I've been following knoppix from 3.1 to 3.2 to now 3.3,
( http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-old-en.html - for an ugly web-page descriping this beautiful project)
and it is probably one of the best examples of just how powerful Linux is. Not only does this livecd autodetect and load appropriate modules and drivers for just about *any* hardware you throw at it (x86 based mainly), but on a single CD it has just about any program you could imagine, with a KDE 3.1 desktop and all the trimmings...

Anyway, flattery aside, does anyone know of an easy way to use Knoppix as installation media? In otherwords, boot from the CD, get into a full linux filesystem, and then use that state to partition and initalize a Hard Drive, and put the fully inflated Knoppix CD down to the drive, so that Knoppix is your actual HD based distro? There must be some (relatively) easy way to do this, so perhaps people have had luck with it...


Thanks!

hehe...

I looked into this a little more, and realized the website I was at was a roughly translated English version of the main German site...

www.knoppix.net seems to be more robustly informative for the english speaker, and their forums have a section relating to HDD install. I'll look into it a little more and see what I can make of it.

Any ideas or advanced tips still appreciated!

So I read further into it, and found a few web sites, besides the very useful knoppix.net forums on HDD installs, that outline some of the info I was begging for earlier:

http://www.freenet.org.nz/misc/knoppix-install.html
http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/debian-knoppix.html


I guess I could have done all this on my own, but I figure talking and thinking out loud can possibly help others that may want to do this same thing...

All it took was a full night (not evening...NIGHT) to get Knoppix 3.3 fully installed on my system. But now it's here, and man am I happy...

For those who are planning to install knoppix on your laptop or desktop, perhaps you could post here to say what did or didn't work for you... As for me, after booting off the CD, I opend up a konsole, and su, and 'knx-hdinstall' was the script I ran which automated a huge portion of the process... I had to use fdisk in the middle of it to partition my disk ( I have a working win2k partition that I need to keep.) Read up on fdisk before you try this!!! Followed the rest of the instructions, and it dumped exactly what you see on the CD, onto my HD! Remarkable, truly remarkable.

It uses lilo to manage your mbr, so read up on that as well... also, check out this link for a little helpful advise.
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5842
It talks about getting lilo properly loaded into the mbr. Knoppix didn't load for me until I followed the instructions, modded my lilo.conf and /sbin/lilo -v to get it loaded in, then everything was fine and dandy like free candy.

For my Dell Inspiron 1100,, my lilo.conf looked like this: (obviously not riddled with chunky and verbose comments, so edit as necessary!)

boot=/dev/hdc # inspiron 1100 has the harddrive at hdc for some reason!
vga=773 # gives me access to the full screen during boot up and at console, / which is quite nice#
prompt
timeout=10
append = "hda=ide-scsi hdb=scsi hdc=scsi hdd=scsi hde=scsi hdf=scsi hdg=scsi hdh=scsi apm=power-off nomce" #left this one alone, except changed hda=scsi to hda=ide-scsi at the beginning of the line

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.22-xfs #nice kernel indeed!
label=knoppix
append="root=/dev/hdc6 hda=ide-scsi" # got this idea from another site, listed below...
read-only

#Windows
other=/dev/hdc2
label=win2kpro
optional
table=/dev/hdc

www.geocities.com/randomnumbergenerator2001/ was a tremendous help in getting the vga setting correct, the append section, and a few other pointers.


Hope this helps someone out there. I'm going to use this linux laptop to showcase just how freakin' pretty you can make linux when it's tuned real nice. I'll get some screenshots up when I get to that point!

thanks for posting lazlow - maybe this will inspire some people to try Knoppix - it's an awesome project. I did a HDD install a while back, and was very pleased - it makes the Debian install a snap, and I'd recommend it especially for noobs curious about Debian but intimidated by the regular Debian install.

www.knoppx-std.org

nuffsaid.