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I installed Knoppix 3.7 on my hard drive with hardware detection. Thinks look good
so far except that the ethernet interface is not working. If I run Knoppix 3.7 from
the CDROM boot, I can get the ethernet interface working with no problem.
When I pull up the KDE menu and select "Knoppix-->Network Interface-->Network
Card Configuration, the message that I get is, "No support network cards found."
Can anyone help me with this?
Well, that's odd. :? Here's what I'd check when you boot to HD:For step (1) you can type $ uname -r to see what kernel is installed. The CD boots with 2.4.27 unless you type knoppix26 - but it doesn't hurt to practice with the command line :D and use uname when you boot the CD to check stuff.
- 1 - the installed kernel is the same as the CD kernel that you boot (2.4.27 or 2.6.9);
2 - you're not using the boot parameter (cheatcode) nodhcp;
3 - during boot, Knoppix gives the message Network device eth0 detected;
4 - $ dmesg | grep eth0;
5 - $ cat /proc/net/dev;
6 - $ cat /etc/sysconfig/(kernel-version)/netcard.
Step (2) is to make sure Knoppix looks for a router or always-on internet provider. (DHCP is the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, which lets something else set your system's internet parameters like IP address.) If you installed a bootloader, nodhcp might show up there. For LILO, for instance, look in /etc/lilo.conf for the line append=.
Step (3) is to make sure Knoppix finds your ethernet hardware (eth0 is the first one - you may have more) and also finds your router or internet provider. The message is one of the last that the Knoppix startup scripts print in color before starting KDE.
If you don't notice it, once you're in KDE you can switch to console 1 by typing all together <CTRL><ALT>F1 and you'll see the last screenful of messages. To get back into GUI mode, type <ALT><left arrow> or go to its default display with <CTRL><ALT>F7.
If Knoppix doesn't give this message, use step (4) as another check for hardware detection. If you type just the command $ dmesg in a terminal window, you'll get an eyeful of boot messages - it's good to look through the whole pile sometimes, and in a terminal window you can scroll up and down at your leisure.
But to cut to the chase, you can instead direct the ouput of dmesg (with the "|" pipe symbol) to the filter grep and tell it to show you any lines that have "eth0" in them.
If (3) gives negative results but (4) is okay, then something is badly wrong with the Knoppix part of your installation. If (4) doesn't turn up either, then something is badly wrong with the Linux part. Either way, I think re-installing Knoppix would be the first thing to try.
Step (5), when you do it with a hard-drive boot, is just a sanity check for (3) and (4). The cat command tells the system to dump a file to your screen (or somewhere else if you use, for example, the pipe). If the file is big you'd probably use less instead. But the ones in (5) and (6) are small.
When you're connected to the net, (5) will have a line for eth0 with non-zero numbers. If you wait a bit and enter the command again, the numbers will be bigger. A line with all zeros means the hardware was found, but the connection wasn't made. No line means no hardware found.
In step (6), substitue 2.4.27 or 2.6.9 for (kernel-version). If Linux found your internet hardware (controller), this file has its name and also the name of the device driver that Linux is using. An empty file means no hardware detected, but if it names the controller and not the driver, then you have a more interesting situation.
Well ... it's interesting if you're curious about why a kernel module gets loaded from the CD but not from the HD. But you probably aren't. :D In which case, try re-installing.
If you decide to re-install for whatever reason, and you still have the problem, then maybe your CD has a bizarre flaw right where it goes through the installation steps. A blip like that, that doesn't crash the whole process, would be truly astounding. But they say that bad CDs are the #1 cause of problems - whoever "they" is. :wink:
Let us know what you find, okay?
-- Ed
What an interesting thing to say. My first thought on reading it was "Well, that's typical, what else is new?". Just look through the old posts in both this and the networking forum. Many, many complaints are about networking that worked fine from CD failing after a hard drive install.Quote:
Originally Posted by mr_ed
Oops! :oops:
You're right - I haven't read enough of the forum. Is there a common underlying problem?
-- Ed
I feel like I'm being set up to deliver the punch line. To my way of thinking, the underlying problem is trying to install a system that was intended to live on a live CD to hard disk.Quote:
Originally Posted by mr_ed
I certainly don't claim to know what the problem is in this case (or, honestly, care). But I have frequently seen threads where the problem turned out to be simple permissions not set properly on some file. Why the scripts that "install" Knoppix exist at all if people who create them don't bother to get file permissions set right I don't understand. The uber-geeks seem to dismiss this as an issue not even worth their notice, many of the responses just point out that a permssion needs to be changed. But given that Linux permissions are cryptic to a new user and Knoppix is aimed (at least in part) at new users and the install scripts are certainly for the "benefit" of new users who can not or will not do a full Debian install, it makes no sense to me that this never seems to get fixed. The only answer I have been able to come up with is that it's God's way of punishing people who insist on installing a Live CD to a hard disk because they think it's going to be easy.
Harry, I agree with you all the way down the line. The single biggest improvement that Klaus Knopper could make to Knoppix is to remove knoppix-installer.
My pet peeves are forcing people to install a bootloader and leaving in the code that rebuilds the fstab on every boot. These seem like careless oversights to me - like the permissions you mention.
Adding the mechanism to do installation is a case of feature creep gone worse than usual, but the wrong people are getting punished! And not consistently - Knoppix was easy for me to install. But so were Debian sarge and Progeny Debian, so that's what I push people toward.
Maybe the "HDD Install" part of this category should be moved to one of its own. It could have a single message with a dire warning against installing Knoppix and a recommendation to use Debian instead - and then be locked to discourage any further discussion.
In that case, who's on first? :D LiGNUx needs people who are funny on purpose. Burns and Allen, Abbot and Costello, Ricky and Lucy, Tom and Dick Smothers, Martin and Lewis ... Rowan and Martin! Where are they in our time of need?Quote:
I feel like I'm being set up to deliver the punch line.
-- Ed, formerly of the team Wilbur Post and Mr. Ed
[oops - duplicate post] -- Ed
Good suggestions. I will check these out.Quote:
Well, that's odd. Confused Here's what I'd check when you boot to HD:
1 - the installed kernel is the same as the CD kernel that you boot (2.4.27 or 2.6.9);
2 - you're not using the boot parameter (cheatcode) nodhcp;
3 - during boot, Knoppix gives the message Network device eth0 detected;
4 - $ dmesg | grep eth0;
5 - $ cat /proc/net/dev;
6 - $ cat /etc/sysconfig/(kernel-version)/netcard.
Harry, I did look a little and did not find the right thread. I'll go back and do some more diligent homework and seeQuote:
What an interesting thing to say. My first thought on reading it was "Well, that's typical, what else is new?". Just look through the old posts in both this and the networking forum. Many, many complaints are about networking that worked fine from CD failing after a hard drive install.
what is there. :)
It seems to me that you point out what you perceive as 2 problems.Quote:
I feel like I'm being set up to deliver the punch line. To my way of thinking, the underlying problem is trying to install a system that was intended to live on a live CD to hard disk.
I certainly don't claim to know what the problem is in this case (or, honestly, care). But I have frequently seen threads where the problem turned out to be simple permissions not set properly on some file. Why the scripts that "install" Knoppix exist at all if people who create them don't bother to get file permissions set right I don't understand. The uber-geeks seem to dismiss this as an issue not even worth their notice, many of the responses just point out that a permssion needs to be changed. But given that Linux permissions are cryptic to a new user and Knoppix is aimed (at least in part) at new users and the install scripts are certainly for the "benefit" of new users who can not or will not do a full Debian install, it makes no sense to me that this never seems to get fixed. The only answer I have been able to come up with is that it's God's way of punishing people who insist on installing a Live CD to a hard disk because they think it's going to be easy.
1. Moving a CDROM based OS to HDD when it was not intended for this.
2. The authors write a script that is not bullet proof.
I don't agree that 1 is a true problem. Knoppix can and should work in both cases. Different
users have different requirements. I'm sure life would be easier to just provide a CDROM version,
but in my own case a CDROM solution is not acceptable. I really need a root file system that is
R/W so I can customize the environment as I need. Truefully, I would be more than happy to
stick with Red Hat Fedora or Mandrake, but their hardware detection is inferior to Knoppix.
Right now, Knoppix is the only Linux based system that runs on my PC.
Yet, I can see why many people would be happy with a CDROM based O/S.
Should the developers of Knoppix favor a CDROM or HDD based system. I really don't think
so.
Which brings us to the 2nd problem. Yes, the developers should make their software
bulletproof. I have done s/w development in the past and I understand the trade off
between getting the release out ASAP versus making it bulltetproof. Until the software
is made bulletproof the authors must give disclosure statements and warn the user.
This is the case with 'sudo'. It does give a warning when you run it. Buyer beware!
I may have gotten burned here, but I'm a friendly user and I'm willing to work toward
finding a suitable solution. I'm just happy that the author has provided as much as
is available at this time because I think it will get me where I want to be faster than
if I did not have the 'sudo' program. I do hope the author continues to work on the known
problems so it does eventually become a quality program.
[/quote]
Harry, I agree with you all the way down the line. The single biggest improvement that Klaus Knopper could make to Knoppix is to remove knoppix-installer.
Quote:
Mr. Ed (I always loved Mr. Ed :D )
I don't totally agree with you and Harry. If Linux is to become more popular than Windows, then
it must be bulletproof for the newbie. It needs to be a shrink wrapped product that installs
flawlessly. On the other hand, I'd hate to see Linux products be so standardized that the
flexibility is lost so that techies can't customize and experiment. Personally, I think Linux
has evolved reasonablly well, i.e. installation is much easier than it has been in the past,
yet there is still quite a bit of flexibility.
Jim
1) Sure, moving software from a CD to HD should work. And it does work, if you are will to acceopt the software for what it was on the CD. Here's where the problem gets created. Knoppix is a mix of at least 3 different releases of Debian. Klaus and associates have carefully picked and tuned the different parts that they selected to work together on the CD. I can only guess, but I suspect they did this to enable them to get newer "unstable" versions of some programs where the new versions had important improvements, older "stable" versions of others where the newer "unstable" or "experimental" versions had known bugs or were just not ready, and even newer "experimental" software where they thought it was appropriate. They tested evertyhing together and, as well as can reasonably be done with software testing, everything worked together fine. They put it on a CD release and it works well from CD.Quote:
Originally Posted by jjanderson5
People get the CD. They like it. They get the crazy idea that they can somehow install it to the hard disk and it will be faster and even better. They can indeed move the files to the hard disk (but see 2 below). But then they get "greedy". They want to add another program. Or they want to update some software that there has been a new release for. But while Knoppix is made from Debian, it is made from multiple releases of Debian and all of the parts are not conpatable with each other. A lot of work went through the selecting of the parts to build a system that would work well, but when you update some of these parts you strat breaking things. This could be avoided if Klaus selected on version of Debian and build everything based on that, but that's not whet he's trying to do. His forcus is on building a live CD that works great as a Live CD, he is not going to sacrifice the Live CD working the best it can just so that HD install work properly, and many do not think he should. So understand that when you instal the Live CD mix of different versions of Debian to a hard disk, you still have a mix of different versions of Debian. They have been carefully tested and tuned to work together, but if you upgrade or even add things you may make chages that are much more likely to cause problems than if you are running programs from one release of Debian.
Looking at the issue another way, this would be like building a speciial CD version out of Windows, but using some parts of XP, some parts of Win98, some parts of Win95, maybe a little WinME or NT4, and running it all as Windows running on top of DOS 4 or DOS 5. Testing everything and then putting everything that works together on on CD could give you a Windows that runs from CD. But don't be surprised if you move it to hard disk and then something goes very wrong when you try to upgrade Direct X (or install any software that installs direct x for you). Don't be surprised if software can now make changes to the registery or other files, does, and it causes problems - the developers might have known about the problems but decided they were not an issue since the software was on a read-only CD. Even just adding a simple program that brings in a new dll will likely cause the who thing to collapse (heck, that happens now with Windows even when it is a regular single version install). That's not to say that such a hybred mix of Windows on CD would not be good, but installing it to disk and then making changes is not what the people who made it intended or could plan for.
2) The scripts. Yes, I don't understand either how these can "install" the files and not get such obvious things like file permissions right. It's a problem I've seen mentioned on these forums for two years now. Unfortunately I think it might be in part an arrogance on the part of the uber-geeks who write the scripts. To them permissions are a trival matter, something they hardly think about. If they even use these scripts for themselves, when they hit the problem they just type a few keystrokes and it's fixed, in their mind it is a non-issue. For the newbie that the scripts are aimed at it is a major problem. Why these never seem to get updated I have no idea, I just don't think the script writers care (just my own opnion, I've never used the scripts). But I see a lot of posts about things that worked from the CD and stopped workimg after a hard disk "install". Most might be about networking, although recently sound card problems seem to be catching up. Some are certainly user errors, but I suspect most are real and valid problems from people who believed that a Knoppix install was going to get them a Linux system without having to go through the learn experience of installing a release like Debian.
Jim, last night I spent five hours composing a post that explained, in my impoverished German, to someone whose mouse broke when he updated Knoppix that it was because he hadn't installed Debian instead. I have too much invested in my opinion to change it now! :wink:
Knoppix came about because Klaus Knopper wanted a portable work environment that wasn't a portable computer - even though they no longer weigh 24 pounds like the very first, the Osborne 1. http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.html
In turn, this led to these requirements (among others):And (3) allowed a good deal of feature creep in the form of feature duplication. Just for putting words into a file, Knoppix users can choose among Joe, KWrite, Kate, NEdit, vim, Xedit, gvim, zile, OpenOffic.org Writer, and Richard Stallman's own emacs. Free as in Freedom of Choice! :D
- 1 - excellent hardware detection;
2 - a boatload of applications, which in turn required:
3 - compression.
Well, after all, Unix started life as a word processor. And this heritage shows in ULOs (Unix-Like Operating systems - I release the term under the BSD license. :wink: )
But wait - ten's not enough! Where's wily? Never mind, I'll add it myself. And so I fire up synaptic, cross my fingers, and install wily. Hmmm ... the mousewheel doesn't work. Now where in the world is the configuration file?
The German user wants to know why there are five different config files for XFree86 in /etc/X11. I want to know why xorg fails to deliver a usable window environment on either of my home computers, with every UULO I've installed that depends on it - from Slackware to Solaris.
(UULO = Unix + ULO, also released under the BSD license.)
One user wants to install Knoppix but has only 2 GB of HD available. Another has a CD drive that can't read 700-MB disks. Still another is in Spain - but Knoppix loads /etc/apt/sources.list with mirrors in Germany.
Time for a math joke. :D A mathematics professor is writing away at the blackboard and then turns to the students. He says, "It is intuitively obvious that...." and then runs out of the classroom to his office. Twenty minutes later he comes back. "Yes, it is intuitively obvious that..." and he goes on to finish his point.
Sometimes it's not very obvious, but optimizing a system for one set of conditions means makiing decisions that have to make the system sub-optimal for at least some other conditions. And this applies to UULOs in general and Knoppix in particular.
LiGNUx-on-a-disk is a great portable work environment and also a great portable demo environment and a great portable forensics environment - provided that it comes stuffed with what you want, of course. And provided that you can tweak what you get into an environment you want to use.
And Knoppix is good at this, too. A refinement of requirement (1) above is that the hardware be detected and the software be automatically configured to deal with it well.
Jim, this goes to your point about making the OS install flawlessly for the novice. Heck, even a 35-year veteran (ahem) doesn't want to waste time fiddling with details that can be - and in his view should be - handled by the computer.
Do I want to stand in front of my car every morning with a hand crank to get the engine started, or do I prefer to let the battery and electric motor do the job for me? Like it says on the sign over the backscratcher manufacturing plant, "To Itch His Own" :D - but I'll pass.
Here's what a bunch of experts meeting to discuss "Hot Topics in Operating Systems" have written:
This is at http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~syrah/nofutz/. The page goes on:Quote:
In 1999, the OS researchers at HotOS identified "futz" as the most important problem facing the community.
This is just the tip of the iceberg - they have lots more to say about futzing.Quote:
Even though you may have a fairly good idea of what you want the system to do or how you want it to behave, there usually isn't any way to express that directly. Instead, you must change the configuration — experimentally — until the observed behavior appears to match your expectations.
Unix came about in one of the world's premier research laboratories and was developed and used by people who futzed for a living. Thirty years later, having the ability and tolereance (or even love) for futzing remains a badge of honor for many system administrators.
Four years before the HotOS workshop I just quoted from, a crowd (notably including Ken Thompson) from that same research outfit (Bell Laboratories) published a paper saying they'd grown tired of their Unix and had all switched over to a new OS they developed called Plan 9. Here's a passage that just cracks me up:
Isn't it ironic, then, that we owe our TCP/IP internet world to a DARPA grant for UCal-Berkely to implement it in BSD Unix? :DQuote:
First, the operating system they [personal workstations] run, UNIX, is itself an old timesharing system and has had trouble adapting to ideas born after it. Graphics and networking were added to UNIX well into its lifetime and remain poorly integrated and difficult to administer.
The Plan 9 paper is at http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html. It goes on to say:
It sounds like they got the point about futzing. But notice that they're talking about the user, not the sysadmin.Quote:
The distinction between operating system, library, and application is important to the operating system researcher but uninteresting to the user. What matters is clean functionality.
I recently installed Plan 9 on my home computers and had to do what lazy-old-me considers major futzing. A big part of the problem is inadequate documentation. The man pages are great, of course, but there's no Ignoramus Installer's Guide that starts out, "First, check the box to make sure all the parts are there...." :wink:
It turns out that what I thought was just one computer - my Pentium III, for example - is actually four different machines: a processor server, a file server, an authentication server, and a terminal.
See, one of the team's design goals was to re-centralize system-wide resources for economy and control. Users no longer had personal workstations, they had generic, interchangeable terminals that accessed the centrally-managed servers. At the same time, central services were split out onto different machines to control both the technology that each server used and the access given to different personnel.
Plan 9 has no superuser, not even on a home computer where the dogs have more interesting things to do than change your permissions while you're away - like chewing up old books. :twisted:
So the goals of the team (Bell Labs, not my dogs) don't quite match mine. Ah well. Plan 9 is fun! Try wily - it's a clone of Plan 9's acme. (There's no roadrunner in the package. In fact, if you rearrange the letters of the all-in-one environment "acme," you get "emac"....)
Okay, back to the old fogey sitting at his Pentium III and cursing at the theft-proof shrinkwrap on his shiny new set of operating-system CDs. Once he takes a butcher knife to the package, will the software meet his needs?
I don't think UULOs are there yet. Many, many people have put in untold thousands of hours so far, and there will probably be a time when I'll say yes. I'm tempted to think that the drawbacks of its Unix origins, as pointed out by the Plan 9 group, would mean that it's impossible. But hey - Windows came from PC-DOS, and lots of people seem able to work with that, so who am I to say? :D
Knoppix-on-CD sets a very high standard for other distros to meet in the area of futz-busting. But it loses too much ground when it's installed, even to the point of being a detriment to converting the very people who saw the CD and decided to give it a try.
The good news is that 2004 seems to have been the watershed year when LiGNUx in particular, among the ULOs, was finally, openly taken seriously. It's made a dent in the server market that can't be ignored, it has nearly monopolized the compute-speed supercomputer sector, and it has people from Microsoft and the SCO Group (the artist formerly known as Caldera) competing to see who can be the biggest fools in public.
Heck - Sun not only released Solaris 10 for free download, it targeted the LiGNUx core "i386" platform.
So yeah, the beachhead is secure and LiGNUx isn't going away. Three key groups of customers in U.S. business (plus governments in the rest of the world) know that it has to be included in any study of options.
One group of customers is the people who manage corporate computer systems. It's a good thing they weren't too hard to sell. :wink: Another is the people who manage the money in a business. They see that Microsoft is pouring lots of resources into arguing over Total Cost of Ownership, so they know that the Bill & Steve show doesn't have a sure bet.
Finally, there are the people who manage people. Unfortunately, I've met far too many who can't actually manage people. But that's beside the point, really. If they're told that the new system will have the same functionality and enough interface similarity to make transition something that they can gripe about without actually worrying about loss of worker-bee productivity, they're okay with it.
And that leaves only the people who manage their own cubicle, be it in a corporation or in their living room. These folks are the final frontier for UULOs, and really, the toughest group of all.
For them, an OS is something personal. It's the foundation for all the other tools they use to achieve what they're trying to do. Some of their goals they can set for themselves, and others are imposed on them - but they're held accountable. So the OS just has to get out of their way and do its job.
Well shoot. I've taken more of your time than I meant to. But since you're here - have you tried Debian sarge? :D Talk about coming a long way! Debian has made a huge impression on me lately. It was the first distro I installed way back when, and the experience was terrible.
With Debian's new installer (not the one in the stable release), things really go smoothly. And the hardware detection is almost as good as Knoppix - in my experience, anyway. I had to tweak exactly one setting to get screen resolution one level higher.
Progeny Debian - the new, free one - is also good. Didn't need any hardware tweaks, just pointed /etc/apt/sources.list to Debian sites instead of Progeny's. Give 'em a try!
-- Ed