Knoppix

I needed to boot a machine up with Knoppix in order to figure out what Ethernet mechanism shows up. No big deal. I've done this a million times. This, however, is on a virtual machine. I've done this too a couple of times. It seemed to work fine. Not this time. The OS (Knoppix) cannot find the knoppix file system. This file system is in a RAM drive. I know the host machine boots under Knoppix just fine. It must have something to do with the virtual (qemu) software mounting the real cd drive on the host machine.

Qemu will mount an ISO so I downloaded the iso for Knoppix because I didn't leave a copy laying around after I burned it. Who the hell has time or space? While downloading from an FTP site in Denmark I remembered the rule. if it starts off slow give it a minute. The download started at 2k a second. Within about five minutes it was up to nearly 200k a second. That still works out to over thirty minutes for the CD image. Better than a stick in the eye. Then someone kicked me off he internet machine and I had to start over.

Knoppix has pulled my ass out of a dozen cracks. Those frigging Germans. I can so picture it doing it another dozen times if something even better doesn't come along before then. Laptops seem to do better with the Ubuntu live CD. Ubuntu Live doesn't have the utilities like Knoppix.

A bunch of network cards are just plane not supported by Windows. This goes double during install. The Windows install is designed to kind of work in one situation. For all the claims of Windows being the OS that so many people can use, only IT folks can get anything resembling non standard hardware to accept the Win-crap as an OS.

Knoppix booted up in German. I had downloaded the wrong language image. It runs slow in both English and German. No reason for that. Plenty of memory and disk space. I'm sure the original file system error had something to do with loop-backs and proc links and crap. It almost makes sense that Knoppix would have problems in an emulator using the real hardware. It really sucks though. I know VMWare did not have the same issues. Qemu is free.

When all was said and done, the trick didn't work. Apparently, the driver that Knoppix finds and the one that Windows finds are two different things. That is highly educational. I'm glad I learned that lesson.  Ass still firmly planted in crack.