Knoppix Customization
 

The Transition from Knoppix live to Debian Installed

Before anyone freaks out, yes you can just use Debian and install it instead, but in my case, I had used knoppix to install so I found this useful. To see how to install knoppix to your hard drive, see this page.

I recently decided that I wanted to modify my install of knoppix to my hard drive. I wanted to do this for several reasons:

* When I booted knoppix, it booted fine, but I got tons of dependency errors and messages saying it was looking for things it could not find. For example, it was looking for isdn which I don't use. The reason for this is that knoppix comes with as much compatibility as it can to ensure that it will work with as many systems as possible. This is a good thing as a live cd. This is not such a good thing after it is installed to your hard drive. I found that after the install, it was quite messy. There was tons of data on my computer that I knew I would never use and like I said earlier my boot screen was a mess when my kernel was loading. I am happy to say that I trimmed it down from 2.4GB to 1.4GB. Your results will vary depending on what you decide to keep on yours. You can type df -h into your terminal and it will show you how much space you are currently using - you do this again at the end to see the difference. Anyway, here are the steps I used to do it:

1 - Get rid of the repositories that comes with knoppix
You will need to change the information in your /etc/apt/sources.list file. You will need root permissions in order to save it. This means that you either will actually have to log in as root or you will need root permissions in the terminal (my preference). I outline the method below.

(keep in mind I am using newer packages, if you like older ones, change "unstable" to "stable". Newer packages are quite stable in my opinion, Debian's use of the terms stable and unstable is extemely misleading)

Method: Open the file and erase the current entries and then copy and paste the following into the file and save it.

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free
deb-src http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free

Once this is done, save it and then open a terminal and type: apt-get update. This will verify the new repositories you have entered. If you get any errors, it likely means you have just mistyped something, open the file and check everything to make sure it is right.

2 - Use synaptic to get rid of all the stuff you don't want.
The best way to do this is to be logged in as user and open a terminal and type:
xhost + $HOST
This will allow you to open synaptic while logged in as user with root permissions. So next, do this:
su
yourrootpassword
synaptic

You should see synaptic open on your screen. From there, this is the tedious part. You need to click on the drop down menu and select "Installed" in order to see which packages are installed. From there it is a matter of just going through the entire list and removing what you don't need. To remove packages, simply highlight them, click on remove at the right side and then click on proceed at the top. You can do little by little or you can select a lot of packages to remove at once and then click proceed. I was not accustomed to removing packages this way, certainty not the amount and variety so I made sure to take the time to read the description of each package and made sure it was something I could remove. If I was unsure, I left it. Another thing to consider is that with certain packages, it will bring up a message saying it will remove other packages with it that are dependencies or such. This is up to you. To give an example, I had one situation where I was removing something and it said it would remove kdebase. I knew that I still wanted kdebase but really wanted to get rid of the package that I had selected to remove, so I just made a note of removing kdebase with it and then I could install it later.

3 - Install/Upgrade the packages you want.
Here is the part where you need to replace anything that you removed that was required due to it being a dependency. Simply type the name into the synaptic search bar and then wait for it to find it and then click on it to highlight it and then click on "install" on the right and then click on "proceed" to install it. Once you have done that, we are ready to move on to the next step.

4 - Make your install entirely current.
For this step I preferred to use apt-get in the command line in text mode. Some of the things that will be upgraded (kdm for example) require that they are not running. In fact kdm was the only thing I got a message about so if you like, you can do this:
killall kdm
(in the terminal) and you should be ok for doing your upgrades while still in kde.
Keep in mind that I wanted everything done in one shot and I wanted the newest packages, so if that is what you want, do this:

(using apt-get)...
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

(yes you can do them together, but I like to do them separately)
You may get messages asking you whether you want to keep your current config files for certain things. If you recognize the application and you have created certain config files with them, you might want to keep them (press enter for default which is "N" - not to change it), otherwise, if you didn't create them (in all cases, I didn't), you can press Y to install a new one. Then when all of those packages are upgraded you can run apt-get dist-upgrade again just to be sure that it didn't miss any packages. It should tell you that 0 packages will be upgraded. It might say that certain ones are held back and that is fine. If you see this, then you are done

OR

(using synaptic)...
click on the drop down menu and select upgradable. Then click on "upgrade all" above it. Once that is done, you can then click on "Dist Upgrade" which will upgrade any major packages to the newest version of the latest distro.

5 - The New System
Well, at this point you should have almost an entirely new and customized install of knoppix/debian to your liking. Remember to type df -h into the terminal to check to see how much space you are using now (compare it to the beginning). Then you can reboot and you should notice that your bootup screen comes up a lot more smoothly now, with very few/no errors as before when it couldn't find certain things on your system it was looking for. Now you are ready to customize it aesthetically unless you already have.
Enjoy!

6 - Troubleshooting

* If your computer freezes or gets interrupted for whatever reason when upgrading or installing your packages or such, just repeat the same step and it will continue where it left off.