I was getting all stoked to partition yes PARTITION my 9GB hard drive on this hardscrabble Toshiba Tecra 550CDT using System Commander 7. I currently have Win2K installed on the HD and I'm not ready to wipe it just yet.

I have the RedHat Linux 9 Bible with its 3 CD's, I also have O'Reilly's Knoppix Hacks book which came with the bootable Knoppix CD. I read the bits about installing Knoppix onto my hard drive, and to my befuddlement (yes, BEFUDDLEMENT) it didn't say anything about partitioning - even if you want multiboot. It seems to be claiming that I can install Knoppix into the one partition that already exists - y'know, the one that's occupied by Win2K and therefore has an NTFS file system.

This is the same book that told me Knoppix isn't jiggy with NTFS.

Now what do I do?

a) install Knoppix w/o partitioning, like the weird book says?
b) partition with SysCommander 7 and install Knoppix in its own partition?
c) b) with RedHat 9?

Partition with Knoppix and install Knoppix.

Uh, OK, I will try that - but could I get maybe a explanation of what goeth on? The book says Knoppix will install itself into the existing partition, rather than actually partitioning the drive. a) wtf? and b) ain't there a problem with NTFS compatability?

There are a few different styles of Knoppix installation. You can install on an existing Windows partition using the "poor man's install". This essentially puts a Knoppix CD image on the disc plus some stuff so you can boot off of it. This style of installation is good if...well, I don't think it's good at all. It is just like booting off the CD except a little faster. Your configuration and customization options are limited, just like booting off of the CD.

The prefered style of installation is traditional "Debian" style. This requires Linux partitions and will result in a full blown Linux hard drive installation that's mostly Debian compatible. You can install software just like any other Debian system, and _most_ of the time it will work.

However, this isn't as maintainable as a true Debian installation. As the Debian software repositories get more and more updated, your Knoppix install is going to get less and less reliably compatible.

Still, I think it's a good way to transition toward a true Debian system.

maybe you misunderstood what the book said, otherwise it's a stupid book. yes you are right - "Knoppix (or rather linux in general) isn't jiggy with NTFS". you should create two partitions for knoppix - a swap partition approx. double the size of your RAM and another for the actual filesystem (just use whatever fs it wants to use by default - reiser, ext3, whatever). if its a semi-recent version of knoppix it will have QTParted, which you can use to resize your NTFS partition. before you do though, defrag the drive in windows and backup anything important.