Run away process?

[howie]

I made a persistent USB flash drive and installed a few programs. I setup a "Minecraft Server" just to see if I could do it so I needed to install JDK 7. Got the server running and joined the server from another computer (local network) and had my nerd achievement moment.

At this point all is still good. Have no idea if any of this contributed to the problem.

Now that I have this working "Minecraft Server", I figured I'd try it out on one of my older computers hooked up to a new Dell 1920x1080 monitor. This is the first time running the Knoppix persistent USB flash drive on this hardware.

I boot up the system and notice I have no video. I force the computer down and boot up again and use a cheat code to set the resolution of 1280x1024. This time I booted up with video and was getting ready to start the server when I noticed the performance meter in the lower left corner was solid green. Normally after boot-up it flat lines pretty quickly. So I thought I'd give it a minute. Then gave it a few minutes. The CPU never settled down. Thinking it had something to do with this older and slower computer I shut it down and called it a night.

This morning I booted up with the Knoppix persistent USB flash drive on my day-to-day fast computer to try out some software and that same problem persists. On my faster computer, performance meter in the lower left corner was a solid 80% for about a minute then lowered to about a solid 40% but never settled down.

I have a feeling the cheat codes hose the persistent USB flash install. It changes something instead of only existing for that session.

Another time I hosed the persistent USB flash install was when I used the cheat codes to try the different desktops available (kde, gnome, icewm, etc). It seemed like the persistent USB flash install got worse with each desktop I tried. It got to a point where their was no option to shut down and all I could do was log-out but then just logged me back in. I hit the power button bring up a shutdown option.

[utu]

Greetings, howie.

IMO, you might be better off taking smaller steps.

You may have over-filled your persistence file for one thing.
For another, perhaps the video was ok on the first computer,
but not able to find the right parameters for the second.
And these problems might be inter-twined.

I suggest you start over, simplify your steps to sort these
several things out.

[howie]

I've started over many times. It's hard to not monkey with this stuff. Thanks!

[Capricorny]

FYI, I've just run a 2-day session with remastered Knoppix DVD 7.0.5, 4GB persistent store booting and running from a 32 GB USB3 stick on a new Toshiba laptop, running things like Vmware Workstation 8.0.5 from the stick (using Windows virtual machines from hard disk) with no problems whatsoever. So there is surely nothing inherent in 7.0.5 keeping you from success. There are seemingly, however, quite a few "do-nots" in your way of working with Knoppix, but you provide way too little information to give you good hints. Just one thing: Whenever you want use Knoppix for servers, you should run off a hard disk. An external USB3 hard disk might suffice, but I would always check the setup with a Poor Man's Install on an internal hard disk first.

Then you can track the resource use in a sufficiently reliable way.

[utu]

...you provide way too little information to give you good hints...

I agree with Capricorny on this,
but the runaway symptom after things seemed ok is how I'd describe my experience(s)
after having tried to put too much on a too small persistence file.
Things don't work ok on reboot in this case and one has to give up the material
in the persistence file to recover AFAIK.