Installing Stuff with toram?

[planetbeing]

I'm not sure if this can already be done or if it is impossible to do (being a newbie who only wants a temporary OS while his hard drive is being nice and crashed), but I wanted to install some programs while running KNOPPIX with the cd only and with the toram option. Now, I figured that since I was running it off the RAM I should be able to alter the /KNOPPIX directory and be able to install libraries or software or something of the sort.

I did try the APT-GET wrapper thing with KNOPPIX -> Utilities -> Install Software (while running from CD) and didn't get much joy from that... apt-get from the shell still complained about not being able to write to a file.

I just figured it might be nice for the toram option to copy the CD to RAM as a hard drive device rather than a cd-rom device, so writing can be an option.

Also, to be even more ambitious, I'd like to suggest that toram can be modified so that one has an option of things to load into memory (might be too complicated given the structure of the boot cd)... I don't really need things like the games and stuff in memory. I have 1 GB of memory and I'm running XMMS, OpenOffice, gaim, konqueror, and Mozilla (on a HP Compaq nc6000, if you're interested) at the moment (pretty much going to be my typical usage) and the system runs as smooth as silk.... But only with 11 MB of memory to spare... Kind of makes me nervous.

Probably WAY too complicated, but a persistent home directory and start-up scripts with my school's SAMBA server would be cool too (as I said, being a naive newbie, I have no idea what kind of dependencies that has). Then, I really wouldn't need a hard drive. [I know I have that stupid USB drive pen lying around somewhere, bah]

[kn2user]

Read this post:

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...ighlight=klick

This should help you to get some software to install.

[planetbeing]

Thanks, though I was thinking of some more general purpose solution than relying on someone to package it so it's "klikable". I'm probably able to already install stuff by getting the sources and configuring the bin directory to somewhere on the ramdisk, but if you have only binaries, or need to compile additional libraries, it's probably possible, but it's just not as easy and may require custom hacking for each program.

I don't see why the cd-rom is not copied into RAM as a rewriteable medium rather than the cdrom device it is now? Oh, perhaps it has something to do with the compression.

[kn2user]

I think that toram option works like the cd device because the normal install of knoppix would be 3 gb which is much more than the ram has.