A word from the stupid :p

[Gandalf_Grey_]

I finally figured out why I kept getting errors (see my question about bash). I have a Suse 8.1, Redhat 8 and Windows XP in a triple boot. I have 2 hard drives, the first drive holds my OS's while my second drive holds my data. I made the partitions on my second drive fat32 so that both linux and windows could read and write to them. I then thought that since it was a 60gb partition it would serveg great for a knoppix remaster. I forgot that fat32 won't preserve symlinks . After 3 nights of yelling at my computer I finally figured this out and am now in the middle of a successful knoppix remaster.

A word from the stupid: ALWAYS USE A LINUX PARTITION

[aay]

Good reminder. Sorry for your troubles, but thanks.

[frenchuserwithpoorenglish]

You are not so stupid ...
it is possible to do the remastering without any linux partition!
just use loop files !
you have to create about 4 files with a size of 2gb (4 *2 =
(2gb seems to be the maximum size of a file in a fat32 file system)
then you use (mount) one file as a loop swap (dd + mkswap + swappon)
(normaly it is to be done automaticly with knoppix when you name the file with the right name in the root of your fat32 partition).
another file as the source for KNOPPIX (where you are going to chroot)
another file as the source for KNOPPIX/opt (because openoffice is very large) (i think 2gb is too large for this)
and the last file for the destination ... (where you are going to build the compressed file system).
and later you can put the final iso directly in your FAT32 partition and burn it with your favorite burner.

In other words : when uou read the remastering howto you just have to replace the linux partition whith loop partition ...
create the big file with :
dd if=/dev/zero /mnt/hdxx/knoppixcd/source1.loop ...
mkext2fs /mnt/hdxx/knoppixcd/source1.loop ...
mount /mnt/hdxx/knoppixcd/source1.loop /mnt/source -t ext2 -o loop ...

be aware the command are not complete (size of dd, parametres of mkext2fs, creation of directories in /mnt or /tmp)
the bad thing is that with openoffice when you decompress the KNOPPIX file the size is supérior of 2GB (it is why you need 2 loop file for the first time you remaster).

I think it would be great to build a script (best a tcl/tk application) that make it all just by asking the FAT32 partition to use and just vérify that there is enougth place to to it all).

For the moment i do it by hand and i 've made a remastering just without openoffice so i can burn the iso in a cdrw!

Question : as anyone try to mount a loop swap with the windows pagefile.sys or win386.swp file ? how does windows feel when rebooting (because we are forced to do a mkswap on the file).