once you are done, but this is certainly a
good shortcut for getting up and running with a
complete (more-or-less) Debian environment in a hurry.
 Knoppix has some of the best hardware detection out
there, and just studying how your hardware gets set up
can be a great education.

Of course there is a cost.  You lose all control over
what parts of the file system go where (initially) on
your hard drive.  

You can of course revise things later if you don't
mind moving things around by hand.  You may want to
consider partitioning your hard drive before you start
the Knoppix script, and leave a lot of free space to
play with later.  First things you might want to
consider moving afterwards are /home and /var. 

Search back in the CLUE archives or remind me to
repost a nice 'tar one-liner' for moving big chunks of
filesystem from one partitition to another.

You can certainly achieve a much smaller footprint
installation (not to mention satisfy the purists) on
your own using Debian's regular installer and
'dselect', and you will have much better idea of what
is actually on your system.  (Klaus sure does pack an
awful lot onto his CD's, and it you can spend a great
deal of time just poking around to find out what's
there.)

(Some of) the people you run into on #debian may lead
you to believe, that anyone who is not an absolute
'dselect guru' is 'lame', and with Knoppix you don't
have to know anything at all about dselect (or even
apt for that matter).  

dselect is Debian's very powerful but 'somewhat
arcane' front-end to dpkg, the Debian package manager.

apt is much more user friendly, but even if you
install Debian 'from scratch', you will get 'funny
looks' on #debian if they find out you use (or prefer)
apt.

dselect certainly works on a Knoppix system, and one
way to learn to use it is to  practice taking off the
(some of) the stuff Klaus put there that you don't
need.   

So, if you have an extra box / harddrive to play with,
a Knoppix hard drive install is a nice easy way to get
your feet wet with a Debian installation, and find out
for yourself why Debian has so many loyal followers.

Have a lot of fun.

aloha,
dave



--- "Jed S. Baer" <thag at frii.com> wrote:

> Has anyone done a permanent Knoppix install?
> 
> Is it really this easy?
> http://www.freenet.org.nz/misc/knoppix-install.html
> 
> There's an interesting sentence on that page, about
> getting help on IRC:
> 
> "Please also know that, even though Knoppix is based
> on the Debian
> distribution, your enquiries in #debian may not be
> welcomed."
> 
> Really? Is Knoppix in some particular way divergent
> from Debian -- in a
> way that would irritate purists or something?
> 
> Maybe this would be a cool thing for me to do at the
> installfest. Hmmm.
> Gotta think about that.
> 
> jed
> -- 
> http://s88369986.onlinehome.us/freedomsight/
> 
> ... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies
> that could someday
> facilitate a police state. -- Bruce Schneier
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