Knoppix Menus

[wroseland]

Knoppix seems to come with a lot of stuff I don't want. The menus are full of applications that I don't see on other Debian-KDE distro's. Is there a good way to configure the menus and is there a way that I can eliminate some of the packages that are loaded?
Thanks,

[Harry Kuhman]

Knoppix seems to come with a lot of stuff I don't want. .... Is there a good way to configure the menus and is there a way that I can eliminate some of the packages that are loaded?
Running from the Live CD or Live DVD, no.

Running from Linux installed on your hard disk, there is a great way: Install Debian Etch instead, then install exactly what packages you want. This will also avoid the many problems that are seen with a Knoppix "install".

[kirol]

As Harry said you obviously cannot alter a cd/dvd-rom, but if you've installed to HD, removing packages with synaptic/kpackage/apt-get should also make them disappear from the menu structure...

[Harry Kuhman]

Actually, while you can't remove packages from the CD, you might be able to create a new menu and save it to a persistant configuration. I've never had persistant configurations work well though, so I didn't think about it.

While you should be able to remove pakages from an installed Knoppix system, the much bigger problem is that installed Knoppix is plagued with problems. Many things are well known to not work and installing Knoppix is not advised for the Linux novice. Klause even stated he was considering removing the buggy install scripts from 5.x, but obviously he has not done that yet. So when someone actually realizes that Knoppix has a lot of stuff that he will never used crammed on the CD or DVD and wants a cleaner system, it seems to make much more sense to guide him to installing something that will be free from the known Knoppix install issues and let him install exactly the packages he wants, selecting from all of those contained in Knoppix and many many more, all very easily and cleanly installed with apt-get.

When Knoppix first came out the Debian installer was still pretty technical, it wanted info about IRQs and Interupts and various hardware. Even a technical person might have to abort an install to dig into the system and check jumpers or settings. People loved Knoppix for it's hardware detection and asked why distros like Debian couldn't do the same. Some even choose to install Knoppix instead of a distro intended for hard disk use because the install was easy. Unfortunately, easy does not equate to clean and this choice to do what was easy led to many problems. The oldest problem in the hard disk install forum is one about a network that worked fine when running from CD but stopped working when running from a hard disk install. I still see reports of this same symptom from those trying to install the current Knoppix.

But the hard disk distro developers listened to the complaints and made the distros install cleaner. You can install Debian Etch without ever seeing a question about IRQs or Interupts or much else of any technical nature. In fact, I believe that the Etch installer, while not perfect, is superior to current Windows products. It is certainly a more stable choice for installing than Knoppix. Knoppix deliberately chooses to mix Debian versions. This approach works ok for a live CD (after extensive testing), but it produces a system that is very fragile and easily broken by a simple install or update when it is installed to hard disk. I know of no logical reason to install Knoppix any longer. The only reason that seems to be given is the baby duck syndrom, or the excuse "that's what I have a copy of". The baby duck syndrom is not a good reason, and the excuse "that's what I have" is like arguing that one doesn't have a hammer and then asking for proper guidance for how to pound in nails with a wrench. If someone is determined to pound in a nail with a wrench then I'm not going to waste my time trying to stop them. But I don't see the point of long discussions and guides on how to pound in a nail with a wrench when the correct answer is "Get a hammer, there are many different ones designed to do just that and you can easily find the right one for you." To me, Debian Etch is the hammer that most closely matches the Knoppix wrench.

[wroseland]

Thanks, I have installed Knoppix (3.4 I think), 3.8 and 4.0 to disk (I can still run the 3.8 from one partition). I installed 4.0 and ran it for a couple of months but I saved a PDF file that Opera had downloaded and it was over. The install defaulted to a reiserfs and the boot drive (where my home was) was unrecoverable. This was the first time I had ever lost a file system like that. I started using Kubuntu after that. I recently installed Knoppix again. I tried the 5.1 CD first but it got an i/o error on my drive while copying files. I went back to 4.0 and it installed OK (I have had more errors during the install process: I have installed Debian several times, SUSE, Fedora, Knoppix, Ubuntu and Kubuntu), except that it would not boot because of the way the /boot/grubmenu.lst file was configured. The drive I installed to was hd3 so it added commands of "root (hd3,0)" to the load sequences. Unfortunately my bios appears to add new drives to the top of the boot sequence, so although the drive is hd3, it is hd0 at boot time. I changed the commands to "root (hd0,0)" and it booted OK. I was more than a little disappointed that the "Debian" install did not allow me to select my X manager and I got gnome. I expected it to ask or at least, since I used a Knoppix DVD, to default to KDE. What I liked about Knoppix install was that it usually configured everything correctly. I originally ran Linux on a FICA va503+ MB with an AMD K6-500MHZ processor. The Debian install always did something strange and it was not consistent. Knoppix through 3.8 worked OK on that system. I tried Knoppix 4.0 on that system but the install would just stop. All of the Debiam distros at that time failed to install. I figured out if I unplugged my USB printer before I started the install, it would work. The Linux distros seem to have a lot of flaky problems like this. It is too bad that the Debian groups cannot invest in some organized testing.