Need help with Knoppix-installer

[ValhallaSystems]

I've been battling with Knoppix-installer_0.3-14 that has got me tearing out my hair (what there is of it).

It's an older laptop. I've 80MB memory (the max it will hold). The HDD is empty and partitioned. cfdisk reports hda1 - bootable - Primary Linux - 3503.97MB, and hda5 - Logical Linux - swap - 822.53MB. Yes its a small HDD. When I did the partitioning cfdisk was unable to reread the data and requred a reboot. That confirmed the partioning I had set. Doing ls for /mnt/hda1 showed that there were no files present.

A reboot, (Knoppix 2) showed that knoppix (3.4) correctly identified all the hardware.

The computer is not connected to the web, so I downloaded the knx-installer_0.3-14.tar.gz to another computer (Windows) and copied the file to a floppy. Then by emulating the script from the web, I copied the tarball from the floppy to the computer running live Knoppix. I then successfully unpacked and ran the script.

The first stages of installation ran well, I answered the "who am I" questions and provided desired passwords. Then immediately after the summary page when I pressed "Y" I got an error message from mkfs. "Error: Formatting of failed. Some messages from mkfs.ext3: Usage of mkfs.ext3 [..." etc.

Another clue.

If I choose "Partition Harddrive" from the installation menu it attempts to load cfdisk but cfdisk gives the message "Partion Disk. - Opened disk read-only - you have no permission to write." Curiously cfdisk when opened from the command line gives no such message - thats how I partioned the drive in the first place.

Therefore, I think that somehow, my HDD is (or has become) a read only drive - at least as far as linux is concerned. Windows appears to be able to write to it with no trouble.

So. How do I make the HDD writable to linux? I've tried Google searching this one, but have had no success.

Any help you can provide will be appreciated.

[Cuddles]

ValhallaSystems,

I am seriously "reaching" here, so take pity on me if this doesn't solve, or work, but, its my best I can offer on the issue...

I think your partition is already mounted, by Knoppix, when you booted - my guess...

Go to a Konsole window, and try the following "view" command ( for Disk Free):

cuddles@Morpheus:~$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5              4806904   2946124   1616596  65% /
/dev/hda6             34218604  15114240  17366136  47% /home
cuddles@Morpheus:~$

What devices are mounted in your output? I am going to take a "stab" at the fact your hard drive partition will show up in the output, and it was probably "mounted" by Knoppix on boot, and is defaulted to read-only. If you get a /dev/hdX# in the output of df, try a root Konsole, and do a umount /dev/hdX# - on the device. Then try your installer again, and see what happens. ( like I said, this is a stab at it )

Another thought, this is about as simple as I can think of, you are running the installer in a "root" window, right? If you are running this as a "normal" user, do a su to get root priviledges, and then re-run the installer...

I also had problems with the installer in v3.4 - my success was to actually run the mkfs.ext3 manually ( I think, it has been a few weeks of doing my install )

A few things, that I can come up with, from the top of my Geekette head...

Hopefully, this helps,
Ms. Cuddles

[ValhallaSystems]

Thanks for your reply, Cuddles

I've figured it out. The moral is never completely believe the error messages you see. It turns out that there was one box that I had not filled in. The one where the installer asks you which partition you want to install on. It gave me only one option, so "stupid me" thought that would be the default. Wrong. It was trying to format the drive, not the partition!!

So now its working off the hard-drive. More or less.

Now to figure out how:
to get the mouse to work - so far its just the touchpad (which I hate).
to get the sound card to work seemingly an obscure thing from Yamaha.
to get it to use a swap file since it appears that even with 80MB that is not enough and it is slow - even refusing to run some apps which are apparently too large!, and the only immediate option is to use a DOS partition, which I don't have. May be I have to re format hda5!

This was suposed to be fun!

[Cuddles]

Thanks for your reply, Cuddles

I've figured it out. The moral is never completely believe the error messages you see. It turns out that there was one box that I had not filled in. The one where the installer asks you which partition you want to install on. It gave me only one option, so "stupid me" thought that would be the default. Wrong. It was trying to format the drive, not the partition!!

Ouch, that one hurts - that is one problem with Linux, with devices, and device names - just to get used to all of the "different" ways of working from Windows to Linux, all of my desktop icons I renamed to /dev/[devicename] - so that I am constantly reminded of them...

So now its working off the hard-drive. More or less.

Now to figure out how:
to get the mouse to work - so far its just the touchpad (which I hate).

No clue on this one, I have a PS/2 mouse, and only one...

to get the sound card to work seemingly an obscure thing from Yamaha.

No clue on this one, I have a no-name AC97 VIA, but it was recognized, and with a little "tinkering", got it to work with ALSA...

to get it to use a swap file since it appears that even with 80MB that is not enough and it is slow - even refusing to run some apps which are apparently too large!, and the only immediate option is to use a DOS partition, which I don't have. May be I have to re format hda5!

I have 512 MB RAM, and even setup a swap partition for another 512 MB - from what I hear, this being the best "working" - physical RAM and swap should add up to a 1 GB total memory... If you have 1 GB of physical RAM, no swap is needed, but, if you have, say, 1/2 GB, you should have 1/2 GB of swap, if you have 1/3 GB of RAM, then 2/3 GB should be made for a swap -=- from what I hear - the target "total" memory is around a GigaByte...

This I found a topic, that appears to suggest that the installer doesn't format the swap for you, and thus, when the system comes up, it "thinks" the swap is supposed to be where you said, but, since it isn't formatted, it doesn't use it....

Here is the link to the topic...
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...&view=previous

I would also check your /etc/fstab file to ensure that your system is pointing to the swap partition, as well...

I did a Search Knoppix.net for the word swap and found the above topic, here is the search results link as well - if the above link doesn't solve the issue, you might look at this link and see what else you can find...

http://www.google.com/search?q=swap%20site:knoppix.net

This was suposed to be fun!

It is, you just aren't seeing just how much fun it really is... [sick humor]

Just wait... By the time you get this one working to your liking, thats when they release a new version... and you get to do it all over again... ( like they did with me ) Now that is fun...

Hope this helps,
Ms. Cuddles

[mzilikazi]

Thanks for your reply, Cuddles

I've figured it out. The moral is never completely believe the error messages you see. It turns out that there was one box that I had not filled in. The one where the installer asks you which partition you want to install on. It gave me only one option, so "stupid me" thought that would be the default. Wrong. It was trying to format the drive, not the partition!!

So now its working off the hard-drive. More or less.

Now to figure out how:
to get the mouse to work - so far its just the touchpad (which I hate).

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5807

to get the sound card to work seemingly an obscure thing from Yamaha.

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6579

At one time I had a 490CDT that this worked on:

sudo modprobe sb irq=5

to get it to use a swap file since it appears that even with 80MB that is not enough and it is slow - even refusing to run some apps which are apparently too large!, and the only immediate option is to use a DOS partition, which I don't have. May be I have to re format hda5!

If you already have a partition set aside to use for swap (/dev/hda6 for example) simply issue:

mkswap /dev/hda6
swapon /dev/hda6

This was suposed to be fun!

Well if you read the Docs it states:

Q: What are the minimum system requirements?

A: Intel-compatible CPU (i486 or later), 16 MB of RAM for text mode, at least 96 MB for graphics mode with KDE (at least 128 MB of RAM is recommended to use the various office products), bootable CD-ROM drive, or a boot floppy and standard CD-ROM (IDE/ATAPI or SCSI), standard SVGA-compatible graphics card, serial or PS/2 standard mouse or IMPS/2-compatible USB-mouse.

Forget trying to run KDE. Not that it won't work at all but it will be so slow it's pathetic. Try Icewm of XFCE4. I have Icewm on a P166 w/128M and it runs quite nicely for an old box.