BTW, if you have a persistent home image from a previous version of Knoppix, you can use it with Knoppix 3.8 CeBit. You won't get the benefit of unionfs, but it will work as it did before, and it doesn't crash when you halt or reboot.

(Meaning, a persistent home with just the contents of /home/knoppix on it.)

(And if you don't have one from a previous version of Knoppix, you can always make your own.)

<edit>
The persistent home crash is fixed in Knoppix 3.8.1. Excellent.

Despite what the Knoppix home page says -- "permanent homedirectory on harddisk (even on NTFS)" -- persistent home still doesn't work off NTFS. (Unless I'm missing something.)

<edit 2>
So it looks like the "MkImage-ct.exe" utility on the Knoppix CD, when used in Windows, just creates an unformatted "knoppix.img" file. So, booting Knoppix 3.8.1 (without a persistent home) into level 2, then mounting the NTFS partition (hda1) read-write (scary! but should be OK because we're not writing a new file, just changing things within an existing file), and formatting "knoppix.img" with the command

# mke2fs -j /mnt/hda1/KNOPPIX.IMG

works, and then we can run

# /usr/sbin/knoppix-image

to mount it, and

# chown knoppix:users /KNOPPIX.IMG/

to set the permissions correctly, and then running KDE with

# init 5

works with "knoppix.img" as an old-style (i.e. no unionfs magic) persistent home from NTFS.

Then, booting 3.8.1 with the command line

knoppix: home=/mnt/hda1/KNOPPIX.IMG

works, and we do have a persistent home on NTFS! Excellent!