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Loading Zone March 2005 • Vol.5 Issue 3 Page(s) 82 in print issue |
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My Knoppix Adventure Open Sauce by Pete Loshin |
Jump to first occurrence of: [LINUX] [TRIP]  The last thing I want to drag along on any trip is a laptop. So, on this year's trek to visit family up and down the East Coast, I ditched my laptop and lost 10 pounds of ugly fat. The Knoppix LiveCD distribution (and its many offspring) is the coolest thing since writeable CDs. I have been a mostly theoretical fan of these distributions, but I decided to put Knoppix to the test by depending on it for all my mobile computing needs on whatever PC my family members saw fit to make available to us. All I took along with me was a Knoppix 3.7 LiveCD and a 256MB USB RAM doodle for storing my desktop and configuration. The theory was that I could boot from CD, write my config to USB memory, and be good to go anywhere I could find a CD-bootable PC. I just needed to check email, do some work, and share old family photos, plus new ones I took along the way. The plan was to burn the latest Knoppix (3.7) to CD, configure it, and dump my working data onto the desktop. I would use Mozilla for browsing with my favorite bookmarks and for checking mail. I would use KuickShow, the KDE image viewer, for slideshows and a USB CompactFlash reader to view new snaps with ease. Knoppix has everything I need in the course of a normal work day: Emacs (and eight other text editors); GIMP for graphics; OpenOffice.org for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations; Mozilla (and others) for Web browsing and email; a dozen or so games; and dozens of other applications and utilities. What actually jumpstarted Knoppix for me was Kyle Rankin's "Knoppix Hacks" from O'Reilly. While some hacks weren't all that tricky, most are killer, and it's nice to have them with you in a handy printed package while you're messing around with a new desktop. That's why my portable desktop was more like a pound than an ounce. Rankin and company answer the questions you'll have if you want to usefully use Knoppix but don't want to waste hours figuring it out yourself. Executing the plan was the work of a rainy, late December afternoon and a matter of copying configuration and bookmark files from my desktop, an image for the desktop background, and other odds and ends. The Knoppix desktop includes options for creating a persistent desktop so you don't have to reconfigure everything from scratch each time you boot. It saves application configurations, too. It all works fine as long as you have a partition to copy to, which is where a CompactFlash card or USB RAM stick comes in. Then, you can boot to your own desktop anytime just by plugging in and issuing a kernel command (knoppix myconfig=scan) at boot time. On the road, it worked wherever I went: on my father-in-law's latest and greatest laptop, my brother's bread-and-butter family PC, and even the crusty, dusty Pentium III he's turning into a Linux database server. At about four years, it isn't terribly old in human years, but that's 65 in PC years and it's time to retire. Booting to Linux with Knoppix showed that the old Dell has some life in her. My brother, David Loshin, information management expert and CEO of Knowledge Integrity (knowledge-integrity.com), dislikes waste as much as I do, so we ran out for a hard drive, extra RAM, and a full Linux distro (SUSE 9.2). We knew Linux ran fine because we had booted Knoppix. So, in went the RAM and drive and then the SUSE install. We got a nasty error message and nothing booted, Linux or Windows. That could have been nasty, but after checking the Knoppix installation and surfing the Web (on the same system giving us a problem) for an answer, we succeeded in almost record time. We repartitioned the drive to work around a BIOS limitation related to disk size and my brother had a great new Linux machine. I know some of you are having trouble getting Linux running on your systems. I don't always have the answers, but send your questions to linuxtrouble@loshin.com and I'll do my best.  Pete Loshin, former technical editor ofsoftware reviews for Byte Magazine (print version), consults and writes about computing and the Internet. He also runs www.linuxcookbook Get saucy with Pete at pete@cpumag.com. |
