4. Installing Knoppix

Since you got Knoppix to at least boot on your system, it should not be too hard to get it onto your hard disk. After all, all hardware was detected and that's usually the trickiest part in installing any linux distribution. And then, most guys I know, seem to always go for the latest and greatest hardware, which is really like begging for trouble.

For installing Knoppix onto your hard disk, there is a tool available, but unfortunately, at the time of writing it is still in heavy development. It looks like it will one day be a promising tool, but as for now, we will have to live with a couple of it's shortcomings and nuisances, from which I will try to spare you.

Partitioning The Hard Disk

I am not going to give an extended list with things that go wrong if you try to partition your hard disk from within the installation program we will use later on, but believe me: it is better to partition your hard disk(s) beforehand, and save yourself a lot of trouble.

To do this, we will use fdisk. Granted, it is not the most intuitive tool to do the job, and if you get by using qtparted or cfdisk anything else, fine for you, but I've found fdisk to work always, while others work most of the times.

What you need to figure out first is under which names your hard disks have been detected. When the system boots up it holds a lot of information in it's "kernel ring buffer", and from there you can find out how your hard disks are named. You could just show the whole of the kernel ring buffer, using the dmesg command, but since this one usually also contains a lot of things we don't want to read at the moment we are going to filter a bit using grep, so that we get only the information we are interested in.

knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ dmesg | grep drive$
hda: Maxtor 51536H2, ATA DISK drive
hdb: WDC WD1200JB-00DUA3, ATA DISK drive
hdc: HITACHI GD-2000, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ 
	

There you are. In the example the Maxtor disk drive has been named hda, the Western Digital one hdb and my cdrom drive has been named hdc. This is directly related to whether the disks are primary or secondary master or slave on your ide bus. Serial ATA disks will usually get letters later in the alfabet.

Starting of the fdisk program will now give us an interface to remove and add partitions. I am not going to cover all of the usage for the fdisk program. It is a menu based program, very old style user interface, but it will do the job. You don't have to be afraid to do any harm since you should have no data to do harm to on your hard disk, plus you have to tell the program explicitly to write the partition table to disk before you exit fdisk or it will not have written anything. That way you can always verify your configuration before you do the final write.

(substitute "/dev/hda" with the device name of the hard disk you are
trying to partition)
knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ sudo fdisk /dev/hda

There is an excellent tutorial on partitioning hard disks, including discussions about how big your swap space should be and so on, on this place: http://www.lissot.net/partition/. Especially chapter five is a must-read if you feel unsure about this part.

As a small reminder you can use the following table to see what commands are doing what. You will only need the commands listed here, though help will provide you with a longer list of commands.

For our home router, we will create three or four partitions:

1. The boot partition, which will be our system partition. It should be big enough to hold all software you will install on your system. Expect to use about 3 Gigabyte of data if you want to install most of the commonly used software from linux, but you could optimize that down of course. For the installation of Knopix 3.3, you need a primary partition of at least about 3 Gigabytes before the configuration tool will allow you to start. Beware of that!
2. The data partition, which will be the partition that will hold most of the data used by the applications. I.e. all of your web pages, all of the files served on the filesystem, all of your mail, etc... should fit onto this partition.
3. The backup partition, which will be big enough to hold a full backup and a sleuce of incremental backups. The size of incremental backups is hard to predict, and depends on the amount of data changed, but guess on the safe side. If you don't plan on installing a backup service, you don't need this of course.
4. The swap partition. As a rule of thumb, make it as big as the memory you have in your system.

After we have written out the partition table, we still have to activate the swap partition, because of a bug in the installer. If we were to start the installer now, we would be stuck in an infinite loop in the main menu, since it tries to check for a swap partition and does not find it, and therefore decides that you have not partitioned your hard drive yet. You can try it if you want, but we will continue activating the swap partition.

(You will have to replace "/dev/hda3" with the name of the device you want to
use as a swap partition. 3 Is the order number of the swap partition in the partition
table in that device.)
knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ sudo mkswap /dev/hda3
knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ swapon -a
knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ 

Now we should be able to start the knoppix installer. From the console you can just type

knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ sudo knoppix-installer
knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ 

And you should get a menu screen with five options that will gide you through the installer.

Figure 4.1: Installer Startup Screen

Choosing the "Configure Installation" item from the menu will go through a wizard that will ask all of the necessary information required to perform the installation, such as:

1. The partition to install Knoppix to. This is the boot partition we just created.
2. Your full name.
3. Your user name.
4. Your user password.
5. Your administration password. This is the root password for the installed system.
6. Your preferred hostname.
7. Whether the boot loader needs to be installed on the Master Boot Record or on the partition itself. We want to use the Master Boot Record, since no other operating systems are installed on the hard disk.
8. Choose your system type. There are two ways to install a knoppix system. We want to install a debian style system. The alternative would be a knoppix style system, in which the hardware is automatically detected on every startup.

Now we just start the installation and after some warning confirmation the installer does it's part, showing a long progress bar. We are ready to go and have a meal and a beer.

When the installer is done, ideally, we would just have to reboot the system.

This is only necessary if you got a warning about genliloconf crashing, and it
should only occur if you are using a different partition than /dev/hda1 to install the
system on.
knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/hdc1 /mnt/hdc1
knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ sudo chroot /mnt/hdc1
knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ cat /etc/lilo.conf | sed s/\\/dev\\/hda$/\\/dev\\/hdc/g > /etc/lilo.conf
knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ sudo /sbin/lilo
knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ 

At the end of the installation the system prompts to write a floppy with the existing configuration, which we just say no to, and a message saying that the installation was successful. Don't worry if you see some errors on the console, the knoppix-installer script is still not bugfree, and I don't think many of these matter (screendump from my system).

Booting The System

Now that the system has been installed we can safely reboot the system. Just pressing control-alt-delete will log off the knoppix user and restart after ejecting the cd tray. Or try typing sudo shutdown -r 0 on a console window. Don't forget to get out the Knoppix CD, you won't need it anymore, so you can safely add it to the big black box of old CDs on the attic.