Quote Originally Posted by |enouf|
Note; I've only used knoppix 3.6

* The 3.6 Knoppix CD ISO was (as reported via Nero and Win32 Exploder) indeed over 700MB (however Harry's points are correct) - as a matter of fact, I recall I had to buy 700MB capable CDs to burn it (I only had 650MB'ers at that time). I am a big proponent of correct File sizing conventions, and while KiB and MiB more correctly state the truth that Harry mentioned (1024*1024) I never bothered to worry about the *true* ISO size - I just knew I needed larger media.

* Whenever I install Nero - I always Enable "OverBurn" .....
The 3.6 ISO may have been over 700 meg, I don't recall. The ISOs were certainly growing at that time and very close to but never exceeded the 703 meg that is actually on all modern 700 meg CD. The current CD ISO is 694 megs, although it is also 711,124k and 728,190,976 bytes. To my knowledge there has never been an official Knoppix ISO released that needed overburn, and overburn would not have helped cram any aproximately 700 meg ISO onto a 650 meg blank CD (way more than overburn can buy you). There was an incorrect entry in the FAQ at one point that mentioned overburn; this is an unfortunate side effect of having a wiki that anyone can contribute to. If the ISO is any larger than the posted size for that release then it is a bad download. There are problems that I have seen frequently when downloading from the mirrors (I stopped using them when the BitTorrent Knoppix feed became available) that would corrupt the file and increase it's size. The md5 check will catch this as well as any other downloading problems.

Quote Originally Posted by |enouf|
IOW without *sufficient* RAM available, the CD won't boot -- I have an old P-pro 166MHz 32MB (maxed) Baby-AT box that the same knoppix 3.6 would not boot at all - this was to be expected and understood, HOWEVER, my friends POS Dell with XP and 128MB RAM would *also* not boot -- too little installed RAM. IIRC, it would only make to some sicko type extremely limited windows manager that worked backwardsly (you click to close, and press and hold to select)

* Neither has mentioned which version of Knoppix they are trying to use
32 megs seems too low even with a swap file; if you can get Knoppix working with that memory then it very likely will not be worth using. However 128 megs should be enough to run. I have run it on an old P166 with 64 megs and a swap file on the FAT partition. It runs slow, but it runs. A swap file might help the POS Dell, but since you said it is running Xp it likely has a NTFS file system. Since Knoppix can't write to NTFS you would either need to make space for a Linux Swap file or a FAT partition (I would consider going with the FAT partition since that would also give you a way to save files to the hard disk as well). But I don't think the swap file should be required if you have 128 megs of memory.

And yea, it's interesting to see how little information some people give and then expect detailed help.