Flash to USB installer (experimental) in 7.0.5

[ssanubis]

Alright, thank you for the information. I had attempted the same steps as described by blacksimon prior to my first post (which lead to my posting in the first place) and am not presented with

5) ok at warning message all data will erase on usb. I want.

In my case I was given an error at that point that my overlay was too small (less than 400MB). I have tried with an 8GB fat32 partition (let me state here again that the drive in question is a verbatim tuff 'n' tiny 8GB thumb drive) and that failed with that message. I then tried a 2GB fat32 and a 6GB ext2 partition. Failed. I then tried 2GB fat32 and 6GB ext4. Failed. I then checked the forum and saw this thread and tried a 2GB fat32 and 6GB ReiserFS. Failed. Then I tried with a 2GB fat32 and left the rest of the drive unpartitioned. Failed. I then tried all of the above with the second partition named "live-rw" (thinking maybe knoppix is possibly now incorporating debian live's startup script). Failed. This is what I did earlier before my first post. It sounds to me, from blacksimon's post, I should not have needed to touch the partitions in anyway. I kind of figured that was how this should have worked. So.... is this function just "too" experimental? If I missed something obvious please, please point it out. In the mean time I am now home so I will try again from my home PC instead of my work PC and see if I come up with any other result.

PS
I did try before I gave up entirely using the normal install or the "i" option instead of "p" and the install worked no problem and the USB booted into knoppix as expected.

[Werner P. Schulz]

It sounds to me, from blacksimon's post, I should not have needed to touch the partitions in anyway. I kind of figured that was how this should have worked. So.... is this function just "too" experimental?

With the "flash-knoppix2" you need a flash drive with only one partition. If there are other partitions, they will be destroyed - you get a warning about this!

[ssanubis]

I have tried with an 8GB fat32 partition (let me state here again that the drive in question is a verbatim tuff 'n' tiny 8GB thumb drive) and that failed with that message.

Yes, that was my first step. Since the problem seems to be with the new flash-knoppix2 and likely some combination of my hardware/flash drive, where is the best place to report the issue? Is there a bugzilla for Knoppix?

[philo]

Rerring to Blacksimon' tutorial.
Step#5 is NOT the normal warning that all data will be erased. It is an error message saying that the overlay is <400MB and therefore too small.
Until now, I have not yet been asked to set the size of the overlay for the 'p' option. And there is no opprortunity to do it.
So i am moving in a circle...

[krba]

Hello!

I made bootable USB (Emtec 16gb) with experimental Knoppix 7.0.5 flash boot, with reiserFS. It works correctly. Even when put tiny7 on virtualbox. OK, it's a little bit to slow, but works!
BUT the crucial problem is when I want to put my local keyboard layout and when syslinux.cfg touched:
- go to boot->syslinux->sislinux.cfg (open with leaf or vi editor) and put in APPEND line bitween lang=en and apm=power-off my keyboard=hr or xkeyboard=hr or just open and save and... voila on my comp ASUS P5VD-X at next boot I've got the: No DEFAULT or UI configuration directive found!
Same thing with KNOPPIX 7.0.4 works (of coarse without this experimental, raiserFS etc...)
So, how to change keyboard layout on the other way?

2.nd mabe someone of you noticed then when you have boot usb stick, and at the same time you have live CD/DVD (knoppix) in your CD/DVD device, although boot starts from USB, it will redirected to boot from CD/DVD.

3. how to fix calling from root console sudo modprobe vboxdrv before calling virtualbox installed OS (tinyXP or tiny7)

etc... but enough for now.

Oh, yes, KNOPPIX is my favorite mobile OS and I try to stay it in the future. (Tried lupu, slax, moo then Ylmf, Zorin, Ubuntu, but.... :-/)

[STraute]

Just like philo I attempted to use the experimental /usr/bin/flash-knoppix2 to create a USB flash storage medium with a big reiserfs rw overlay partition. I also got the error dialog with:

Overlay size is too small!\n(minimum 400MB required)

When I ran the script in a terminal window, I noticed a shell error message complaining about numeric format in the line

let avail=total-ksize

After changing the format of the calculated media size in MiB from floating point to integer, I could successfully finish the "remastering" of the Knoppix 7.0.5 EN DVD onto my flash medium using only the script, with a 7 GiB writable overlay filesystem. The flash medium only contained an empty (DOS FDISK-style) partition table before I used the script.
/usr/bin/flash-knoppix2.patch:

--- /usr/bin/flash-knoppix2     2012-12-21 00:27:14.000000000 +0000
+++ flash-knoppix2      2012-12-28 09:01:10.000000000 +0000
@@ -364,7 +364,7 @@
   ERROR="${FLASH}:\n$MSG_ERROR_INCOMPATIBLE"; bailout 2
  fi
 elif [ "p" = "$METHOD" ]; then
- total="$(awk '{print ($1 / 2048)}' /sys/block/"${FLASH##*/}"/size 2>/dev/null)"
+ total="$(awk '{printf( "%d", ($1 / 2048) ) }' /sys/block/"${FLASH##*/}"/size 2>/dev/null)"
  ksize="$(du -sm --exclude='knoppix-data.*' . 2>/dev/null | awk '{size=$1}END{print size}')"
  let avail=total-ksize
  let avail-=200

Please note the change from "print ..." to "printf( "%d, ... )"

[Werner P. Schulz]

The best place to report issue is
http://lists.debian.org/debian-knoppix/

(but not: http://knoppix.net/wiki/Category:Bug_Pages)

[Blacksimon]

Rerring to philo in post #10

My step #5 is the normal warning that all data will be erased....
I do it again and it still propose the same message
No error for me

#5
sdd: Sony Storage Media (14904MB)

Repartition and format device?
CAUTION: All data will be erased!

#6
sdd: Sony Storage Media (14904MB)

Do you really want to do this?
WARNING: ALL DATA ON WILL BE ERASED!

[ssanubis]

Well, it's good (and bad, lol) to see I'm not the only one experiencing the issue. And it seems we all experience it in the same place. I, too, had run the script in terminal and was informed the error was on like line 369 or some where around that point and had glanced at the script briefly to see if it was malformed and it looked about right to me, I simply didn't know the calls it was using so I couldn't be certain. I will try that fix for the script that AMSTraute proposed.

[Blacksimon]

assuming you have created an encrypted partition of 5GB and copied from the old knoppix-data.aes all the content, now I wonder ...
having more available space on USB, this partition can be increased in size as it can usually be done with the file knoppix-data.aes?

Yes, you could make it larger since the beginning .... but that's not the point .... it is curious to know if it is feasible ...