Announcement from Klaus - DVD Knoppix planned

OK, I understand how jigdo can help now. For some reason, I was only thinking of keeping the original files intact.

My booting scheme may be rather complicated. By not having a burner nor a floppy, I extract the ISO's /KNOPPIX directory to some partition onto my main hard drive (/dev/hde ... using the Promise Ultra100TX2). I just so happen to run six different OSes from that hard drive, so the way I've laid out my partitions isn't the best for what I've done.

So, with a second hard drive (/dev/hdg), I've created a 1-cylinder (8MB) Linux ext2 partition. I dump the boot.img file (via dd) directly onto that partition and made it active. I set my PC's BIOS to boot the second hard drive, I get the KNOPPIX boot screen and it finds the extracted directory on /dev/hde.

One ?bug? I've noticed is that even though I can "boot the boot floppy image" from /dev/hdg, it cannot find the extracted /KNOPPIX directory on /dev/hdg nor /dev/hdh (again, all hard drives are connected to Ultra100TX2 ... only Zip250 and CD drives are on the motherboards main IDE ports). Later in the boot process, I think I see two identical errors about "major-block-device-2" or something very similar. I have a feeling that error is related to the two hard drives /dev/hdg and /dev/hdh. I cannot even use those drives once KNOPPIX is fully loaded. Maybe Klaus set a limit of 5 or 6 devices, and only allows the use of /dev/hde and /dev/hdf. It's not a huge problem, but something worth noting nonetheless.

I too noticed the knx-hdinstall "bug". Did you still get 100% filesystem full errors with a 4GB partition? I tried with ext3 and it still ran out of space. I'll try the other formats later.

The other minor detail I notices was the KDE KNOPPIX splash screen. It still refers to KNOPPIX 3.2 whereas the new background image clearly indicates a new version number. :)

thewalkingman, all I did was e-mail Klaus per one of the previous messages and he sent me the website credentials.

-SUO

--Your Promise card may not be fully supported directly under Linux, but that's just a guess. That might be why it can't find the knoppix dir on hdg/hdh drives. (I got lucky using an older Ultra ATA/66 card; my root is on hde, like yours; but I have to boot from a floppy. Then again, it's a P-1 233MHz with an older BIOS.)

--Consider though, both of our setups are well out of the ordinary. Most systems boot from hda/b/c/d. Booting from hde is stretching it, and g/h are probably not really even considered. (Perhaps Klaus's "detect" script for scanning devices at bootup doesn't go that far.) If you move the drives off the Promise to your motherboard, I bet everything will work, albeit a bit slower. If I could disable my moboard IDE entirely, I would - then it would see the PCI card as hda/b/c/d.

> Did you still get 100% filesystem full errors with a 4GB partition? I tried with ext3 and it still ran out of space. I'll try the other formats later.

--No, I was at 99% full with ~17MB of free space. I suspect that not running out of space was due to Reiserfs having "tail" handling turned on by default, which saves space by packing small files and "tail ends" together instead of wasting blocks. :) Reiserfs rocks. I use it pretty much exclusively.

--BTW, *why* don't you have a floppy? I still find them indispensable, especially for Linux. But sometimes ya still need to boot that Win98 disk...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SUOrangeman

OK, I understand how jigdo can help now. For some reason, I was only thinking of keeping the original files intact.

My booting scheme may be rather complicated. By not having a burner nor a floppy, I extract the ISO's /KNOPPIX directory to some partition onto my main hard drive (/dev/hde ... using the Promise Ultra100TX2). I just so happen to run six different OSes from that hard drive, so the way I've laid out my partitions isn't the best for what I've done.

So, with a second hard drive (/dev/hdg), I've created a 1-cylinder (8MB) Linux ext2 partition. I dump the boot.img file (via dd) directly onto that partition and made it active. I set my PC's BIOS to boot the second hard drive, I get the KNOPPIX boot screen and it finds the extracted directory on /dev/hde.

One ?bug? I've noticed is that even though I can "boot the boot floppy image" from /dev/hdg, it cannot find the extracted /KNOPPIX directory on /dev/hdg nor /dev/hdh (again, all hard drives are connected to Ultra100TX2 ... only Zip250 and CD drives are on the motherboards main IDE ports). Later in the boot process, I think I see two identical errors about "major-block-device-2" or something very similar. I have a feeling that error is related to the two hard drives /dev/hdg and /dev/hdh. I cannot even use those drives once KNOPPIX is fully loaded. Maybe Klaus set a limit of 5 or 6 devices, and only allows the use of /dev/hde and /dev/hdf. It's not a huge problem, but something worth noting nonetheless.

I too noticed the knx-hdinstall "bug". Did you still get 100% filesystem full errors with a 4GB partition? I tried with ext3 and it still ran out of space. I'll try the other formats later.

The other minor detail I notices was the KDE KNOPPIX splash screen. It still refers to KNOPPIX 3.2 whereas the new background image clearly indicates a new version number. :)

thewalkingman, all I did was e-mail Klaus per one of the previous messages and he sent me the website credentials.

-SUO

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Originally Posted by Dave_Bechtel

Reiserfs rocks. I use it pretty much exclusively.

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Same here (except for my /boot which is ext2).

Quote:

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--BTW, *why* don't you have a floppy? I still find them indispensable, especially for Linux. But sometimes ya still need to boot that Win98 disk...

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They couldn't pry my floppy drive from my cold dead fingers. That drive is just too handy to give up.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SUOrangeman

OK, I understand how jigdo can help now. For some reason, I was only thinking of keeping the original files intact.

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AND- you can download a jigdo from more than one mirror at a time.

Floppy? What's that?

With the advent of the bootable CD and floppy boot images, I have managed to live without a floppy for over a year now. OK, maybe I had to borrow a USB floppy drive once or twice for some twisted OS (maybe a BeOS or BSD-like release). However, every flavor of Windows and nearly every Linux distro can boot just fine from CD (again, even if I have to use a bootable floppy image). Oh yeah, I do keep a small (say, 50MB) bootable DOS partition on a second hard drive. So, I still have access to goodies like Ghost, PartitionMagic, Ranish, etc. I'll occasionally boot ZipSlack and KNOPPIX from the DOS command line.

I will admit, however, if I can find an LS-120/240 IDE drive for cheap ($20), I'd buy it in a hearbeat! :) It would be a nice complement to my Zip250 IDE drive which as trouble booting *my* system.

It's time for legacy components to really disappear. I'd exclusively use USB for *external* devices if every OS I try properly supported it. And this is with a platform (AMD's second SMP Athlon chipset ... ?762?) which has well-documented problems with USB.

Anyway, ...

I may have run into a (hardware) problem with the DVD. In trying to install to the hard drive via knx-hdinstall onto a 4GB partition, ...

... using reiserfs seems to stall exactly at "41%." All of the processes seem to go to "you-know-where" in a hand basket. The disk LED is active the entire time, but everything else freezes

... using xfs stalls a "1%" with the same behavior as bove.

My prior attempts to use ext3 seemed to fail because of disk space. I'll have to give it one more try before I start drawing conclusions. I'm hoping that this WD1200JB is not the problem. But I am sure as heck gonna make sure my backups are up-to-date.

-SUO

--Do you have a swap partition enabled, and are you installing from runlevel 2 (knoppix 2)? You really don't need the GUI overhead while installing... Also try running badblocks on the suspect partition.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SUOrangeman

I may have run into a (hardware) problem with the DVD. In trying to install to the hard drive via knx-hdinstall onto a 4GB partition, ...

... using reiserfs seems to stall exactly at "41%." All of the processes seem to go to "you-know-where" in a hand basket. The disk LED is active the entire time, but everything else freezes

... using xfs stalls a "1%" with the same behavior as bove.

My prior attempts to use ext3 seemed to fail because of disk space. I'll have to give it one more try before I start drawing conclusions. I'm hoping that this WD1200JB is not the problem. But I am sure as heck gonna make sure my backups are up-to-date.

-SUO

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--Well, you can send an email to Klaus and be part of the beta testing... Pity the boot splash-screen says "Not for distribution" or it would probably be on BitTorrent by now. Klaus's efforts command respect.

--Anyway, all those who are testing the DVD may want to consider this script that I use to trim things down a bit (I highly recommend you peruse it carefully before running, as it deletes packages that you may want to keep.)

(Don't forget to chmod +x it, and run as root of course. Also as you probably know, this will only work after knx-hdinstall and reboot.) If you have trouble running it, let me know; I tried a new thing with multiple packages per 'deldeb' entry.

#BEGIN knx-freshinstall-purgedebs-dvd
#!/bin/bash

# Use: freshinstall |tee -a ~/freshinstall.log

function deldeb
{
echo " --- Deleting: $*"
apt-get remove --purge --assume-yes $*
}

# Get rid of DVD Knoppix pkgs we don't need
deldeb emacs*
deldeb ant-phone
deldeb aspell-es aspell-de
#deldeb aspell-de

deldeb billard-gl
deldeb blas blas-dev
#deldeb blas-dev

deldeb dia dia-common
#deldeb dia-common

deldeb drgenius

deldeb dx dx-*
#deldeb dx-*
# 66M

deldeb euler
deldeb evolver

deldeb fftw2
# 110MB!!

deldeb gap gap-*
# 64.5M

deldeb geomview

deldeb gimp1.*
# 23.6M

deldeb ggobi
deldeb gstreamer*
# 10M

deldeb lapack*
deldeb maxima*
# 23.8M

deldeb mrproject
deldeb omniorb*
deldeb rasmol

deldeb scigraphica*
deldeb texmacs*
# 11.7M

deldeb umbrello
# 3.7M, undocumented, no descript(?)

deldeb yacas

Quote:

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Originally Posted by thewalkingman

sigh

I so want this dvd

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I still cannot get through knx-hdinstall.

I now have a 2GB swap partition, and a 4.5GB volume. I let the script run overnight and the disk was still spinning this morning (1% copied).

I see no problems with the disk in FreeBSD 5 nor WinXP. I think I've even booted Win2K (all are installed on separate partitions on this on 120GB drive. I've also got Win2K3 and BeOS MAX 2.1 installed. I temporarily took off WInME to make more room for KNOPPIX).

I'll go through each filesystem format (ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs) with knx-hdinstall the next time I have a free moment.

-SUO

--I had some weird hangup happen when installing on my Dell laptop P166 with a 20-gig HD... I ended up hitting Alt-Sysrq-S to sync the drive, and it continued. But I had to keep an eye on "top" running in a different VT to see when it hung, and had to sync a bunch of times. Maybe something to do with DMA/hdparm settings, I dunno.

--Try doing a Sysrq sync when it hangs; if that doesn't work, move everything to the motherboard IDE controllers temporarily and see if that does the job. (You can always reboot into the cd and change fstab on the install after moving everything back.)

--BTW, you probably don't need more than 256Meg of swap unless you want to save the machine state if it crashes.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SUOrangeman

I still cannot get through knx-hdinstall.

I now have a 2GB swap partition, and a 4.5GB volume. I let the script run overnight and the disk was still spinning this morning (1% copied).

I see no problems with the disk in FreeBSD 5 nor WinXP. I think I've even booted Win2K (all are installed on separate partitions on this on 120GB drive. I've also got Win2K3 and BeOS MAX 2.1 installed. I temporarily took off WInME to make more room for KNOPPIX).

I'll go through each filesystem format (ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs) with knx-hdinstall the next time I have a free moment.

-SUO

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OK, this DVD can be booted like the CD version right? Is it very slow to run this way? I suppose knx-hdinstall is the way to go. Is this DVD-KNOPPIX mainly for hdinstalling?

Can one run it off the DVD and even write (ie:save) data to it too? There was some talk about this with DVD-RW. They really should implement a CD-RW or DVD-RW protocol so you can use CD-Rs or DVD-Rs just like a floppy.

Regards,

Hi all,

I don't know whether this is the best place to submit my request for new software for Dvd-Knoppix, but at present I have really too little time to search a better way and I'd really like to propose these programs:

- Lilypond: it is _THE_ Free Music Typesetter for all sorts of musicians: it is text-based - and TeX-based! - and requires Guile, the GNU Scheme implementation
- MusiXTeX: the name should me self-explanatory...
- Noteedit: this is a graphical music notation editor that acts as a front-ent for Lilypond, MusiXTeX and ABC

Before greeting all, I'd like to thank very very much Klaus and all people helping him: Knoppix is really great!!
And I hope it will be possible to purchase the Dvd-Edition on line: I'd sure buy it!

Thank you again!
Bye,
Guido