Watching movies with Knoppix

**Curls** · 04-25-2005, 10:23 AM

I have an old laptop with no hard drive. A new drive would cost more than the laptop is worth, so I wondered if I could use Knoppix to watch movies from the CD-Rom. I have a copy of Knoppix 3.3, but can't open the CD drive. Does Lnoppix lock the drive? I would have liked to make use of the laptop rather than throwing it out. Or is there a way round this?

**Freitag** · 04-25-2005, 04:56 PM

Sorry, but I am having this problem also.

In dsl Linux you just type

mount cdrom as su, but with Knoppix this doesn't work.

I am a new KNOPPIX user and have been trying to figure out how to do this.

Cheers!

**foamrotreturns** · 04-26-2005, 05:23 PM

Originally Posted by Curls

I have an old laptop with no hard drive. A new drive would cost more than the laptop is worth, so I wondered if I could use Knoppix to watch movies from the CD-Rom. I have a copy of Knoppix 3.3, but can't open the CD drive. Does Lnoppix lock the drive? I would have liked to make use of the laptop rather than throwing it out. Or is there a way round this?

The only way you can watch movies from CD-ROM is if they are formatted for DivX. And i'm not even sure if Knoppix has a DivX codec installed by default. What you would have to do (since you don't have a HDD) is run Linux from RAM. This is possible with some smaller livecd distros with the "toram" cheatcode. However, if the laptop is as old as you are saying it is, it will not have enough RAM to load Linux with a GUI and all of the programs necessary to watch movies. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but without a HDD, you're pretty much SOL when it comes to doing anything that involves the use of the CD-ROM drive. You might try watching the movie over the network, served by another machine, but I'm not too sure how you'd go about doing that.
Also, I guess if the movie is DivX formatted, you might be able to load it on a thumb drive. But again, if the laptop is too old, it might not have USB.

**Curls** · 04-28-2005, 09:56 PM

Originally Posted by foamrotreturns

Originally Posted by Curls

I have an old laptop with no hard drive. A new drive would cost more than the laptop is worth, so I wondered if I could use Knoppix to watch movies from the CD-Rom. I have a copy of Knoppix 3.3, but can't open the CD drive. Does Lnoppix lock the drive? I would have liked to make use of the laptop rather than throwing it out. Or is there a way round this?

The only way you can watch movies from CD-ROM is if they are formatted for DivX. And i'm not even sure if Knoppix has a DivX codec installed by default. What you would have to do (since you don't have a HDD) is run Linux from RAM. This is possible with some smaller livecd distros with the "toram" cheatcode. However, if the laptop is as old as you are saying it is, it will not have enough RAM to load Linux with a GUI and all of the programs necessary to watch movies. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but without a HDD, you're pretty much SOL when it comes to doing anything that involves the use of the CD-ROM drive. You might try watching the movie over the network, served by another machine, but I'm not too sure how you'd go about doing that.
Also, I guess if the movie is DivX formatted, you might be able to load it on a thumb drive. But again, if the laptop is too old, it might not have USB.

Heh, I meant old in computer terms. It's 5 years old and is a 600mhz with 256 meg of memory, so it's still capable of doing some work. I was quoted 147UKP for a new drive for it but found out today that any 9.5mm high laptop drive will fit, so it will turn out to be a cheap movie player, once I get the drive I won on Ebay today. BTW, Knoppix has a video player called Xine which will play DivX-XviD. I just tried it out on my desktop and it plays OK.
Cheers!