Make Knoppix detect ISOs lying on HD

[probono]

I would like to be able to run Knoppix ISO from HD.

Granted, there is the fromhd cheatcode, but with this I always have to extract the /knoppix/knoppix file from the ISO I have downloaded. It would be great if Knoppix could search for Knoppix ISO files lying around on HD at boot time using loop.

It should be feasible by editing linuxrc and/or the init scripts.

With this, you could have a "very poor man's" install by just downloading the Knoppix ISO to HD, copying miniroot.gz and vmlinuz and creating the neccessary LILO/GRUB entries.

No more "unpacking" the 700 MB file from the ISO!

(My dream is to always grab the latest ISO and run it from within the ISO without unpacking - and have the rest of the HD as /home where I also install my software using klik)

[Ambrose]

I do this all the time.

Boot knoppix, mount your 700 meg hard drive PARTITION. Making this partition any bigger is useless is the partition will be mounted RO. Let's call the hdc1

mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt/hdc1 -o rw (Or whatever other options you may or may not need)
cd /mnt/hdc1
mkdir KNOPPIX
cd KNOPPIX
cp /cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX ./KNOPPIX
reboot
At the boot prompt, type 'knoppix fromhd' Knoppix will look on all partitions for it's 700meg compress KNOPPIX image, and boot that.

Hope this helps.

- Ambrose

[probono]

I too do this, but that's not what I meant. With this method you still have to extract the knoppix/knoppix from the ISO which requires an additional 700 MB of HD space (at least temporarily) and some minutes to copy knoppix/knoppix.

What I want is to leave knoppix/knoppix _INSIDE_ the ISO and boot it from there.

I imagine it should work by modifying the scripts inside initrd.gz. It should to the following:

When I enter
knoppix fromiso=/dev/hda1/KNOPPIX3.4_CTEDITION
the init script should, instead scanning all kinds of devices, insmod loop && mount /dev/hda1/KNOPPIX3.4_CTEDITION /mnt/iso -o loop
then it could continue as usual...

I see no reason why this should not work but unfortunately I am not programmer enough to actually do it.