In this post Im going to tell you about setting up my first Linux Box, the Hardware Im using with it, the distro, and my errors and how i fixed them, this will be a "living post" which ill gradually keep posting on my experiences with the Distro Knoppix.
Whats Knoppix?
From what ive discerned its a live linux os that runs from a CD rather than a harddrive (though you can install it to a hard drive, i havnt done this yet)
My box hardware:
Pentium 2 MMX 233Mhz
95mb RAM
5GB IDE HDD
Legacy Floppy Drive
IOMegaZipCD(ATAPI) CDR/CDRW
10/100 Ethernet Card
NVIDIA GeForce MX4000(AGP)
PCI Soundcard
1024x768 resolution color monitor
Installation:
Well my first task was changing my boot order in my BIOS(Basic Input/Output System) usually you can get to this by pressing F1 or DEL at the screen you see when you first turn your pc on. I made the cd-rom check for boot first and my hdd last.
(if you download the Knoppix .ISO from their website, make sure you burn the image to a CD, DO NOT extract the ISO and then add the files to burn, didnt work for me)
Pop the Cd in and wait youll get a boot screen, pressing enter will go right into loading Knoppix
Now my first few trys were failures because of errors concerning my hardware, my first attempt i was trying to install running insufficient RAM or messed up RAM (which it was i dunno at the moment) but I was getting this error
Error: cannot unite read-only media and initial ramdisk
Read-Only Media is the CD initial ramdisk is either the ram or something to do with the HDD connection, but in my case it was the RAM
Fixing this was pretty simple I upped the RAm on the Motherboard and started the pc up again and i got past this error
The installation then goes through finding devices and default configuring them...
now for my hell
everytime it would get to the XSession(or the graphical boot) it would show a root prompt and then my monitor would go into stand-by basically no input into the monitor but the monitor is working. usually you can tell this problem by the power led on the monitor goes from green to yellow or mabey even red, depends on your monitor i suppose.
Figuring this problem out was frustrating but when i did find a solution it was sooo simple.
I figured the problem was laying within either the video card or the monitor itself, which actually ended up NOT being the case, at the Boot screen(or boot prompt) you can specify by commands how you want knoppix to load (called cheat codes in documentations) i tried various codes such as:
knoppix screen=1024x768 which sets knoppix to load with that resolution
knoppix vga=normal, this says everything, and in big characters
and otehr concerning the refresh rate
none worked
so i booted in text mode which worked and browsed around but didnt seem appealing at that time, i wanted to know why my awesome setup wasnt getting a gui
so i started over and at the time when the graphical session was trying to start, and when i seen my weird screen go blank i pressed CTRL ALT BaCKSPACE which resets the XSession andrestarts its initialization, well i got this error then:
error: no suitable x-server found for your card
hmph...my card, huh well the card is new, so i knew it should be able to work, so i went to my cheat code documentation and found my solution
I reset by box and at the Boot prompt typed:
Knoppix xmodule=fbdev
it worked, much to my amazement and happy expression
so that concludes my first delve into Knoppix, which is a pretty nice Linuz OS, runs on older machines anything i486 and up. includes a pretty good selection of programs and tools as well.
