Hello everyone,

Sorry if this is posted in the wrong place. There was no section for Knoppix, and I know that Knoppix is based on Debian, so this seemed like the most appropriate place to post.

I installed Knoppix 6.2 on a 4 GB USB stick, and it works perfectly. I just have 2 questions:

1. I can navigate the Knoppix filesystem once I'm in Knoppix itself, but if I try to find it on the USB stick, I can't find it. there is only a boot folder, a KNOPPIX folder, and various other files.
This hasn't created any problems or anything, I was just curious as to why this happens, that's all.

2. Can I use the same USB stick for regular usage, but without intefering with the Knoppix installation?
In other words, if I navigate to the USB stick (the one with the Knoppix installation) from another operating system or computer, and create a folder named "my files" or whatever, can I then use it to transfer files like you would do on any regular USB stick, but without ruining or intefering with the Knoppix installation?

Thanks for your help everybody,

Alex

hey energyeruption

when you navigate the filesystem while running Knoppix your seeing the ramdisk filesystem
look under /mnt or /media to see where the usb is mounted at

or as root use "mount" to see where it's mounted at

like, for Slax, the usb would be mounted under /mnt/live/mnt/sdxx and will not show up when issuing "mount"

and Yes, you should be able to use the USB as reg storage ,etc without interfering with Knoppix

Are you running Knoppix persistent USB?

Hey linus72,

Thanks for the info, I'll have a think about that.

What is "persistent usb"?

I quite like Knoppix to be honest. I find it a bit better than Puppy, 'cause puppy won't display some websites very well, especially online banking. Knoppix is a bit more user-friendly, and the web-browser is better too.

Cheers,

Alex

ok
a persistent hdd/usb install means that whatever you do or settings you make while running live is retained between reboots/shutdowns like a hard drive install

when you booted up did it ask if you wanted to make a persistent "knoppix.img" or is there a menu entry for persistent usb??

see here
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/knoppix...-image-how-to/

and I know of a usb distro thats good for data recovery
http://redobackup.org/

but, I think Knoppix may have testdisk/photorec already?

do you know if it formatted sdb or just blanked the drive?

How can one Firefox be better than another?

Oh I see. Yeah, knoppix asked me to create a file when I first booted it, in order to save my personal settings, and I had to choose the size of it as well. So yeah, I imagine it is a persistent usb install. Anyhow, Knoppix 6.2 doesn't even have the menu entry from the link you sent me, which was based on version 5.3, so I imagine they've re-done everything. Thanks anyway though.
I remember I did the same thing in Puppy Live CD. It create a file to save all my settings after the first shutdown, and it even re-wrote the file on the CD each time I shut-down.
I checked out the redo website. It looks pretty cool. Up 'till know, I used a Puppy Linux LiveCD in emergencies, and from there, I managed to see all my files, on both the windows and the ubuntu partitions. It saved my ass loads of times! However, I wanted to be able to do this on a USB stick, and I read somewhere that knoppix is one of the best USB-bootable linuxes, so I gave it a try, and I'm very pleased with it. Like I said, it also displays a few webpages better than Puppy, as online banking is another reason I use live cd or usb linuxes (more security). I think I'll give redo a try as well, since it seems to be specifically dedicated to this sort of job, whereas Knoppix and Puppy are just all-round small-sized live distros. It sounded good from the website anyhow.
On knoppix, like in puppy, I can see all my windows and linux partitions, so i'm covered. I couldn't find testdisk or photorec as far as I looked.

thanks for your help linus72, I really appreciate it!

@darkduck: Neither Puppy nor Knoppix use firefox. If I remember correctly, puppy uses SeaMonkey and Knoppix uses IceWeasel. Different browsers display stuff in different ways. You might have noticed even that some (very few) websites don't work as well in firefox as they do in internet explorer, although that was more the case a few years back, now these issues have been mostly solved.

Alex

Oh yeah, and as far as I know, knoppix just blanked the drive, since the drive was already formatted in fat32 format, since that was what was recomended on a tutorial I found for installing knoppix.

Yes, you're right about Knoppix and IceWeasel.
Not the same with Puppy though. You can choice browser there. At least in 5.1.1.

My question looks silly now. :-(

@darkduck: yeah, if I remember correctly you can choose your browser in Puppy. Although, Puppy is only 70MB big, whereas Knoppix is about 900mb (about 700 for the system, plus a 200mb file I created to save all my settings), so it's only natural that Knoppix has better capabilities that Puppy. It's just that in Knoppix things are more clear, you can choose whether to display certain stuff on websites, whereas in Puppy it's a bit more difficult to adjust those settings. Nevertheless, Puppy is amazing for only 70MB, and it's saved my ass so many times!

I was wrong linus72, knoppix does have the testdisk program

Ok
if the drive is just bklanked and not formatted it is much easier to recover/restore it.
But, not sure about fat32, I have recovered ext2/ext3 partitions with testdisk but have never tried fat32??

Testdisk works pretty good on restoring the drive/partition

Just make sure you don't format the drive!

Hey linus72,

Yeah, fat32 struck me as strange as well, since I always have my ubuntu partitions in ext4, but fat32 for knoppix was recommended by this page here:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/install...ve-in-windows/

(I have ubuntu 10.10 and windows 7 dual boot on my computer)

Anyhow, the Knoppix USB is only 4GB (the actual OS is about 900Mb) so I don't really care if anything happens to it anyway, I just have for emergency reasons, to save my windows or ubuntu partitions, which are in ntfs and ext4 respectively.

Thanks again for the Redo info, I'll definetly check it out, it seems like the ideal tool for the job!

Alex

P.S. just remembered: I don't know if it matters, but the USB stick was blank anyway, I bought it brand new just for the job