Knoppix Tips and Tricks 496
cosog writes "Robert Storey writes in a
thorough review about Knoppix: 'Some people even take a Knoppix disk with them when they go shopping for a new computer, a clever way to ensure that the hardware will be Linux compatible before you purchase it.' His article discusses things like: booting, rescuing, installing on HDD, tips'n'tricks, etc... A nice read for everyone interested in Linux (and Knoppix in particular ;)."
Knoppix (Score:5, Informative)
BitTorrent link... (Score:5, Informative)
The torrents are pretty fast; faster than the mirrors in my personal experience.
Re: Full text (Score:4, Informative)
When it comes to software, much the same situation prevails. There are applications that do everything from psychoanalysis (in Emacs hit M-x and type "doctor"), to helping you contact alien civilizations (SETI@Home).
Operating systems are not immune to this tendency towards specialization. Notepads, cell phones and perhaps your DVD player all have specialized operating systems. At the height of the dotcom bubble, there were pundits predicting that soon your online refrigerator would have an operating system, the purpose of which was allegedly to order milk when you needed it. Just why you couldn't buy your own damn milk was never explained to us.
And finally we come to Linux distributions. There are different distros for different purposes. Desktop Linux (in many flavors), server Linux, embedded Linux, Linux routers, Linux BIOS, Linux on the Halfshell. And every so often, somebody comes up with a whole new use for Linux that just makes everybody sort of just stop in their tracks and say, "Cool!" Which brings me (you are still with me, aren't you?) to the topic of this article - Knoppix.
Live From Germany
Knoppix is a "live CD" distro - just boot it and use it. You do need a CD drive of course, but you don't need a hard disk. The implications of this are significant. It means you have a portable Linux that you can take with you wherever you go. This can be used in a number of innovative ways - as a demo disk, as a rescue disk, as a way to use Linux at your local Windows-only Internet cafe. Some people even take a Knoppix disk with them when they go shopping for a new computer, a clever way to ensure that the hardware will be Linux compatible before you purchase it.
To be fair, Knoppix was not the first live CD ever created. Apple, for example, distributed MacOS (even before OSX) on a live CD. Linux has had DemoLinux, SUSE Live-Eval and Cool Linux, as well as some others. But none of these have come close to the functionality of Knoppix, which could justifiably claim the title as "first useful live CD." Even though Knoppix has inspired a number of clones (Gnoppix, Morphix, Freeduc, Quantian, to name a few), it still remains the most popular live CD distro by far.
Most people are just awe-struck the first time they see a Knoppix CD boot. Probably the thing that blows them away is the hardware auto-detection. There is really nothing to configure - just boot the CD, and two to three minutes later you have a beautiful desktop system. This is remarkable, given the lack of standards (and lack of driver documentation) that exists in the PC world.
Knoppix took the Linux world by storm in late 2002, but actually it's history is a little bit longer than that. Klaus Knopper of Germany started his experiment with "Knopper's *nix" about three years ago. As he tells the story, it wasn't his original intention to create a new Linux distro, but rather to learn how "el torito" (the booting mechanism on CDs) works, and how to get access to a whole CD from a minimal ramdisk system. However, his project soon attracted the attention of the LinuxTag association, which happily provided a mailing list and forum so that others could give their input. Though Klaus was (and still is) the solo developer of Knoppix, user feedback and bug-testing have helped make this distro the great success it is.
Deep Impact
Knoppix is one of the most up-to-date distros around. This is thanks to the fact that it is based on Sid, the "unstable" branch of Debian. Some people might be put off by the word "unstable," or the word "Sid" (the name of the mentally unstable kid in the movie "Toy Story"). Fortunately, in everyday use Knoppix is considerably more stable than many other distros (and infinitely more stabl
Re:Knoppix (Score:5, Informative)
Really? DD is far slower because it makes exact copies down to the bits. Norton Ghost works by cloning files instead. Instead, think of dump + gzip instead of dd. Insert some netcat for networking and presto, one central server holding default installs for all OSes you want. Probably works nice with network booting, then selecting a configuration, start cloning and then reboot into a brand-spanking new & fresh OS installation.
Re:Knoppix (Score:5, Informative)
See, if you do DD, it works if all the hard drives are the same size. But if you want to make an image that will last a while, on multiple machines, you have to make it match the smallest drive (since dd simply copies the content and doesn't rewrite the partition table). So if you make it, say, 2GB, you throw away a lot of space on bigger drives. And like I said, partimage can't write NTFS properly.
Not to mention Ghostwalker, which changes the machine's hostname and rewrites the SID's (I think that's what they're called; I rarely use Windows anymore) on the files so that they are unique and secure.
Slashdotted? (Score:0, Informative)
Take a Mepis disk too (Score:5, Informative)
Not to knock knoppix as Klaus has given birth to the *practical* live CD movement, but its still has the 'feel' of a toy..
Hmmmmm or have some fun and boot one off cluster knoppix and PXE the rest of the building...
best (Score:0, Informative)
mount -o dev
chroot
lilo -v
used it many times, had to re-install lilo after windows got corrupt, forgot to run lilo, AFTER editing lilo.conf. A real life saver. Afterall, who REALLY makes linux rescue disks anymore?:)
Article Text (Score:5, Informative)
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
-- Charles Duell, Commissioner of US Patent Office, 1899
In these modern times it seems that there is a product to suit every whim and fancy. Whether you need a miniature Statue of Liberty with a clock in her (its?) stomach or a stuffed alligator with a light bulb in its mouth, you can rest assured that somebody somewhere is marketing it.
When it comes to software, much the same situation prevails. There are applications that do everything from psychoanalysis (in Emacs hit M-x and type "doctor"), to helping you contact alien civilizations (SETI@Home).
Operating systems are not immune to this tendency towards specialization. Notepads, cell phones and perhaps your DVD player all have specialized operating systems. At the height of the dotcom bubble, there were pundits predicting that soon your online refrigerator would have an operating system, the purpose of which was allegedly to order milk when you needed it. Just why you couldn't buy your own damn milk was never explained to us.
And finally we come to Linux distributions. There are different distros for different purposes. Desktop Linux (in many flavors), server Linux, embedded Linux, Linux routers, Linux BIOS, Linux on the Halfshell. And every so often, somebody comes up with a whole new use for Linux that just makes everybody sort of just stop in their tracks and say, "Cool!" Which brings me (you are still with me, aren't you?) to the topic of this article - Knoppix.
Live From Germany
Knoppix is a "live CD" distro - just boot it and use it. You do need a CD drive of course, but you don't need a hard disk. The implications of this are significant. It means you have a portable Linux that you can take with you wherever you go. This can be used in a number of innovative ways - as a demo disk, as a rescue disk, as a way to use Linux at your local Windows-only Internet cafe. Some people even take a Knoppix disk with them when they go shopping for a new computer, a clever way to ensure that the hardware will be Linux compatible before you purchase it.
To be fair, Knoppix was not the first live CD ever created. Apple, for example, distributed MacOS (even before OSX) on a live CD. Linux has had DemoLinux, SUSE Live-Eval and Cool Linux, as well as some others. But none of these have come close to the functionality of Knoppix, which could justifiably claim the title as "first useful live CD." Even though Knoppix has inspired a number of clones (Gnoppix, Morphix, Freeduc, Quantian, to name a few), it still remains the most popular live CD distro by far.
Most people are just awe-struck the first time they see a Knoppix CD boot. Probably the thing that blows them away is the hardware auto-detection. There is really nothing to configure - just boot the CD, and two to three minutes later you have a beautiful desktop system. This is remarkable, given the lack of standards (and lack of driver documentation) that exists in the PC world.
Knoppix took the Linux world by storm in late 2002, but actually it's history is a little bit longer than that. Klaus Knopper of Germany started his experiment with "Knopper's *nix" about three years ago. As he tells the story, it wasn't his original intention to create a new Linux distro, but rather to learn how "el torito" (the booting mechanism on CDs) works, and how to get access to a whole CD from a minimal ramdisk system. However, his project soon attracted the attention of the LinuxTag association, which happily provided a mailing list and forum so that others could give their input. Though Klaus was (and still is) the solo developer of Knoppix, user feedback and bug-testing have helped make this distro the great success it is.
Deep Impact
Knoppix is one of the most up-to-date distros around. This is thanks to the fact that it is based on Sid, the "unstable" branch of Debian. Some people might be put off by the word "unstable," or the word "Sid" (the name of the mentally unstable kid in
Re:DD != Ghost (Score:5, Informative)
Now your not talking about ghost, your talking about a number of tools.
mount
partd
mkfs
kernel support for more filesystems than ghost will ever dream of.
tar
dd
cp
mkswap
lilo/grub
Between these utilities you can do pretty much everything ghost can and much much more. A knoppix cd (generally I use a customized one to take out the gui fluff) gives FAR more flexibility than any other software tool.
Re:Knoppix (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, I use Barts Boot cdrom [nu2.nu], and ghost over tcp/ip to backup servers/workstations and laptops. I find ghost works great to backup a system that doesnt have an OS or a Partition over the network. Plus I can read
If ghost worked under winex or dosemu, then I'd run it under knoppix, but for now, Barts Cdrom does the job.
Re:Knoppix (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Knoppix (Score:2, Informative)
That said, there does exist a good free ghost-like tool or two for linux, which actually parse common linux filesystems:partimage [partimage.org] even has experimental NTFS support!
Knoppix and students (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Knoppix (Score:4, Informative)
New SID [sysinternals.com]
My best experience with linux (Score:5, Informative)
I like the idea of a live cd where if I fucked anything up, a simple reboot would fix everything. This is how linux should be taught to new users who are afraid of trying new things but still have some strange desire to use linux.
Re:My Knoppix Problems (Score:5, Informative)
These aren't comparable measurements at all.. The x in cdrom speeds is how many times faster it is than the original "1x" cdroms, and harddrive speed isn't measured in X's at all its in revolution's. You can't just add an X to the end of a harddrive speed and expect to compare it to a cdrom drive.
Article mirrors (Score:2, Informative)
Mini Knoppix (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Need bootable USB (Score:5, Informative)
Boot off of knoppix CD, but place your home folder on your USB key. Knoppix readily supports this, and in most instances will automatically detect the key and the home folder without any special paramaters.
An even bigger plus is that you probably won't need much more than a 32mb key for day-to-day use.
Re:Knoppix (Score:3, Informative)
Ghost will read file by file and write to the new disk. (advantages is that you can resize partitions, it'll be faster because it copies less data; disadvantage: it must support the file system; it may miss hidden/meta data you want copied)
Re:Knoppix (Score:5, Informative)
7200, 5400 HD RPM and 52X CD-ROM RPM (Score:1, Informative)
Hence a 52X speed CD-ROM will revolve 10920 and 28028 times per minute on the outer and inner edge respectively - What makes CD-ROMs slow is the spin-up and spin-down. Hence random access reads are extremely slow.
Also a 52X is only 52 times faster than a 1X CD-ROM in theory and never on the entire disc. Most new CD-ROMs use CAV (constant angular velocity) and will revolve with the same speed on the entire disc, but will have different transfer rates depending on where on the disc you read.
Re:Knoppix (Score:5, Informative)
Knoppix may be shutdown by software patents (Score:1, Informative)
Anyway, the EU is about to vote on software patents and treaties with things like clicking on a file menu is owned by someone.
Knoppix is European and can not afford the costs of software letigation. Just like to spread the word.
Re:7200, 5400 HD RPM and 52X CD-ROM RPM (Score:3, Informative)
The drive spins the entire disk faster when it is reading the inner edge to maintain a constant read speed.
But like the original poster said, this is no longer true in most modern "52x" drives that just read data more slowly along the inner edge of the disk as compared to the outer edge.
Re:I used knoppix at bestbuy (Score:5, Informative)
Two things about Knoppix that piss me off (Score:3, Informative)
One has a Biostar motherboard with a Via Rhine network card on it. For some reason, though Knoppix will load the Via Rhine module for it, the card won't come up. It works fine in Debian with the same module, and I've seen posts that the module is somehow compiled slightly wrong in Knoppix. But to fix it, I need to install the Knoppix kernel to a hard drive and then recompile the module! No thanks...
The other is my laptop which has a Senao pcmcia wifi card. Again, in Debian with wlan-ng I can make the card work fine using the prism_cs driver, but Knoppix seems to really, really want to use the orinoco driver for the card. So much that, no matter WHAT I do, I can't get it to use the prism_cs driver. Highly irritating!
Oh well.
Re:Knoppix will be good when.. (Score:3, Informative)
Already been done [sourceforge.net]. Also, Morphix [sourceforge.net] can fufill most of your other requests, although it's not point-and-click customizable quite yet.
Re:Knoppix (Score:2, Informative)
If you specify a larger block size dd goes much faster:
$dd bs=1024 if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc
I heard you should try to have the two hard drives on separate IDE channels for best performance.
Re:DD != Ghost (Score:4, Informative)
Check out System Rescue CD [sysresccd.org] They even have a PPC version.
I compare the price and license of the rescue CD to that of Ghost. I can give the CD away to anyone without a worry, I can't do that with Ghost.
System Rescue CD (Score:3, Informative)
A happy user of QTParted
Re:Being put off (Score:2, Informative)
If you want to not use debian, that is fine. I think someone in the debian team used to work at Pixar, so they are making their releases named after Toy Story characters for a while (bo, rex, hamm, woody, sarge, others).
Re:BitTorrent link... (Score:3, Informative)
Whether BT is faster for grabbing KNOPPIX depends on where you are. My office box is on the INET2 backbone, and I've found that grabbing from an INET2 mirror via HTTP or FTP is about 100x faster there than grabbing via BT. YMMV.
Re:Knoppix (Score:5, Informative)
Hmmm... what to think of a post scored as +3 Funny that simply summarizes a bit by the Dead Alewives [deadalewives.com] without giving credit where credit is due [reference.com]?
Funny. Sad. Whatever. Listen to the original routine should you be so inclined.
Knoppix Data Recovery for Grandma (Score:5, Informative)
Knoppix firewall (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Rescue (Score:2, Informative)
colleges do this (Score:3, Informative)
Campus computers were setup like that. The drives were wiped when restarted, and on boot it'd load a cloned OS over the network onto the hard drive.
Kept the geeks from installing viruses and required no maintance, since the OS for every PC on campus was all on one server, just had to be sure every PC was similar so the drivers could be the same.
Re:Need bootable USB (Score:1, Informative)
I work at a net-cafe and we had add BIOS passwords and remove CD and floppy booting from the startup routine to keep people from coming in with thier own bootable media.
The last straw that caused that was when I caught some kids with a Knoppix CD poking around the system, luckily we use ntfs so they werent able to install cain or any other password sniffers.
I recently did a hard-drive install of knoppix 3,3 (Score:3, Informative)
I ran into a couple of problems though. Sndconfig refuses to work with my sound card. I have an audigy and the emu10k1 (or whatever the hell name it was) installs by default. Running the sndconfig command (after struggling to find a way to close x windows without shutting down) I was greeted by a "module is not in the specified search path"... No information was given as to which path was the search path nor any information as to how to change the search path.
Knoppix also installs by default close to every program ever written for linux including both KOffice and OO.o perhaps a little bit of an overkill.
The other problem I have with knoppix is changing the refresh rate and screen resolution. When using the live CD, the refresh rate and the screen resolution are some of the "cheat codes" you can enter. In the hard-disk install, no oppurtunity is offered for the entering of such codes. I'll probably end up having to edit some
The final minor annoyance (and it is minor) is that the CD version boots using both color and a nice resolution (1024x768) for the streams of console text that appear during booting. The hard-disk install does not. It's pretty minor, but the colored text and resolution was really nice and made reading the text much easier.
Knoppix is a really good live CD, but the harddrive install leaves a little to be desired. Hopefully that changes with new versions.
Re:Knoppix (Score:5, Informative)
You run it on a machine to reset the name and SID's, then on next boot it asks you for a machine name and recreates the SID's.
So sysprep, ghost, startup and put in name and your done.
Re:Trick to knoppic I never learned (Score:5, Informative)
I've just started playing with Knoppix tonight, and I gotta tell you, I'm sold. THIS is what Linux should be.
Re:Two things about Knoppix that piss me off (Score:2, Informative)
However, check out Linuxant's Driverloader [linuxant.com] It loads the Windows driver and allows it to drive the wifi card in linux.
In fact I'm using it right now - great stuff. Although I don't know how you would be able to integrate it into a Knoppix CD
Re:Knoppix may be shutdown by software patents (Score:1, Informative)
They give insentives to OEM builders that meet certain goals to give loawer OS $prices for the more systems they sell with there product. This is great and i am sure with in there right. but makes it harder to push alternative OS for a big company. say I am not as big as DELL or HP and I have a computer store that sells a small amount of systems. If I give into there sell more and get it less Am I not breaking there legal contract if I load linux on some systems I sell.
DELL don't they get a discount deal as long as they sign something that says that they can not sell without a XP OS.. how do i avoid paying the MS TAX?!
Re:Knoppix will be good when.. (Score:4, Informative)
Having said that, Knoppix (still) rocks :-)
dd and speed (Score:2, Informative)
If you want to make an exact copy of a disk full of data then there is no faster way than this.
Re:Knoppix (Score:2, Informative)
Instant PVR with KnoppMyth (Score:2, Informative)
It's quite amazing how easy it is to get running.
Before you try it, I recommend you cruise the discussion forum to be sure your hardware is supported.
Re:My Knoppix Problems (Score:2, Informative)
Remember that a typical mp3 (which is compressed) is 128-196 kilobits a second.
Re:There are many limitations to Sysprep: (Score:3, Informative)
Mainly this, Sysprep works perfectly well on OEM versions AND upgrades.
Basically all sysprep REALLY does is, change the pc name and SID + knock out motherboard and ide drivers.
It's kind of like performing the first half of a win98 install, then ghosting that to different systems, you will get clean hardware detection every time and simply cut the install time down (since copying everything with ghost or knoppix at that point takes about 2 min where the installer takes 20).
Activation issues are not an issue.
So most of those things work (especially the big ones), just don't expect microsoft to help you with them. Have you ever called microsoft anyway? and if so, did ever make the same mistake (of calling) again?