New to linux and knoppix and some newbie question.

[arkaine23]

I have never seen it take more than a couple of minutes to boot up. I know KDE checks for a minimum of 81mb ram or ram + swap. If not enough memory is available it's suppposed to default to use twm, a very basic window manager.

Icewm is pretty ncie, its minimal and sort of setup like windows. Fluxbox is also pretty neat since you can access your menus just by clicking the desktop. XFCE is sort of in between icewm and KDE in its level of complexity and features. In knoppix, there's also windowmaker but I've never used it. So that's 6 window managers in all to choose from, and the default is the most resource hungry. I'd try out Icewm, fluxbox, or xfce to see if the long boot-time goes away.

It's also possibkle the hardware detection is having trouble with the video card/monitor and has to retry several drivers before finding one that works. In which case there are some cheatcodes for framebuffer mode, for an alternate xserver, and to select certain video drivers, which could help once we can identify what the trouble is.

[Shaba1]

Ok I got fluxbox working last night. Talk about minimalist. But hey I have to do what I have to do. It took me some time to realize that I had to right click in the open area to get the flux equivilent of the windows start menu. Ok now most of the instructions here are made for KDE how do I translate them for using flux box? Most importantly can someone walk me thru how I could get my USB zip drive recognized. I would like to continue to boot off the CD but would like to save any work to a zip disk.

[kael]

I would highly recommend not using KDE because of your limited memory. Of the choices presented on the CD, fluxbox is probably the least system-bogging, however, given your windows backgroud, IceWM would probably be the most familiar for you. The menu should be quite similar to the one in KDE. Another 'cheat code' that may be useful for you is the 'depth' option; it may improve performance at a lower color depth. (knoppix depth=16 desktop=icewm)

[firebyrd10]

Thanks arkaine23.
I looked up some info on flux(fluxbox) on the web and will study.

I will definately be back with more questions. Right now the only thing that makes me hesitant was the amount of time it took(45 minutes) from when I put the cd in until the time the KDE desktop came up.

It could be because of the speed of the drive, laptops aren't known for they're 52x drives. And because its old you can expect something around 2x-4x, at 2x it takes about 80 minutes to read an entire cd, when booting knoppix reads alot of the cd which could explain the long boot time.