documentation

[pap2003]

Hello,
While working with knoppix these questions came to mind:

What is cloop?
What is a block device?
How come knoppix works on my 256mb ram if the compressed file system is 1700MB?

Can anyone can point me to some documentation ?

[OErjan]

have you tried the links on top called docs?
http://www.knoppix.net/docs/
there you find among others
http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/KnoppixRemasteringHowto
http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/FaqBooting
http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/FaqHardware
http://www.knoppix.net/docs/

other than that you have the howtos, minihgowto and goides you find at LDP
http://www.tldp.org/
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html/
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.htmlhttp://www.tldp.org/guides.html

as you see the documentation is there.
yse it is sadly spread over a HUGE amount of text but if you search with google for instance you wil find.

knoppix works as it does not need everything in ram, it can read from the CD aswell, if you start too many apps it might become crouded though...
cloop=compressed loop device, that is a ompresed "image" of the filesystem mounted as an endles loop of film. not 100%corect but...
block devises read/write whole "blocks" of data at the time. a characterdevice only one caracter at the time. extremly simplified but...

[Markus]

This page has links to a lot of docs, browse it if you have time after going through OErjan's links: http://www.linuxlinks.com/Beginners/

[OErjan]

just to add modems, networkcards are caracter and CD, DVD, Hdd.. are block devises. most block devices are posible to access as caracter devices aswell, much slower and not always reliable (they normaly write in blocks and buffer, not so in car mode, some devices may freak out at that).