Knoppix in just under 2 GB?

[brianfay]

I need to get knoppix installed on an IBM ThinkPad 380D which has just less than 2GB of hard drive space. I have tried using Damn Small Linux and Mepis, but neither of those will install properly. Knoppix runs great off the cd or off a poor man's install to hard drive, but I really want it installed for real. Is there some way to get past the installer's warning and/or remove a few applications like GIMP or OpenOffice so that I could get it to run?

And does anyone know when the Documentation link on this page will be working again?

Thank you.
--
Brian

[stuart_b]

What doesn't work with the others? If you can install but settings (like video) are munged, you could do the install, boot Knoppix from CD and copy settings. Have you tried Morphix?

With Knoppix, I can think of two ways to do basically the same thing. One is to remaster with a lot of programs removed. That way, all you then have to do is a hard drive install and you have it. But the installer script will presumably balk at installing on the small drive even though you have reduced the installed size--so it might not work unless you modified the script. Or it might let you override that--the option exists in the script, but I haven't gotten it to work. This obviously won't work unless you have a CD burner.

Or you can install Knoppix on a desktop system, remove programs till you have it small enough to fit comfortably on your laptop and copy it to the laptop. The easy way to do that would be with a recent version of Ghost, as it would let you resize the ext3 partition Knoppix would be installed on. (I say ext3 as I don't know if Ghost can handle ReiserFS. Older versions can do ext2/ext3, but can't resize them.) Another way I can see would be to remove the hard drive and put it in a USB external box, boot the system with the Knoppix CD and copy everything from that HD to the laptop's one. Then you could chroot into the new install and get lilo installed to the laptop's MBR.

Either way, it's worth mentioning that you probably want to reduce the size of the installed system considerably. Out of the "just less than 2GB of hard drive space" you need to have room for the system, swap partition, and enough free space for files you create, logs and such.

[brianfay]

Funny that you mention Morphix, Stuart. I remembered reading about it a while ago and went to the website this morning. I have the light version running on the ThinkPad now. Some issues still (no sound and I need to install a couple of things) but overall it's working just fine and doing the things that I need it to be able to do. Thanks for all the advice.
--
Brian

[ekplus]

I am completely new to knoppix but I run it (this morning) by using Knoppix LiveCD 3.3.
I did it on a Pentium-I 133 64Mb RAM.
I would like to install knoppix 3.3 to its hd
I wonder if there is a easy-to-install Mail Server program included in the CD.
If not, is there any program (mail server) that I can install for my office (100 mail-users)??

thanks+

[CrashedAgain]

You might try looking through the installer script & editing out the HD-size check. You may have to do this even if you make a remaster. You might also check out kanotix, I think I read that you can tell the kanotix HD installer to skip the HD size check.

[stuart_b]

Actually, you didn't mention how big the hard drive on the old Pentium is, but I assume it's small since you added your question to this thread. Just how small is it?

And is there some reason you really need Knoppix for your mail server project? Most of the stuff that makes Knoppix so big is aimed at either desktop/workstation use or diagnostic/utility use. It's a little lacking in server applications, but at the same time loaded down with stuff inappropriate to server use. Same for the hardware autodetection--most users don't want it in a server after the initial install. So if your interest in Knoppix is simply to get a usable Linux on a system, you might look into the Knoppix-based Morphix we mentioned earlier. For server use, if you install Knoppix you may want to change your default runlevel from 5 to 2, so you don't run the GUI. With Morphix, I think that can be specified at install.

As far as e-mail, Knoppix installs something called smail. I am not familiar with it, but it might work for what you want. What I KNOW will work is sendmail. I suppose it has a reputation for being difficult to use, but there is a lot of documentation available, and Webmin has a very good interface for managing it. And it is easy to install with apt-get, after removing smail. (QMail is supposedly easier, and also is supported by Webmin. But there might not be a .deb for it.)

If it's just running a mailserver, you might look at SME Server. It's designed to be a sort of "server appliance", doing routing for Internet access, mail, DNS, DHCP, and a Samba server--but you can turn most of it off. The nice thing is it has a webmail application built in.