This question asks how one is supposed to preserve configurations across boots on the same computer in DSL. That is I'm looking for a something like Slax's "saveconfig" commant that writes a small file to the local hard drive that the CD boot will autodetect and use if present.

Each time I boot DSL off of my CD, I have to configure the ethernet setting. In my case it's a wireless card, so I have to enter the name, channel and WEP key of the network). I'd also love to set the root password and shut-off the guest as part of the config. Even better would be if I could set the home directory of a newuser to a specific local drive.

A second kind of configuration i'd like to save is the boot settings. In may case I always have to enter fb800x600 then answer a whole lot of questions like (USB mouse? no, US keyboard? etc....) that get triggered when you don't do the default boot. Surely there must be someway to save these on a given computer so the user does not have to enter them every single time on.

well first of all your boot media should be rewriteable. a regular cd-r wont work.

Okay I've figured out most of this And thought I ought to document it here.

At boot time you can specify a a term
dsl restore=hda3
where hda3 is the name of a writable device.

This tells the system to try to use the backup file it created there to restore the user diretories and some of the system settings. By specifying this, one time the fbackup/restore file will get re-created created when you log out too. It does not capture all of the system settings like the wireless card settings, but it does remember things like the xvesab, keyboard and other questions it normally asks at boot.

After the restore file is created then every time after that it will try to extract the file called backup.tar.gz at the root of the devices it scans:

it then unpacks it and restores the user directories and settings.
In there is two things, a directory called home and one called opt.
home contains all the user directories which normally will just be the default user "dsl".
opt contains multiple things but a key thing it contains is boot.sh
this file get's executed at the end of the boot process.

You should not edit these files directly but instead make any changes you want in /opt and /home/dsl directly.

Now the first half of my question was how do I configure a wireless connection so it's remembered across boot cycles. The wireless connection is apparently not one of the settings that get saved.

to recreate the wireless connection each boot cycle I added the following two lines to /opt/boot.sh

iwconfig eth0 essid myLocalNetworkName key myHexWepKey
iwconfig eth0 commit
pump -i eth0

this will start a dhcp client connection to the wireless router called myLocalNetworkName and give it the passkey value you specify.

If you are running instead with a manual IP address you will need do other commands to set the DNS, router, and such.

Another thing that is not restored is any mounted partitions you had. Thus to restore these you need to add mount commands to this same file.

Since knoppix will autodiscover your partitions for you and put them in the fstab you can use a short mount command to mount these.

for example if you look in your fstab you may see entries for /dev/hda2 or something. To mount this you add the line

mount /dev/hda2

You don't need to specify the mount point since that is already set by knoppinx in the fstab as /mnt/hda2 and the mount directory auto-created for you at boot time.

One more thing is that if you install DSL onto your disk then it will automount the partition you installed it into.

I have never needed to save net configs cause DSL usually detects it automatically for me...But back before I did the HD install, I always just did backup/restore to save my settings.Pull up your menu (right click on the desktop) and then goto system>backup/restore. Type in the location where you want your backup file, and it will save it. Obviously, you have to mount your hard drive before doing so. I think you have to do the same when you boot up, but instead of choosing "backup" you have to choose "restore".

I think there also is a way to make an ISO of your current config. So instead of using DSLs ISO, you use your own modified DSL ISO.

i downloaded and installed DSL to a pendrive and now every time i reboot i lose all my settings from my last login and every time i try to back it up i get a message that says Invalid Device, am i trying to store it in the wrong place? Or am i forgetting to mount somthing? help soon plz.