KDE?

[Kowood]

So when I boot knoppix 3.4 from the CD, after the ISO screen thingy with the pretty colors and the penguin and the black background, it comes up to the regular screen, and in a few minutes, instead of KDE starting, a little window says "couldn't start kdeinit" and another after that says I don't have enough memory. It then drops me to some thingy (nwp? not sure of the name) in which it automatically opens up a shell, and you can access programs with the left mouse button on the background. It only started doing this after I put a little hdb about 3 gb in last night. Are there any cheat codes that can cut down on usage of memory? What's causing this? Forgive me for not being detailed enough, if you need more info I can write it down.

[Markus]

What do the commands top and free say about memory usage?
Also have a look in dmesg and /var/log/XFree_something.log which name eludes me right now.
How much RAM do you have?
Is there a swap partition on the new drive?
Have you tried the mem=256 (or some other amount) cheatcode?
How are your drives hooked up? Try using master and slave instead of cable select.

[Kowood]

The full messages were (in order):

-couldn't start kdeinit, check your installation

-Not enough memory to start kde! (at least 82mb required)

^^that message also includes a little bit about TWM, which I don't think is really necessary for this post.

And then it drops me to TWM window manager.

I had 2 swap partitions. One on hdb, and later, one on hda, but I deleted those both so that the livecd wouldn't use them. I've got 128mb RAM. The drives are hooked up like so: There are two cables running to the drives, and the end is plugged into hda, and halfway down, there is a second set of plugs which are in hdb. The hd's are correctly recognized (I think). It's recognizes the one that was hda before as hda, and the new one as hdb.

Edit: the mem=128 cheatcode makes the screen turn that deep, dark blue right before the penguin screen. top, free, and /var/log/XFree86.0.log didn't tell me much besides the size of my memory (126676).....I also noticed that the livecd creates /ramdisk on the memory and uses about 95000 kb (or whatever that's measured in), leaving much less than the required 82 that KDE needs. And I think that this is the problem. Are there any cheatcodes to keep it from creating the /ramdisk? or to put that in a swap partition? I just made a 512 mb swap on hdb2, and a (roughly) 2500 ext3 on hdb1

[Markus]

I don't think the ramdisk size has anything to do with this. It's supposed to free up the memory after the booting process. Besides, it's needed for the booting process, so you can't skip it. BTW, I made a typo with the cheatcode, it's mem=128M, notice the M. free is supposed to tell you have much memory you have available. You can add the "cached" mem to available mem to see how much you can use. Have you also tried startkde after the booting process has finished?

[Kowood]

Where do I enter the startkde command? With the cheatcodes, or in a shell in twm? If a shell, which?

[Markus]

I would try it from Ctrl-Alt-F5 or 7. While in Ctrl-Alt-F5 you can also try init 5. Have you tried other WM's with a cheatcode like desktop=icewm or desktop=fluxbox. Should work if TWM works. All in all, 128MB is a bit too little for KDE to be running smoothly.

[Kowood]

So, if 128M memory isn't enough, how else can I make this work? what exactly does a swap partition do? i had some odd illusion that a swap partition had something to do with memory...

[Markus]

A swap partition or swap file is virtual memory quite like in windows. You could create a ~250MB swap partition, type 82 and knoppix would use it to extend available memory. It runs slower than RAM being on the hd but it could make a difference to get to KDE if that's what you want to use. Have a look at man swap for setting it up. Basically you just create a partition with cfdisk or some such and make it type 82. Then do mkswap /dev/hd?? and if you want to start using it right away, swapon /dev/hd??

[Kowood]

Okay, here's what I did. I followed your instructions for making a swap partition, booting with knoppix26 noswap, then I restarted with no cheatcodes booted KDE from TWM, but it looked gross and the little K bar and stuff didn't show up, next I booted with knoppix26 noswap, KDE actually worked, and I tried to install Knoppix from the bash shell with knoppix-installer, but that didn't work. (the installer didn't work from TWM, either) So I restarted again, using knoppix26 noswap, and KDE didn't work. I did the same thing using different cheat strings (nothing, knoppix26, knoppix noswap..) and it didn't work anymore. It wouldn't load from TWM, either. Seems KDE only works once in a blue moon.

[Markus]

Perhaps try leaving out the noswap cheat if you want to use the swap.