[Malvern] Knoppix

[Andy Morris]

For those trying out Knoppix, you might find the following useful.

I recently appealed in this LUG for the loan of an old laptop for a few
months, to finish a writing project, because the only time I have available
is on the daily grind to work by train, and with the constant delays on the
trains, it would put wasted time to good use.

Andrew Ballantine has kindly loaned me one, with Knoppix 3.1 shoe-horned on
it, for which I am muchly grateful.  Writing progress has been swifter as a
result, but with an unexpected side bonus of the apparent magical
improvement in train reliability lately, whenever I am writing on the
journey - I have had only two late trains in the past 10 days, both due to
Network Rail, not Central Trains!

One of the things Andrew warned me about is the boot display screen went off
the page, because Knoppix defaults to 1024x768 on boot-up, and the Tosh has
an 800x600 screen. 'S OK, until a forced filesystem check (automatic after
26 boots) threw out some disconnected inodes, and I could not read the
bottom line of the screen to run the appropriate commands for a cleanup.

A check on the Knoppix website showed a first cure was to change the "vga"
mode setting in "lilo.conf" from the default of "791" to either normal or a
hex code of "0x0103". The hex code came from running "/sbin/lilo -T video"
which outputs all the boot video display modes of your installed video
interface.

This put a standard 80x25 display in the middle of the screen, and I fixed
the filesystem.  However, I liked the neat original display, with a Linux
penguin at the top, so I dropped a query on the Knoppix website as to
whether a mode code existed for this on 800x600. It does ... with a lot of
other useful codes. Take a look at:

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=36801#36801

for the details.

And thank you again, Andrew! I  now have OpenOffice 1.1.0 installed, and the
display fonts are much, much tidier on the 800x600 screen.  I'm working on
how to get a GB keyboard in the boot, as well as in KDE.  I think I may
reload my home PC with Knoppix/Debian, to replace SuSe.

See you guys next Wednesday!


Andy