Remastering Knoppix

[Philip Ogletree]

Hello,

I am about to attempt to remaster Knoppix 4.0 (or is it 4.0.2?) and I was wondering if I might be able to ask a few questions?

Are there any problems with 4.0 like 3.9 and the UnionFS which made people go use 3.8?

Is the 3.8 HowTo still applicable? I saw one message where someone had to change a single step.

Which installation method is the best. I would like to add the Knoppix remastering partition to GRUB and boot it form there but would that involve a Debian installation which I believe would not let me remaster anything? Do I have to boot up off the CD and use the bootfrom=? Cheat code (that may not be the right one) each time to start the installed partition? Or can I set up GRUB to allow me to boot from the GRUB screen without a bootable CD, but will that make remastering harder such as saving parameters (such as screen and audio) that should be found during boot up so the remaster will still work on another machine.

On the far left of the bar at the bottom of Knoppix there is the normal Debian Start? Button. Right next to it is a Knoppix penguin that also opens up a menu. I have searched the forums and have not seen anything that would tell me how to make such a menu of my own. Is there a website that would tell how this is done? Preferably one that would tell me how to write a script that will automatically populate a menu while using whereis to make sure the programs are installed and accessible from that location.

One last thing, I see there is a section for Ideas. Can I tell you about an idea I had and see if you think it is worth putting in the other forum?

Knoppix works great on my old machines but the newest machine has some video problems so I have to type in Knoppix screen=800x600 depth=16 each time it boots up. The problem is that I sometimes miss the time limit or forget. In such a situation I have a totally blank screen and have to turn the computer off and then back on. I am worried about not correctly unmounting any drives and not shutting the equipment down correctly. I thought that perhaps a hot key combination such a CNTL-ALT-R could initiate a reboot of the computer and thus shut everything down correctly.

There may already be a way to do this. I thought if the mouse was working a right click could bring up the menu with logout. I keep forgetting to look and see if there is a hotkey that would click the logout menu item and another hotkey for Reboot. I just thought that someone could get messed up at one of those steps and the CNTL-ALT-R might be easier to remember.

Thank you for reading this and thanks in advance
Philip

[tr]

Are there any problems with 4.0 like 3.9 and the UnionFS which made people go use 3.8?

Is the 3.8 HowTo still applicable? I saw one message where someone had to change a single step.

Which installation method is the best. I would like to add the Knoppix remastering partition to GRUB and boot it form there but would that involve a Debian installation which I believe would not let me remaster anything?

Philip Ogletree:
I try to answer to some of your questions to the best of my knowledge.

1. There is no problem with unionfs if using new 4.0.2.

2. If you mean Undescore's howto it works still.But it depends of your KDE version what must be done. I have remastered KDE 3.3.2, 3.4.0 , 3.4.1. 3.4.2 and 3.4.3 and espcially from 3.4.1 on things has come little bit easier to be done.

Still there is something weird with /tmp/.ICE-unix permissions after hd-install of remastered version. That directory must be owned by the root and permissions must be 1777 to get KDE started. But something overrides your setting after every boot.

One thing more. If your sources.list has testing or unstable Apt repositories, 'apt-get dist'upgrade' upgrades XFree86 to X.org. The sad thing is, that Knoppix's scripts don't work any longer and you can't get X started after remastering The solution is to use scripts from Kanotix. But it is not easy to replace all needes passages. I thinkt that knoppix-autoconfig, mkxf86config and xsession are files to be modified. Remember also that hotplug is replaces with udev in Kanotix new rc13 and on.

3. Debian installation is the best way to install but you can't get X to start as chrooted because of 'sudo: unable to lookup your_box via gethostbyname ()'. Hostaname should be placed as 'knoppix' if you want to start X after Debian-like installation. I myself do everthing from Debian installed system and start X from my previously remastered CD where remaster scripts are installed.


-tapsa-

[Philip Ogletree]

Hello,

Thank you for your help.

>>I myself do everthing from Debian installed system and start X from my previously remastered CD where remaster scripts are installed. <<

I read where the Debian install doesn't install hardware detection scripts. Are you able to get around this by doing the above quoted sentence?

Thanks for the 'apt-get dist'upgrade' upgrades XFree86 to X.org. i didn't know that.

Thanks again
Philip

[tr]

>>I myself do everthing from Debian installed system and start X from my previously remastered CD where remaster scripts are installed. <<

I read where the Debian install doesn't install hardware detection scripts. Are you able to get around this by doing the above quoted sentence?

Thanks for the 'apt-get dist'upgrade' upgrades XFree86 to X.org. i didn't know that.

I mean I do a remaster file from my CD first, not from hd installation. After that I can do everything from hd installation but starting X because of different hostname (my hostname is not knoppix what it should be to get X started).

Dist-upgrade upgrades you system to X.org if you have testing and unstable sources in you sources.list.

I myself can't get X.org started from remastered CD in spite of X starts fine from chroot state ('su - knoppix' and 'startx'). I try to do more investigation how XFConfig86-4 should be replaced with xorg.conf (doing a symlink works as chrooted but no anymore from remastered CD). So because something must be changed in Knoppix's scripts it safer to use XFree86 until someone has solved this problem. Checking new Kanotix would help in that (remember that in rc13 hotplug is replaced with udev).

-tapsa-