KNOPPIX from CD with data & programs on external HD

[Francesco Pietra]

I am nearly sure that my question was already answered. If so, please address me to that point that I was unable to find and accept my apologies.

For a scientific travel - unaware of the hardware I'll found - I plan to bring with me KNOPPIX 5.0.1 on CD and an external USB/Fireware HD (I dropped the idea of flash card because uncertain if it will run on any hardware - I had problems with mine - and very expensive in large size) for my data and special programs. That is, I would like to put on the external HD my debian home which includes both pure debian programs and wine for a couple of non-unix programs I need.

I do not intend to remaster KNOPPIX (if not essential to what I intend to do), nor of running it from HD because speed is no problem for what I need.

I just got the USB/Firewire HD to be partitioned, formatted, and worked out.

Thanks a lot for any help.

francesco pietra

[patelbhavesh]

I think this is what might help
http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Pivot_Root_Install

[malaire]

I think this is what might help
http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Pivot_Root_Install

He said that he didn't want to install Knoppix, so I don't think that would help.

[malaire]

I am nearly sure that my question was already answered. If so, please address me to that point that I was unable to find and accept my apologies.

For a scientific travel - unaware of the hardware I'll found - I plan to bring with me KNOPPIX 5.0.1 on CD and an external USB/Fireware HD (I dropped the idea of flash card because uncertain if it will run on any hardware - I had problems with mine - and very expensive in large size) for my data and special programs. That is, I would like to put on the external HD my debian home which includes both pure debian programs and wine for a couple of non-unix programs I need.

I do not intend to remaster KNOPPIX (if not essential to what I intend to do), nor of running it from HD because speed is no problem for what I need.

I just got the USB/Firewire HD to be partitioned, formatted, and worked out.

So first you need to partition the HD. If you don't know how to use the tools included in Knoppix (e.g. fdisk, cfdisk), then you could try GParted LiveCD (~30MB) instead to do the partitioning.

After you have partitioned it (maybe a single FAT32 partition), just start Knoppix and see if you get an icon for it on the desktop.
I havn't used any USB/Firewire HDs so I don't know how well Knoppix supports them.

After that just click on the icon to use it, and right-click the icon and select "Actions->Change read/write mode" to make the partition writable.

If you want Knoppix to save your home-directory (and maybe other changes in the filesystem) there automatically, you need to create a "persistent home" on that HD. (In Knoppix 4.0.2 it's at KMenu->KNOPPIX->Configure->"Create a persistent KNOPPIX disk image")

[malaire]

About the Firewire support:

I just noticed a thread on debian-knoppix list in which someone had problems with Knoppix 5.0.1 and Firewire HDs while Knoppix 4.0.2 worked.

[Francesco Pietra]

Hi all who helped a lot:
I examined your suggestions and decided that Pivot Root Install is just what I need. Unbelivable possibility were it not true.

Preliminarily I tried on my i386 (drawback: live knoppix501 refuses networking; on my amd64 it networks, though I can not use the machine because APC broken and HD raid too expensive to be used without protection). So I have to proceed with i386.

On sda (unformatted Samsung 80 GB), following
#knoppix-installer
I used qtparted., though I was in doubt how to go on because of my limited knowledge (I only know how to use debian installer, raid or no raid). Well, I devised to partition as follows:
/ (root) (ext3 10GB)
/swap (linux-swap 3 GB)
/usr (ext3 10GB)
/var (ext3 3GB)
/tmp (ext3 3GB)
/home (ext3 30GB)

Now the doubts:
I set up /, /saw, and /usr as primary partitions, filesystems as above. I thought I have exhausted possibilities for primary partitions and went to extended partitions. I could just set one (with no specification of filesystem). Then, the remaining free disk refused to be partitioned further.

The question is how to modify my obviously wrong procedure and if the stated partitions are advisable, or better just a couple of partitions. I am used at that partitioning scheme on debian, though I can change if necessary.

Once the system is up, do you expect that networking difficulties on my i386 may be overcome for apt-get?

Thanks for your exquisite kindness

francesco