Trouble booting with toram

[sandyscott]

Hi,

I'm trying to get my computer to boot into Knoppix with the toram command, but receiving slightly odd errors

It gets as far as saying:

Copying KNOPPIX CD to ramdisk ... Please be patient
: permission denied
Copying KNOPPIX CD failed. ramdisk possibly has not enough space left.
Total Memory found 2075588 kB
Creating /ramdisk (dynamic size 1645060 kB) on shared memory ... Done

I should first say that this is a somewhat heavily modified Live DVD, created by my uni to give us access to various bits of overwise expensive software, (CAD, Matlab, etc.) This means it's quite bit bigger than than the normal CD - about 1.6 gig.

However I have 2gig of ram available, and that should be plenty to load it all.

Any suggestions why this isn't working?

Thanks

Sandy

[Harry Kuhman]

created by my uni to give us access to various bits of overwise expensive software, (CAD, Matlab, etc.)

Even though you seem to have created a new word here (overwise), this sounds quite a bit like you are using Knoppix to violate copyrights and steal commercial software (unless there is some other meaning to "give us access" that I'm not aware of). We don't condone, encourage or support the misuse of copyrighted software here, even if some feel it is over priced. I'm rather surprised that Cambridge does.

You seemed to think this was relevant to the original posting, so I'm commenting on it.

[sandyscott]

Having mentioned the modifications, I should have explained myself better:

I'm an engineering student, and this has been produced by my faculty (in conjunction with its couterpart at MIT), and requires an internet connection to connect to the licence server in the department, if you want to use any of the paid-for software. They do this as we regularly do projects using these pieces of software and allowing us to use them at home reduces the load on the limited numbers of workstations in the department.

Here's the page on the CD on the Cambridge engineering department server: http://www-mdp.eng.cam.ac.uk/CD/index.html

quote:

"Most of the software on the EDaL disks may be freely distributed and is licensed under a free software license such as the GNU General Public License. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft for further details of the GPL and its philosophy. As an exception, some versions of the disks may be issued that contain commercial software such as Pro/Engineer. We have obtained special permission to include this software from the copyright holders, and these CDs should not be copied or re-distributed. See Applications & Licensing for more information on licenses."

Sorry for any misunderstanding - I only commented on it to explain why it's such a large amount bigger than a standard knoppix CD, but I'd still appreciate any ideas you have about how to sort out my problem.

Thank you,

Sandy Scott

[Harry Kuhman]

Thanks for the clarification. Without the disc it's hard to diagnose what is going wrong, but let me throw some thoughts out and see if anything looks likely:

toram should copy the compressed cloop file from disc to memory without uncompressing it, and then use it in place of the file on disc. This was designed to be used with 700 meg CDs. It may also be available on the Knoppix DVD version but I suspect that may not have been tested, it would need to copy both compressed files and would need a system with a lot of RAM. While it sounds like you should have enough memory to run Knoppix even after loading the cloop file (at least until you start a memory hungry application), something is going wrong. I would look at the mechanism that allocates memory space for the toram option, maybe it is only allocating enough space for the original file on the 700 meg CD and not your remastered disc. I'm expecting that since it's under 2 gig you still only have 1 compressed file, but that would be worth confirming. And I would expect anyone remastering to not change the name of that file, but if they did they would have to be sure to change it everywhere, including in the toram processing.

You might want to try the toram option on a system with more memory, such as a 4 gig system. I'm guessing that it will fail there as well, but this would be worth confirming.

[sandyscott]

Thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately, I think it's unlikely that I'll be able to find a system with 4 gig of ram, but there were a couple of things I thought might be leads, if only on ramdisk size.
- The text as it's booting says that it allocates a ramdisk of 1645060 kB, is there any way of forcing this higher? maybe...
- isolinux.cfg - This includes a ramdisk_size argument - apparently a minimum size (100,000), any way of manually changing this at boot, or loading my own isolinux.cfg, maybe from a usb stick (no floppy drive)?

Thanks

Sandy