Virtual Pc Nightmare!

[tbielawa]

I can see the question comming, so here's the real answer.

Knoppix 3.8.1 and up (3.9 is current as of this writing) does not work properly with Virtual PC. Knoppix incorrectly detects the network adapter as a D-Link adapter, and installs the wrong networking drivers causing the virtual machine to crash. If you search for the solution to this problem you will find: “If networking crashes you machine, don’t use networking then,” which is just not a good solution. The correct solution is as follows.

1.Boot Knoppix with the nodhcp cheatcode. This prevents Knoppix from trying to access the network adapter and crashing before you have a chance to fix things
2. As root (of course), execute the following commands:
3. modprobe –r de4x5
4. modprobe tulip
5. ifconfig eth0 up
6. pump –i eth0
7. Enjoy network access.

[Israel]

Thanks for the advice, I actually don't have a book for Virtual PC (the software was given to me). But I do think I have a good grasp on saving a Virtual Drive. I've installed Linux Mepis and Suse on Virtual drives and no problems saving them what so ever. I'm at work, but I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks!

[tbielawa]

I actually don't have a book for Virtual PC

The complete documentation for Virtual PC is available from the help menu.

[Israel]

Ok...., I should've got that one. My bad, I'm always working 3rd shift when I post these so you'll have to forgive my brain runs a little slower at these hours.

I'm still having trouble with the saving part. I have a book by O'Reily that say to save your configuration to disk normally you just go to
"Knoppix-Configure-Save Knoppix Configuration" or go to the Konsole and type:

/usr/sbin/saveconfig

I tried both of these a couple times and never could get it to save. Any tips?

[tbielawa]

Are you getting any error messaages? If so post those here. I still suspect that the drive is not formatted. Make sure you can mount the partition that you're trying to save to.

[Israel]

All it said was:

The KNOPPIX Configuration could NOT be saved:

Nothing more...Nothing less....

[tbielawa]

You still haven't said if you can mount the partion.

[Israel]

Ok, as if you couldn't tell....I'm a noob. But I'm not really sure how you would mount the partition. (Nor, the entirity of what that means, other than creating a partion you would "mount" to the real hardrive?) With all the other versions of Linux I tried installing they took the first time, no tweeks or fixes. I'll take it then, since I don't know for sure, I probably haven't done that. How would you go about that in Knoppix or with VM?

[tbielawa]

Before you can use a disk you must partition it, then format the partitions (create filesystems on the partitions), and then mount the filesystems. Knoppix doesn’t do any of these steps for you, because it is intended to be run as a Live CD, and it doesn’t touch the hard drives in the process (except for SWAP partitions).

Partitioning the disk means just what it says; you break the disk into smaller pieces, which are usually independent of each other. When you partition the disk, you usually provide a rough idea of what the filesystem type will be. Partitioning can be performed with cfdisk, but it sounds like you already understand this part.

Next you need to format the partitions. Formatting the partitions creates a filesystem on the partitions that the OS can read and write. My guess is that you skipped from here stright to the last step. To create a filesystem in Linux, use the mkfs command. Ext2 is the most common filesystem in Linux, and although Ext3 is newer and better, Ext2 will cause you fewer problems if you don’t know what you’re doing (I don’t think all versions of Knoppix have a kernel with built in Ext3 support, so you can’t use bootfrom=/dev/hda1 if hda1 has an Ext3 filesystem). To format hda1 with an Ext3 filesystem the command would be “mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1”.

Finally you need to mount the filesystem before you can use it. Mounting a filesystem is basically the process by which you tell the OS that you want to use a particular filesystem, and you give it a name that you can refer to it by. In Windows this is where you assign a drive letter like D: to a filesystem. In Linux it will be something like /mnt/hda1. To mount /dev/hda1 the command would be “mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1” assuming that the directory /mnt/hda1 exists. Filesystems can also be mounted in Knoppix by clicking on the icon of the partition that the filesystem exists on, on the KDE Desktop.

Once the filesystem is mounted, you can access it at the mount point, in this example /mnt/hda1.