My persistent home isn't persisting

[j.drake]

I tried downloading FireFox with klik and FireFox doesn't work -- it complains about not being able to find the Mozilla runtime directory -- haven't read the forum posts about it yet -- but at least it's still there when I restore my persistent home!

Wierd, I have the opposite result. Klik installs it great, and I can run it during that same Knoppix session, but it doesn't stick around until the next one.

By mounting your "knoppix.img" file (which is the file your persistent home is saved in) as a loopback device, I mean:

One of my "knoppix.img" files is at the root of /dev/hdb1, which is an ext3 partition. So mount that read-write:

mount -t ext3 -o rw /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1

Then mount "knoppix.img" on /mnt/hdb1 read-write:

mount -o loop,rw /mnt/hdb1/knoppix.img /mnt/test

Then cd into /mnt/test, and you should see the contents of your persistent home dir. You can write to it, copy files from it, etc. (I have another "knoppix.img" on /dev/hda5, a vfat partition, and can mount it the same way.)

Does that work for you?

The "Create a persistent home" script carries an option of saving the persistent home to a file (which is what I assume your knoppix.img file to be), or dedicating an entire partition to the persistent home. I chose to do the latter, as I already had a large partition mapped out from a previous Mandrake dual boot install, and I assumed (possibly wrongly) that assigning an entire partition would work better than creating a file. I'm going to try the "Klik is buggy" theory in my previous post first, and it that doesn't work, I'll try creating the PH using the file method instead. If that doesn't work (or even if it does and I'm just bored and curious ), I'll try your loopback suggestion.

Thanks again for sticking with me and offering some good suggestions. Dual boot HD installs are neat, and once Knoppix standardizes on the 2.6 kernel, and works the bugs out of captive NTFS, and other issues, such that I can just tee it up and go without cheatcodes and workarounds, I may try dual booting from HD again (after a thorough backup, this time). Until then, I'm still a little gun shy, and would prefer to stick with live CD and persistent home, if it will work. I have to share this computer with a wife who has no patience for the challenges of working with or debugging linux installs. OTOH, might be fun instead if I can perfect the PH andsaved configurations as files on the removable thumbdrive, together with captive NTFS drivers (and especially if I can boot from the thumbdrive too), so that the stock CD and thumbdrive will provide me with portable access to virtually anything I want from most PCs.

JD