On Sunday 06 April 2003 12:05, Hannes Hirzel wrote:
> Hello John
> john hinsley <johnhinsley at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> [snip]
>
> > BTW, I'm playing with the Debian SID as made by a Knoppix HD install:
> > it's a bit quirky, but so far very fast and stable. (And, of course, the
> > deb just flew on.)
>
> Could you elaborate a bit on this please? What are you on at the moment?

You mean "what have I been smoking?" Cheek! 

But seriously (and for those who may only have picked up the thread at the 
hint of illegal substances), Knoppix is a run from CD, no install, Linux 
distro. In that it's not unique, but Knoppix seems to be by far the best out 
there. That used to be the full story, except that someone came up with the 
bright idea that (as Debian -- on which Knoppix is based -- is a bit of a 
drag to install) a script could be written to install the stuff (there's 
something like 1.8 gig of stuff on the Knoppix CD) to hard drive and give it 
a flying start: I've always run the script from another Linux partition, but 
it should be possible to pop it on the CD and run it from there. The script 
is knx-hdinstall 0.38 and the project leader is Christian Perle 
<perle at itm.tu-clausthal.de> the script itself can be got from here:

http://www.itm.tu-clausthal.de/~perle/knx/

Ijust got the CD, ran the script from my SuSE partition and after some 
fiddling about, mainly with my soundcard, popped the Squeak deb on.

> Currently I'm looking into Knoppix as well in the context of another
> project. But I could thinks of doing a Squeak-Knoppix CD as well. For
> that I'm lacking knowledge how to install Squeak on Knoppix which is
> said to be debian-based.
> In fact I'm looking into "remastering" Knoppix.
> This means unpack the compressed Knoppix file system, remove certain
> programs, add other programs e.g. Squeak and then pack the thing again
> and do an ISO-CDROM image.
>
> The Squeak specific issue would be to come up with a repeatable
> installation process for everybody to use. The result would be CDROMs
> with Squeak packed on them. The Knoppix CDs run on bare hardware. A
> Squeak-Knoppix-CD could directly start into Squeak.

Yes. I remember a thread on this, and I'm sure it would work, but I'm not sure 
that it would have any real advantages (apart from Linix users being able to 
set the memory) over Tansel's Squeak News isos (which will run fine on Mac 
and Windows -- at least -- boxen). 

But don't let me put you off!

Cheers

John