problem installing Kaffeine, freeing space on flash drive

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09-05-2010, 05:44 PM
knosys

problem installing Kaffeine, freeing space on flash drive

Greetings.

I'm fairly new to Knoppix, though I had used it occasionally during the past several years. Now I'm using it a lot, having just gotten a Windoze laptop. I plan to run Knoppix mostly, from a USB flash drive.

I had no problems doing the install to the USB 8GB memory stick, but I'm stumped on upgrading software packages. I've never succeeded in using the updater whose yellow triangular icon with a "!" in the middle appears in the taskbar (always get an error, after spending a long time deselecting the packages I don't want). But now I can't even figure out how to deal with the Synaptic installer - or so it seems.

I decided to try upgrading the Kaffeine media player, and went ahead with the procedure despite all the things the installer said it was going to delete (which makes me nervous). It got all the way through the installation, which took a long time (despite/home/knoppix/.kde/share/apps/kaffeine the zippy CPU), but then I couldn't find what had been installed, though I found it had taken at least a few hundred megs of space, which I hadn't expected. There's no sign of kaffeine - it's gone from the taskbar menu, and using "locate" shows mostly only my initialisation files under "/home/knoppix/.kaffeine." I found that there had previously been a /usr/bin/kaffeine executable file, but it was not replaced in the installation procedure. :-(

That's my first problem - lots of precious space gone on the flash drive, and nothing to show for it!

Due to my concern for space, I then began looking for things I might move to the hard drive, and use a symlink from the root filesystem to get to those files. I found a good candidate in "/usr/share/doc" and proceeded to move the whole directory out to the internal drive. The move went fine, but no space was freed! I then tried an experiment, moving some games files, but got the same result. I even rebooted in desparation, thinking perhaps there was some sort of lock that prevented the files from being deleted (though it seemed unlikely at best). Still no joy.

The only other time I've seen such a thing is in the case of files having hard links to them, which I hadn't checked for before moving the directory, though I did in my subsequent experiment. However, generally, if there are links, they will be to files with the same names, and I could find no evidence through "locate" to indicate that any such files exist.

So I've had a rather bad day thus far. Any ideas, suggestions, tips?

Thanks in advance!
09-05-2010, 05:58 PM
Harry Kuhman

There are people on this forum who are (they report) doing what you are trying to do and I hope that one will try to offer you some help. But when I read you post, it was as if you had written "I have a goat and I'm trying to teach it to hunt like a dog but having problems, what am I doing wrong?". In other words, Knoppix isn't intended as a standard Linux distro that you add to and up-date frequently without issues. It is a Live CD or DVD. You might be better served using Knoppix as it was intended, and using a different Linux distro as you main system (I like Debain but there are other choices). With the price of large hard drives dropping so low, you might even consider having a Linux hard drive for you Laptop, or even having a hard drive that you set up for dual boot into Linux or that other OS, and putting the original (and likely smaller) hard drive that came with the computer aside for safe storage until you were comfortable with your choice.
09-05-2010, 06:30 PM
knosys

Thanks, Harry. Sorry that I garbled that post a bit, having stuck the path to the Kaffeine init files into the wrong place.

I guess I just naiively assumed that if Synaptic is provided, it would be safe to use it to do some upgrades. Maybe there's a warning somewhere that I missed?

I'm also looking forward to hearing why I wasn't able to free space by moving files. I do have a desktop system running vanilla Debian, but I'm in a situation where I'm going to have to rely on the laptop for a while, so I'm trying to cobble together a working system that gives me most of what I want for the time period when I'll have to use the laptop.

The internal drive has 250GB. If I can figure out how to safely repartition that space under Windoze7, I might be able to do an install of Debian itself. But in the near term, I won't have time for such activities. I think, however, I may get a larger USB flash drive and do a new install. It shouldn't be difficult to bring over what files I've created and system files I've modified from the other stick.

Thanks again!
09-05-2010, 07:15 PM
Harry Kuhman

As I said, I hope that someone who believes in installing Knoppix will try to help you. I personally use it "as is" and rely on distros intended for installing when I want an installed Linux.

I think Synaptic in included because with the union file system and ram disk it is sometimes possible to install something that has been omitted. But there is still the issue of Knoppix being made of several different releases, so there can be problems, and updating packages can also cause issues.

I have no idea why you didn't recover space, maybe someone else does.

You used the word safely, and as far as I know there is no completely safe way to repartition a Windows drive. I have used Partition Magic (not free) to repartition an NTFS Windows disk (XP), but even the instrutions warn you strongly to have a good backup of everything before trying it (and I would also defrag the disk immediately before doing it). 2.5 sata hard drives are currently dirt cheap, I've seen 500 gig sata drives for around $50 or so on sale (keep an eye on Newegg), which is less than I paid for my 250 a couple of years ago (it replaced the 120 that came in the laptop). So rather than letting an OS keep writing to an expensive flash drive (which have finite write capability), you could get a bigger hard drive, go ahead and still have a 250 gig section for the current OS (and confirm for yourself that you can install Windows again from whatever backup you have, an important thing for any Windows owner to confirm before a disaster takes out the current copy, which will happen eventually) and still have the rest for a good hard disk based Linux distro. Swapping out laptop drives is usually pretty easy.
09-05-2010, 09:55 PM
kl522

Quote:

Originally Posted by knosys

I decided to try upgrading the Kaffeine media player,
That's my first problem - lots of precious space gone on the flash drive, and nothing to show for it!

You did not indicate your knoppix version. I believe knoppix 6.2 is especially bad in terms of package upgrade due to some mixup in packages in stable/unstable/testing. knoppix 6.2.1 or knoppix 6.3.1 will be better. But Kaffeine is tool belongs to kde, so I am not surprised that it will requires installation of many other packages before it will install the package itself. I always have that problem with 'k3b' too, every upgrade of it requires me to install many other things which nobody else will need.

I don't use 'kde', but I like 'k3b'. So that's the "evil" I have to live with.

Regarding your second problem of unable to free up space, that's an EXPECTED behavior. When you are using UNIONFS, there is a readonly file system ( /mnt-system/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX ) and there is a read-write persistent store (/mnt-system/KNOPPIX/knoppix-data.img ). When you try to delete something inside the readonly file system, you are not free up space, you will actually end up ADDING space, ie the UNIONFS driver will add a few "markings" on the read-write persistent store to indicate that the readonly ones are deleted.

Bottom line when you delete stuff in the readonly file system, space is not freed. You need to remaster - which is normally not recommended for newbies. Nethertheless, that's the only way to free up "deleted" files on the readonly file system.
09-05-2010, 11:31 PM
evenso

I don't have specific suggestions.

However my hard drive install displays no dependency problems with installing kaffeine (although I am not going to). My live CD and thumb drive versions generally do have problems with upgrades, media in particular. At the root of those dependency issues is usually adriane and speech synthesizer stuff.

My hard drive install takes more upgrades because I removed all packages and their dependencies, except a boot script package, from the http://debian-knoppix.alioth.debian.org/ ./ and the http://people.linux.org.tw/~andrew/debian/lxde/ ./ repositories and closed them. i.e., In synaptic, listed by "origins." If you go this route, proceed with caution! I recommend deleting packages in small groups and rebooting to test the effect. Of course, this defeats the blind access aspect of Knoppix.

There are still packages from something that renders in the synaptic repository list as "local" but that does not show as a repository in /etc/apt/sources.list . (Haven't looked into it and am loath to touch it because removal of many of those packages would include vital rework on the system.)

To regain space if you have been upgrading much, clean your package cache, as root

Code:

apt-get clean

Disclaimer: Not expert advice. :mrgreen:
09-06-2010, 12:05 AM
kl522

Quote:

Originally Posted by evenso

To regain space if you have been upgrading much, clean your package cache, as root

Code:

apt-get clean

This is definitely true. As for me, I configured synaptic to remove the cached package automatically :-

setting->preferences->files
delete downloaded packages after installation

That will free me the trouble to cleaning the cache manually.

Just a matter of personal preference.
09-06-2010, 06:32 AM
knosys

Thanks all!! It's really great to be able to get such good info and sage advice from experienced Knoppix wizards. I think now that I understand a bit more about what Knoppix is and isn't, I'm going to back up all that I've done and start over with a fresh install to the USB stick. If I'm stuck having all that space taken for the /usr/share/doc directory, I guess I'll just have to live with it. There was one configuration question I recall coming up during the previous install about how much space to allocate for the partition where /home lives, and I decided to reserve 1GB, thinking that amount of space would remain on the stick that would be visible on the Windoze side (I used the install method that's described at http://pendrivelinux.com/universal-u...easy-as-1-2-3/ with the ISO for Knoppix 6.2.1 - didn't know there is a 6.3.1 (mentioned by kl522), so I'll look for it now). If I determine that there is in fact more space left on the stick, I'll give it all to Knoppix next time around.

Thanks, all! It's really wonderful to have such an experienced and generous community!!
09-06-2010, 07:04 AM
kl522

Quote:

Originally Posted by knosys

If I'm stuck having all that space taken for the /usr/share/doc directory, I guess I'll just have to live with it.

Not necessarily so. ;)

You will have to check if that resides in the readonly file system or the readwrite persistent store. Those in the readwrite persistent store, you can delete them, that will indeed free up some space for you.

The ones in the readwrite peristent store are, /KNOPPIX-DATA/usr/share/doc
The ones in the readonly compressed image, /KNOPPIX/usr/share/doc

Also, it will be unlikely ( not totally impossible !) that you will be able to find knoppix 6.3.1. Because that's something attached to a magazine. You will have to buy the magazine to get it.
09-06-2010, 07:24 AM
knosys

freeing space from /usr/share/doc and what is knoppix 6.3.1?

Quote:

Originally Posted by kl522

Not necessarily so. ;)

You will have to check if that resides in the readonly file system or the readwrite persistent store. Those in the readwrite persistent store, you can delete them, that will indeed free up some space for you.

Hmmm. I'll check it out after my reinstallation.

Quote:

The ones in the readwrite peristent store are, /KNOPPIX-DATA/usr/share/doc
The ones in the readonly compressed image, /KNOPPIX/usr/share/doc

I just went to /usr/share/doc and used "mv -v * /mnt/<whatever>" to move the files to the internal drive. However, "locate" tells me that the files had been in both /KNOPPIX-DATA and /UNIONFS . Now, there is only my "doc" symlink in both locations. Is there maybe something else I have to do before or after moving the files to be able to reclaim the space?

Quote:

Also, it will be unlikely ( not totally impossible !) that you will be able to find knoppix 6.3.1. Because that's something attached to a magazine. You will have to buy the magazine to get it.

That explains it, then. I've done some searching, and everything seems to be on a members-only tracker or some other commercial gimmick site. Is 6.3.1 not official or not supported - or is the magazine release just an advance of an image that will eventually become available in the usual places? What's better about it than 6.2.1?

Anyway, now that I know more, I think I'll just do my re-install with the 6.2.1 image I already have.

Thanks again!
09-06-2010, 09:35 AM
kl522

Quote:

Originally Posted by knosys

I just went to /usr/share/doc and used "mv -v * /mnt/<whatever>" to move the files to the internal drive. However, "locate" tells me that the files had been in both /KNOPPIX-DATA and /UNIONFS . Now, there is only my "doc" symlink in both locations. Is there maybe something else I have to do before or after moving the files to be able to reclaim the space?

How you interpret "df" (disk free ) can be tricky too.
09-07-2010, 12:50 AM
krishna.murphy

Quote:

Originally Posted by knosys

I just went to /usr/share/doc and used "mv -v * /mnt/<whatever>" to move the files to the internal drive. However, "locate" tells me that the files had been in both /KNOPPIX-DATA and /UNIONFS . Now, there is only my "doc" symlink in both locations. Is there maybe something else I have to do before or after moving the files to be able to reclaim the space?

The locate command uses a static database, which means you can't expect it to change when you just move a file. You can rebuild it by issuing the command

Code:

sudo updatedb

Quote:

Is 6.3.1 not official or not supported - or is the magazine release just an advance of an image that will eventually become available in the usual places? What's better about it than 6.2.1?

No, it's official - but the magazine "special editions" are never posted for download, AFAIK. Probably a contractual issue. Version 6.3 has some extra goodies, like Google Chrome and Flash video pre-installed. There's a thread on it over in the News forum, if you want the details. Personally, I've stuck with version 6.2.0 to avoid the hassle of making a new knoppix-data image; I had already added those extras myself when it came out, along with a bunch of other stuff, so it made sense to wait for something better to make the leap for.

Quote:

Anyway, now that I know more, I think I'll just do my re-install with the 6.2.1 image I already have.

Good plan!!!

Cheers!
Krishna :mrgreen: