Motivation - Why?
I bought a new notebook and was spending some time installing / transferring data from the old notebook and wanted to prepare it with a fresh install of Linux before giving it to my brother. Since I wasnt sure what software/packages he would like or whether he was even going to use Linux, I didnt want to spend too much time and effort installing a distro. Within minutes I had a bleeding-edge Debian based linux distro with many popular applications running.
My machine configuration
- IBM Thinkpad Celeron 550
- 4.5GB Hard disk
- 192MB RAM (128 MB should be fine)
DISCLAIMER: The steps outlined in this document come with no guarantee (or warranty) that it will work, and what ever you do to your system is at your own risk! I hold no responsibility. Please back up your data always (or better yet use a different hard disk).If this makes you uncomfortable stop reading any further!
Steps involved
At the time of writing I used Knoppix 3.3 but these steps should work for other versions. Hopefully with future versions there will be a good installer integrated with KNOPPIX.
1. Download the live knoppix ISO image from www.knoppix.net and burn to a CD
2. I created a boot disk since Knoppix cd wasnt bootable on my thinkpad.
cd /mnt/cdrom/KNOPPIX/; dd if=boot.img of=/dev/fd0
3. Booted Knoppix cd and went on to create partitions.
# cfdisk /dev/hda
# fdisk -l /dev/hda
/dev/hda1 * 1 561 4506201 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 561 608 377527+ 82 Linux swap
4. Setup file systems and mount
# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda1
# mkswap /dev/hda2
# mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
5. Copy the Knoppix file system over
# hdparm -c1 -d1 /dev/hda (just to speed up file copying)
# cp -a /KNOPPIX/* /mnt/hda1/
6. Setup config files required for HD boot
# vi /mnt/hda1/etc/fstab
/dev/hda1 / etx3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
# mkdir /mnt/hda1/home/knoppix
# chown knoppix.knoppix /mnt/hda1/home/knoppix
# vi /mnt/hda1/etc/lilo.conf
- comment the "! Please edit /etc/lilo.conf ....
- modify image=/vmlinuz section so that root=/dev/hda1.
- I also removed vga=791 part from the append= section since that gave me an error when installing lilo
- Make sure you also modify lang=de to lang=us in the append section.
- I added vga=788 below append section so that I can get fb and a nice tux while kernel boots
- I wanted to load kdm instead of kde so I added 2 to the append section to say runlevel 2
- Add other knoppix cheat codes to the append section as necessary
If you want to start kdm instead of kde
# cd /mnt/hda1/etc/rc2.d
# ln -s ../init.d/kdm S99kdm
7. Install lilo and reboot
# chroot /mnt/hda1
# mount -t proc none /proc
# lilo
# umount /proc; exit;
# sync;sync;umount /mnt/hda1;reboot
References and Resources
| Buddhika Siddhisena <bud@babytux.org> | Updated : November 06, 2003
Created : November 06, 2003 |
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WCL