Dazed and Confused New Old User

[Chuck E]

I know I've got a lot of reading to do but I just need to vent about my frustrations at this point.I've used a Knoppix version 5 something to recover some lost files and more recently was using a version 7.1? on a 16GB flash drive to get some use out of a Dell Latitude D610 laptop that I can't afford to fix properly ($ is an issue in my life).

That version of Knoppix started going weird when the task bar at the bottom of the screen disappeared and was not to be found anywhere. There was some kind of pulsing activity at the bottom of any screen which caused any menu that needed another mouseclick to make a choice disappear. So I saved my documents to a different flash drive and found Knoppix 7.4.2 and tried that out.

I used UNetbootin 1.1.1.1 to get it on the drive and selected a persistent space of 5000 mb even though I'm not sure if this works for Knoppix as usually the first time I run the drive it gives me about 10 seconds to enter an amount for the space I would like for files to be preserved through boots. None of my attempts (I'm up to about 6 now) have been able to make a drive that remembers anything between uses.

I've been using the Universal-USB-Installer 1.9.6.0 for the more recent attempts and still no luck. I'm not a programmer and don''t have a lot of experience editing boot files so I'm looking for a simple solution for this issue. I know I've got a lot of reading to do and it's going to take more than 5 minutes for me to get up to speed.

I'm impressed and confused with the amount of things in this version and can't figure out why I can't see any of the files when I put the drive in a windows machine. I can't figure out why the Xscreensaver keeps telling my at boot that my screen saver (which I disable anyway) is out of date and that where ever I got my "distro" from is doing me a disservice.

At nine hours to download (2 times now) I take it from where I can get it which turned out to be England (I'm in the US).

Another issue I have is that the Synaptic package manager seems to be wonky. I try to update the list of packages and get :

An error occurredThe following details are provided:W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs:9D6D8F6BC857C906W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs:7638D0442B90D010W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs:9D6D8F6BC857C906W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs:7638D0442B90D010W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs:7638D0442B90D010W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs:7638D0442B90D010W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs:7638D0442B90D010

After the above messaged is closed and the screen loads again the following message comes up:

An error occurredThe following details are provided:E: The value 'wheezy' is invalid for APT:efault-Release as such a release is not available in the sourcesE: _cache->open() failed, please report.

When that message is closed Synaptic Package manager explodes and will not run again without the wheezy error again.So it's been weeks now that I've been messing with this. On the positive side, with version 7.4.2 I don't have to set the computers time ahead four hours to make it read Eastern Standard Time....


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