[lug] Brand and Retailer for blank DVDs and CDs? Knoppix Hard DriveInstallation?

[John Karns]

On Sun, 15 Jan 2006, Siegfried Heintze wrote:

> Also: the folks at the BLUG meeting suggested I just install Knoppix 4.0.2
> on my hard drive. After reading
> http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/HD_Install_Warning_not_to_do_it however, I'm a
> little reluctant. I tried it once and my mouse and keyboard were working
> fine until I rebooted for the first time after the installation. I tried
> installing again and the keyboard worked but not the mouse.
>
> Does anyone have any comments or opinions about
> http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/HD_Install_Warning_not_to_do_it? Perhaps this is
> an old article?

A couple of comments I can make from personal experience with Knoppix
installs on a laptop:

I installed Knoppix 3.4 on a secondary machine back when it was current.
As my first exposure to debian, it seemed to work well enough, although I
did have to do quite a bit of fiddling around with it at first to get it
to do updates from the debian repositories.  However, during 6 - 8 months
of use, occasionally adding new packages, I finally abandoned the system
due to "broken packages".  I'm still a novice with Debian, so it may have
been something that a more experienced Debian user / admin could have
resolved.  I never attempted doing a 'dist-upgrade', assuming it wouldn't
work, as Knoppix is a hybridized mix of the three Debian branches.

I was also freely alternating between using the GUI based "synaptic" and
the text-mode apt-get package mgt utilities, which might be problematic,
dunno.  And there are one or two other pkg mgt utilities as well, e.g.,
"aptitude".  There apparently are quirks inherent in the package
management system, that can trip up even experienced Debianites [1]

There are a few Knoppix-based distros floating around, of which Kanotix is
one of the popular choices.  It uses the Knoppix script to do the install,
but differs in that (my understanding anyway) after the hd install Kanotix
becomes "pure" debian.  I've recently installed it on a 1999 K6-II (P2
era) Compaq Presario laptop, but haven't spent much time exploring it yet.

One caveat is that it wants to be Debian unstable, via the config in the
apt config file.  I changed it to track testing before doing the
'dist-upgrade'.

-- 
John Karns


[1] Here's a comment from a third party mailing list discussion a couple
of months back.

"Aptitude and apt-get are supposed to coexist. I'll state now
that actually they're not that well behaved.  Yes, they use
the same central database, but aptitude, in its nice broken
way, maintains some portions of it for its exclusive use
(remember that aptitude has some """"additional""" features
that allow it to track other packages more """successfully"""
then apt-get).  This is fine, as long as once you have started
to use aptitude, that you continue to do so, as using apt-get
for some operations thereafter, can lead you to a slight
mismatch in versioning and tracking of packages."

"It gets even better. There's also a bug in aptitude between
the command-line and ncurses interface. They work differently,
and will give different results (the classic example here is
when you try and put a package on hold).
I would have liked to have seen these rather glaring bugs in
aptitude fixed especially as Sarge is plugging it as the de
facto in place of apt-get (bad idea, IMO). Indeed, had you
checked the BTS for aptitude, you'd see the numerous bugs
filed against it on this issue and others."