OK I tried it, I love it, now wanna make it perminant...

[Kesla_koiL]

OK here's the deal. Some friends of mine have been bugging me to loose Winblows for quite a while now and I finally caved in and tried this KNOPPIX CD everybody is raving about around here. I love this version quite a bit. It's a breath of freash air as compaired to Microshaft's product XP, better known as Xtreem Pain. I want to make it perminant so I'm wondering if there's any way to install KNOPPIX to a small hard drive. If that's not an option I'm open to suggestions as to which distro and/or version to use. The reason I'm asking is because I've been to the Linux website and noticed there are quite a few different kinds to choose from. For me that's a problem because I have no idea what any of them are like. That's why I decided to ask some one who knows a little more about the subject. Please keep in mind that I havn't used this more than just today so I'm not as familliar with how things work as some of you. To put it another way, HELP!

[rrfish72]

Go to a konsole and type sudo knoppix-installer. That will get the installer running. You need to have a partition formatted for linux and a linux swap also. These are not very hard to do, even if you have to resize you can do it from the cd.

[Kesla_koiL]

I'm still looking for a good distro of Linux to install on a more perminant basis. By the looks of it I'm going to need a bigger old hard disk. I'm using an old seagate 3.2Gig at the moment and I can see that it's going to fill up quick. I just wish I could use my Winblows drive without formatting it. It's a large drive with a lot of irriplacable data. The main problem is that it would take me over 100 CD-Rs and more than one day to do. I'm currently looking into just buying a new drive and backing it all up to that. A duplicate if you will, of the whole drive. So yes I'm still looking for a good version of Lenux for a beginner like me. Any tips or tricks as to installing Linux on a FAT32 drive would be welcome too. Again, thank you for the help so far...

[CrashedAgain]

Knoppix needs about 2.3G to install so it will fit on your 3.2 with a little bit to spare. You can slim it down as soon as it's installed by removing unnecessary stuff (like over 100 meg of extra language support).
You cannot actually install linux on a fat 32 drive but qtparted should be able to add in a linux partition without losing any data.
Is your current HD partitioned or all one big drive? If it's all one partition with lots of irreplaceable data you are courting disaster, I strongly suggest you back up & partition so that the data is separate from the O/S as soon as you can.
If you have a fat32 partition at present, Linux on the old 3.2 drive can use the fat32 data partition so you may not need to have a bigger HD for Linux as it is O/S only.
Knoppix or Kanotix are both good choices for a Linux install, much easier to work with than red hat based systems like Mandrake, SuSe or Fedora & easier to install than Debian.

[rgarden]

I'm running a windows 2000 system, and recently learned that Knoppix doesn't like Fat32 or NTFS partitions at all, and I don't like the idea of messing with my Windows disk after I trashed it once and luckily reinstalled it from a Norton Ghost image. After some experimentation, I think I have found a solution, but I need some feedback about 1t.

1. Knoppix has two "cheatcodes" TOHD & FROMHD which allow you to move an image of the knoppix cd into a Windows Folder ( not a persistent home directory, or a linux partition). I Ran Knoppix TOHD=/dev/hda1 to create that folder on my windows system, and windows sees it as just another folder. I can delete it if I want and have no problem there.

2. To Use this feature, I put the Knoppix CD into the CD drive, at the boot prompt type "knoppix fromhd=/dev/hda1" and the kernel starts up. About 10 seconds into the boot, right after inspecting for USB devices, I see a notce in Green that the kernel is "Accessing Knoppix Cdrom at /dev/hda1", and the boot sequence switches to the hard drive. I can take aout the CDrom and use the cd drive for whatever I want. From what I can tell, Knoppix is using the first hard drive(windows 2000), as a read only CDrom , so the chances of trashing that are remote.

3. To explore linux, I have hooked up an old 4.3 gig drive in a USB enclosue which Knoppix sees as /dev/sda1. I used the QTParted program to format 2GB as and active ext2 parition, and 1gb as a Linux Swap file /dev/sda2. I then used the Knoppix Configure program to create a "Persistent home directory" on the entire sda1 parition (no encryption) , then right clicked on the drive image on the desktop and changed the permissions to read/write.

4. Now I put in the knoppix cd , wait for the boot prompt, type "knoppix fromhd=/dev/hda1 home=/dev/sda1" and when knoppix accesses /dev/hda1 as a cdrom, I get a 1 gb swap file and a 2gig storage drive on the USB drive.

5. To test this out , I cranked up the Konqueror browser, used Google to find the Firefox Web Browser, downloaded it from Mozilla as a tarball to the Home foleder, extracted it to a folder I made called downloads, installed it, and added it to the KDE desktop next to the konqueror icon. After rebooting, Firefox is still there, as are my bookmarks and my printer config. HOORAH !

6. If I want to use MIcrosoft Office XP, or my Outlook Contacts, I just pull the Knoppix CD out of the CD drive, restart the system, and I come right back up Windows 2000.

7. If I were you, I'd invest $30 in an external USB drive enclosure and try rhis out with your old drive. Depending on how much ram you have, you could cut the swap file down to 512mb or maybe even 256mb and be fine.

[Kesla_koiL]

OK, I guess the next obvious question is weather there's a disk utility tool for Linux that will work on a winblows partition. You know, something that will allow me to add or delete files in the event that Winblows get's yet another virus and it can't be removed while the OS is running. I've looked but I can't seem to find one. I could even deal with it if I had to use a DOS based boot disk with a disk editor utility. It would have to be one that would allow me to browse the files though. Any suggestions would be welcome. Oh, and by the way a few friends and I have come up with a new T-shirt idea. More specificly "W.N.B.W.A." which stands for "Will Never Boot WIndows Again." I'll post this as a new topic to see how many of you like the idea...

Thanks again...
€, AKA (Kesla_koiL)

[CrashedAgain]

I'm running a windows 2000 system, and recently learned that Knoppix doesn't like Fat32 or NTFS partitions at all,

Not so, knoppix will read write to vfat (fat32) systems without any problems. If you have heard of problems with vfat drives it would be due to operator error or some other cause, not inherent to linux, for instance I once killed my windows installation by attempting to delete a link to the mount point while the windows drive was still mounted.

You must use 'captive-ntfs' for ntfs systems.

Your toHD system sounds like a nice workable system, you could even add applications with klik. However, you could just install the second HDD & do a full HD Knoppix install on it. Knoppix will install on 2.3 G, 3G is enough for a Hdinstall if you are using the other drive for your data which you can do quite safely if it's vfat.

OK, I guess the next obvious question is weather there's a disk utility tool for Linux that will work on a winblows partition. You know, something that will allow me to add or delete files in the event that Winblows get's yet another virus...

Yes, you can just use konqueror or the linux command line to read/write file on your windows drive. If if's vfat no problem, if it's ntfs you must mount it with the 'captive-ntfs' utility which uses windows own drivers to write to the drive.
[/quote]

[Rumo]

if it's ntfs you must mount it with the 'captive-ntfs' utility which uses windows own drivers to write to the drive.

[/quote]

Kewl. Does that really work? And is it safe?

I thought the only way to write to ntfs partitions is to activate the 'write to ntfs" kernel support which is both very limited and unsafe.

So I don't need a fat32 Partition anymore?