2GB HDD HELP

[mr_ed]

you people seem better than the customer support of some really good companies

Wait until you get our bill!

Don't change hdb - hdb1 isn't causing any harm, and it isn't enough space to help Knoppix. And hdb3 is just right for swap.

You'd have to take 500MB - 1GB away from Windows on hda to install Knoppix - it could be from either hda1 or hda5 or both. You're probably using partitions hda2 and hda3, right? So making another logical partition would be the easiest.

i thought installing Knoppix would be as easy as RH 7.2...........

Klaus Knopper created Knoppix so he could have a portable work environment without carrying around a laptop - he wanted a CD that he could run in any computer that was nearby. And have 2 GB of software (compressed onto that one disk) with him at all times.

So Knoppix just isn't designed to be installed to HD. But people who want to install it anyway have to understand that it's a big, solid glob that unpacks into 2 GB and then needs working room besides that.

And it runs KDE, so it wants lots of memory. Here's from http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-info/index-en.html:

20 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)

Knoppix is a sweet distro, but it's not very kind toward the lower resources of vintage equipment.

-- Ed

[cyberoidx]

What i was thinking was that i could remove hdb3 and make hdb2 almost 2GB, if there was a way to put the swap file on hda1 or hda2 . Is there a way to do that?

[mr_ed]

Yes and no.

Knoppix (or any Linux) needs a dedicated swap partition - it looks for an entry in the drive's partition table with an ID of 82. (When you're running Knoppix from CD you can see partition tables by typing $ sudo fdisk -l /dev/hda and $ sudo fdisk -l /dev/hdb - that's a lower-case "L" as in "list.")

So yes, Linux swap can be moved to hda. No, it can't be inside a Windows or DOS partition like your hda1.

I hope this helps....

-- Ed

[cyberoidx]

I shifted all my contents in hda2 to hdb1 and now have 3.6GB lin native + 300MB sawp space. I did the install once, but i put the lilo on the partition instead of MBR..... how do i access it now. I used a lilo cd i had to boot up. used Linux root=/dev/hda2 Knoppix booted, showed Hd-install instead of live CD, but then X11 never started correctly. Will try once again, and tell you the errors.

Thanks for now.

[mr_ed]

Congratulations - you've got Knoppix!

You'll need to edit the file /etc/fstab - do you know how to use vi or emacs?

-- Ed

[mr_ed]

Congratulations - you've got Knoppix!

You'll need to edit the file /etc/lilo.conf - do you know how to use vi or emacs?

-- Ed

[cyberoidx]

Thanks ed. I just did a re-install, and its working nicely. Now i'll be experienting with the bootloader. I put Lilo on the MBR, but now i am thinking of removing that, and booting from a cd/floppy. So some changes will be there........ All in all thanks for your help guys.

One more thing. I had done hd install so that knoppix runs faster.... but i see no change in speed, comparing win98 to knoppix is like trains to running.........

Is there anything like disabling animations, etc? cause i think the transparency effect might be doin this?

[mr_ed]

Excellent! Your persistance is really paying off!

removing that, and booting from a cd/floppy

You probably don't have to remove LILO from the MBR - booting with a floppy or CD in the drive should override booting from HD, depending on how you've configured your BIOS. For my machine that has a FD, I set it to check for that first, then for a CD, and then to boot from HD.

i see no change in speed....

This is almost certainly due to running KDE. Remember that http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-info/index-en.html says you need at least 96 MB for it.

When your system doesn't have enough RAM to hold the programs that are running, it uses the swap space as extra "memory." The less RAM, the more the system has to write stuff to HD, read more stuff from HD, then write still more stuff to HD, then read even more stuff from HD....

So no, you're not seeing an increase in speed because instead of doing lots of reads from CD, you're doing lots of read/writes to HD.

The answer would be to use one of the so-called "lightweight" window managers instead of KDE, which is not only a window manager but also a Desktoop Environment - something that knits together all your desktop stuff with a consistent "look and feel" and uses lots of memory in doing it.

You can have more than one window manager installed, but you can only run one at a time. I forget whether Knoppix installs any besides KDE by default. But if you can run kpackage, look in the section called X11, or synaptic in Miscellaneous - Graphical.

Everything that ends in *wm (except selectwm) is a window manager. And a bunch of the other packages in those sections are, too - check blackbox and fluxbox, metacity, sapphire, sawfish, xfce/xfwm4 (another desktop environment and its window manager - but smaller than KDE) ... and many others!

-- Ed

[cyberoidx]

Yes i know all that you said this time. Finally i'm a PRO....

I got fluxbox and TVM already there, and i suppose one more. will try both. Or is there any old version of KDE i could downgrade to?

[cyberoidx]

Yes i know all that you said this time. Finally i'm a PRO....

I got fluxbox and TVM already there, and i suppose one more. will try both. Or is there any old version of KDE i could downgrade to? And what about Gnome (i think it kinda sucks, but i need something to work on..........)