[Lincs] The Joy of X: or how I installed Knoppix in 30 mins

[Grahame.Mulliss at ulh.nhs.uk]

After Marc's speech on Knoppix during the LLUG meeting last Saturday I
procured myself one of his free Knoppix CD's with the intention of
installing it onto my HHD when I got home.

 

Bye, bye SuSE 8.1, hello Knoppix Debian!

 

Truth be told I've never had the best of experiences with trying to
install Debian. For one Debian's installer should come with a health
warning (esoteric in it's construction would be an understatement)  and
I've never got the X configuration working correctly with my graphics
card under Debian.

 

Anyway I popped the Knoppix cd into the CD Drive, booted my PC...
(twiddle my thumbs) Hey presto... my PC boots into the very nice KDE 3.2
desktop... a quick look in the Kmenu brings up some surprises: GIMP 2
and Scribus are both new additions (and being the two programs I use
regularly, most welcome).

 

Anyway on with the bold experiment... I open up Konsole and type the
magic command; "sudo knoppix-installer" and up pops the Knoppix
installer dialog box.

 

First things first I have to partition the HDD, being my Windows box I'm
not overly fussed with wiping the drive (though I will miss playing
Championship Manager - at least until I get it working under WINE) 

 

I choose to partition the drive and QTParted starts. I must admit I've
never used this app before but it's definitely on par with Partition
Magic and probably the best open source partition tool I've used. Anyway
I create a 15gb Reiser partition (root) and a 500mb swap partition. I
didn't bother with a boot partition as I will install the bootloader
onto the MBR (master boot record) - as a note I had to unmount the  C:\
partition first as Knoppix automatically mounts any partitions it finds
at boot. 

 

QTParted creates the partitions with no problems, I close QTP and
continue with the installation. The Knoppix installer detects the new
partitions and proceeds to format them -unfortunately Knoppix decides
that Reiser is not the way to go and formats my root partition as
ext2... ummmm... 

 

Anyway once the root partition has been formatted it's on with the
installation... 3gb of data - time to go make a cup of tea.

 

Once the data transfer completes, just a couple of questions (username,
password and root password) and then I'm asked to configure the
bootloader (Lilo) I choose to install it to the MBR and it's time to
reboot.

 

Ok CD's been ejected from the drive, the PC's booting... time to pray to
all things holy, cross those fingers and dig out that lucky rabbit's
foot... repeat the mantra "please boot, please boot!"

 

Debian themed Lilo splash screen appears and then the kernel boots...
Knoppix boots pretty quickly (first time boot is a little slower as user
area is created, dependencies and links are checked and/or created and
before I know it I'm at the KDM login screen. 

 

X configuration is spot on... correct color depth and screen res
(1024*768 on a 17in monitor).

 

Logging in I find my self with a KDE 3.2 desktop as before and all
applications - exactly as it was when I booted off the CD.

 

Well I've had sometime to play with my new Debian Knoppix box now...
problems so far:

 

QTParted appears to be broken and now will not load

 

Though Knoppix recognised and  configured my soundcard when booting of
the CD, with a HDD installation it strangely refuses to acknowledge that
a soundcard now exists (sndconfig does not work either)

 

Good points:

 

Fast KDE interface (probably the fastest desktop I've seen - only Redhat
8's gnome desktop was faster)

 

Frozen bubble

 

A working Debian distro that only took 30 mins to install

 

More software than you can shake a stick at!

 

Anyway has anyone else tried a Knoppix HDD install yet... comments?

 

Have fun!

 

G

 

Grahame Mulliss



 

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