Having problem with Knoppix 6.0.1 running from liveCD. Appears to be a problem with memory management.

When Firefox tries to allocate too much memory, for example when a web page with too many large images is opened, Knoppix goes into automatic shutdown. Not FIREFOX, KNOPPIX itself! It plays the "shutdown sequence" audio alert, accesses the CD, then pops the CD out. Two minutes later the machine turns off automatically. The machine never exits X11 mode (LXDE).

There does not seem to be any way to stop this process.

As an interim fix, I want it to drop into a shell prompt (preferably root) whenever it shuts down so that I have to log out manually by exiting the shell.

Since it will be at a shell prompt, I should be able to do SOMETHING to go into a text console mode, at least saving files to flash or maybe even restarting X by "init 5", instead of being stuck staring helplessly at a frozen X11 session for two minutes and then seeing the machine power itself off.

Can anyone tell me which scripts I need to change? Will this require full remastering, or are these scripts outside the compressed CLOOP image? Is the problem too deep to fix in this manner?