New Knoppix Book: Knoppix Hacks by O'reilly

[greenfly]

Note: At first I wasn't going to update the thread because I didn't want to seem like I was self-promoting and spamming the forum, but then I figured that some people might be interested in the news.

In any case, I just wanted to update the thread to let everyone know that Knoppix Hacks Second Edition is finally out and available. You can find out more about it at the official O'Reilly page: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514938/

I'm really pleased with how the book turned out. It had been three years since the first edition was published and as all of you know, quite a bit has changed in Knoppix since then with the addition of AuFS and the DVD edition alone. Anyway if anyone has any questions feel free to ask in this thread (moderators: hope that's okay).

[eco2geek]

Congratulations on coming out with the 2nd edition!

FYI, I recently had to replace my primary PATA hard drive ("hda"), restore the backed-up data from the old drive to the new drive, and reinstall GRUB to the MBR. GRUB was already installed on the secondary hard drive's first partition ("hdb1"). In other words, openSUSE is installed on hdb1, and no changes to its existing "/boot/grub/menu.lst" were necessary. I tried using Hack #53, "Repair GRUB," from Knoppix Hacks, 1st Ed., but it didn't work.

What did work was to get root, start a GRUB shell, and install it to the MBR on hda that way, i.e.

# grub
grub> root (hd1,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit
#

Other random Knoppix-related thoughts:

• In this long thread, Gilles van Ruymbeke (hope I got that right) gave us 3 things: 1) A "GRUB for Windows" that allows you to boot a Knoppix "Poor Man's Install" (PMI) from an NTFS partition; 2) a completely rewritten initial RAM image ("initrd.img") to allow you to boot your PMI up without having to boot from the physical Knoppix CD/DVD ; and 3) VMWare versions of Knoppix, complete with "persistent homes." It'd be nice to see all the binaries he created posted in one place (especially since he did a new "initrd.img" for each new version of Knoppix). He deserves a lot of credit for his work.
• Knoppix is getting rather "long in the tooth." The last official version, 5.1.1, was released in January, and the last unofficial version, 5.2.0, was released in March. What if there isn't another official Knoppix release -- ever? What live Linux "toolkit distro" will you use to replace it?

[greenfly]

Congratulations on coming out with the 2nd edition!

Thanks!

FYI, I recently had to replace my primary PATA hard drive ("hda"), restore the backed-up data from the old drive to the new drive, and reinstall GRUB to the MBR. GRUB was already installed on the secondary hard drive's first partition ("hdb1"). In other words, openSUSE is installed on hdb1, and no changes to its existing "/boot/grub/menu.lst" were necessary. I tried using Hack #53, "Repair GRUB," from Knoppix Hacks, 1st Ed., but it didn't work.

What did work was to get root, start a GRUB shell, and install it to the MBR on hda that way, i.e.

# grub
grub> root (hd1,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit
#

Good point! I have run into that sometimes myself--especially on machines with XFS as a root partition. It seems that grub-install sometimes just refuses to work and I've had to fall back to grub like you did above. That's one reason that I made sure to include a complete set of the grub command-line commands in the Knoppix Pocket Reference, but I thought that something like that might be a bit too wordy and reference-like for a Hacks book.

Other random Knoppix-related thoughts:

• In this long thread, Gilles van Ruymbeke (hope I got that right) gave us 3 things: 1) A "GRUB for Windows" that allows you to boot a Knoppix "Poor Man's Install" (PMI) from an NTFS partition; 2) a completely rewritten initial RAM image ("initrd.img") to allow you to boot your PMI up without having to boot from the physical Knoppix CD/DVD ; and 3) VMWare versions of Knoppix, complete with "persistent homes." It'd be nice to see all the binaries he created posted in one place (especially since he did a new "initrd.img" for each new version of Knoppix). He deserves a lot of credit for his work.
• Knoppix is getting rather "long in the tooth." The last official version, 5.1.1, was released in January, and the last unofficial version, 5.2.0, was released in March. What if there isn't another official Knoppix release -- ever? What live Linux "toolkit distro" will you use to replace it?

I can't speak to hosting for Gilles's work, but as far as Knoppix's age, we do sometimes see a good deal of slack time in between Knoppix releases. So far for me Knoppix hasn't let me down when I've needed it to repair a system so I plan to stick with it for the time being--there just isn't a better overall live CD out there in my opinion. That having been said, I suppose if I did run across a brand new machine I needed to recover and Knoppix for some reason wasn't able to boot, I would probably try something like the latest Ubuntu live CD.

[OldCanoeist]

Hi greenfly;

In hack #109 in the recent edition it is stated that bootfrom is compatible with NTFS. But using it with NTFS implies writing to NTFS.

I find comments in some forums that writing to NTFS is dangerous.

Any comments?

[greenfly]

OldCanoeist,

Writing to NTFS traditionally has been very dangerous if not impossible to the point that the write functionality in the NTFS driver for the Linux kernel was disabled for some time (which might be where some of the perception comes from), but recently developments in Linux have allowed it to write to NTFS without using something like captive-ntfs. I haven't personally heard any stories of NTFS corruption due to the current way Linux writes to NTFS. I haven't seen any corruption myself in the tests I ran for the book, but then these days I don't have many Windows machines around that I use regularly, so I don't write to NTFS too often.

So basically I haven't heard of major problems with writing to NTFS with the current version of Knoppix, but in either case it's always a good policy to keep backups of important files.