Greetings.

I'm fairly new to Knoppix, though I had used it occasionally during the past several years. Now I'm using it a lot, having just gotten a Windoze laptop. I plan to run Knoppix mostly, from a USB flash drive.

I had no problems doing the install to the USB 8GB memory stick, but I'm stumped on upgrading software packages. I've never succeeded in using the updater whose yellow triangular icon with a "!" in the middle appears in the taskbar (always get an error, after spending a long time deselecting the packages I don't want). But now I can't even figure out how to deal with the Synaptic installer - or so it seems.

I decided to try upgrading the Kaffeine media player, and went ahead with the procedure despite all the things the installer said it was going to delete (which makes me nervous). It got all the way through the installation, which took a long time (despite/home/knoppix/.kde/share/apps/kaffeine the zippy CPU), but then I couldn't find what had been installed, though I found it had taken at least a few hundred megs of space, which I hadn't expected. There's no sign of kaffeine - it's gone from the taskbar menu, and using "locate" shows mostly only my initialisation files under "/home/knoppix/.kaffeine." I found that there had previously been a /usr/bin/kaffeine executable file, but it was not replaced in the installation procedure.

That's my first problem - lots of precious space gone on the flash drive, and nothing to show for it!

Due to my concern for space, I then began looking for things I might move to the hard drive, and use a symlink from the root filesystem to get to those files. I found a good candidate in "/usr/share/doc" and proceeded to move the whole directory out to the internal drive. The move went fine, but no space was freed! I then tried an experiment, moving some games files, but got the same result. I even rebooted in desparation, thinking perhaps there was some sort of lock that prevented the files from being deleted (though it seemed unlikely at best). Still no joy.

The only other time I've seen such a thing is in the case of files having hard links to them, which I hadn't checked for before moving the directory, though I did in my subsequent experiment. However, generally, if there are links, they will be to files with the same names, and I could find no evidence through "locate" to indicate that any such files exist.

So I've had a rather bad day thus far. Any ideas, suggestions, tips?

Thanks in advance!