Hi, I dowloaded the v3.3 (2004-02-16-EN) .iso with my 56Kb connection (took over 50 hours over 5 days) and shock of shocks - its md5 matched! I burnt the disk and lo and behold it failed on its SCSI setup A quick check on here and the issue was resolved with the 'noscsi' cheat code.
Five minutes later (I had to get a cup of tea), and I'm sitting in front of this gorgeous desktop with fantastic round style menus and buttons (not in the horrible XP way either) gagging at how bonny and fast this experience is; I'm also somewhat bewildered by the vast array of options and programs that I can play with (where do you change desktop resolution? I can do it with a cheatcode at boot, but how do you do it in KDE?), a problem that can be solved with practice and patience I'm sure.

So firstly let me take the time to thank Klaus Knopper for providing such an awesome (and easy) way to get into Linux, I've been trying to delve into this OS for a few years now (one too many BSD's in Windows 98 ), but was always put off by the Uber-Elite attitude that Linuxers seemed to have, and the [apparent] complexity of the system.

Secondly, a big thanks to all the chaps and chapesses who post here, your information has proved invaluable already, and I'm sure that it will continue to do so in the future.


Now (finally) to the point of this post

I have an 80Gb hard drive that holds my Windows 2K system, it is split into 2 partitions as follows (all formatted as FAT32):

  • * Primary partition of 5Gb containing my Windows intallation
    * Extended partition of 75Gb containing 3 logical drives, each roughly 25Gb in size (games, personal and music)


I have too many programs that will only run under Windows to completely ditch it (although in time I would love to), but I do have a perfectly good hard drive that I don't use (I upgraded from it to the 80 gig'er), it's a 30Gb IBM Deskstar, UDMA100 and has a 7200RPM spindle speed. I intend to install Knoppix onto this drive and run some sort of boot manager to handle the two OS's.

My questions are thus:

  • a) Could someone recommend how I partition this drive up for Knoppix?
    b) What should I use, 'knx-hdinstall' or 'knoppix-install'?
    c) Could someone point me to an install guide for the relative command in b) that is considered to be definitative/most successful (as much as one can be) - I've currently got about three of them on my desktop and I'm unsure which one to follow.
    d) After I have installed Knoppix onto the second hard drive (IDE channel 0 as a slave), can I use the boot device selector in my BIOS to take care of things boot wise?
    e) When I pluck up the courage (I tried dual booting 98 and 2K before, result: I lost 6 years of code) to install a proper boot manager, is there a good link to doing it using Microsofts one, or should I use Grub or LILO?
    f) How difficult is it to start with a Debian distro and have it working similarly to Knoppix?


Well done if you got this far! Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. If this post is in the wrong place, please accept my apologies and feel free to move it.