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 Knoppix Remastering Howto

German Version: KnoppixRemasteringHowtoDeutsch


if you want to add a custom kernel, check out the KnoppixCustomKernelHowto


This is a guide that will show you how to remaster KNOPPIX

( notes : commands shown are on one line, so please maximize the window, if you have any comments/suggestions please post below )

You may wish to start from an already customized Knoppix, so you don't have to do so much work ( such as removing programs ), in which case, see KnoppixCustomizations

Requirements:

Instructions:

new - I get a whole lot of /dev/null permission denied errors, Update : fixed ! Well, check your mount status if you met the problem: mount /dev/hdaX on /mnt/hdaX type ext3 (rw,nosuid,nodev) (replace X with your partiton number ) where "nodev" means that you are not accessible on mounted filesystem and you can not access /dev/null. And some scripts get output redirect to /dev/null... To solve this you should mount the target partition before you do chroot

like this
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
And see whats changed
mount /dev/hda1 on /mnt/hda1 type ext3 (rw)

then you can carry on and chroot.

to remove some programs to free up space. apt-get remove "program" will remove that program.

Notes :

When you want to autorun some programs, one can create a script and put it in the directory /etc/rc5.d/ (This only loads items before X loads)

interesting stuff in /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig :

interesting stuff in /etc/init.d/xsession :

Now, onto creating the ISO file :

the "www.knoppix.net" and "Knoppix.net filesystem" can be changed to what you want to call the file. You will get an error that it doesn't conform to ISO standards, you can ignore this.

Tips

If you are looking for big installed packages then the command

dpkg-awk "Status: .* installed$" -- Package Installed-Size| awk '{print $2}' | egrep -v '^$' | xargs -n2 echo | perl -pe 's/(\S+)\s(\S+)/$2 $1/' | sort -rg

will list the packages with size in descending order.

If you have trouble with the above sort command, try using KPackage, expanded all the trees and sorted by the size column to find big packages.

Check out the program "deborphan", it will list orphaned packages that you can remove, these packages were used by packages that are now removed.

I have had good results remastering working from the cd as root working from fluxbox.Just say "knoppix 2" at the boot prompt and it will boot you to a root prompt where you can then say "startx /usr/bin/fluxbox".I like to use the xterm unicode shell.

While working chroot doing the remastering I like to use "apt-get remove pkg-name" to remove packages because before it does anything it will stop and show detials on what it is fixing to remove and let you say "yes or no".Then later I clean up my pkg list by saying "dpkg -l |grep ^rc" and to anything that shows up I say dpkg -P pkg-name".

Thats it. This is an updated version of my previous howto. This is not meant for linux beginers, you will need to know your way around linux... to get this to work. I'll update this as corrections/improvemtns/etc come through.

Thanks to aay, charan, Tech2k, and #knoppix for some corrections and tips and ideas feel free to edit or add to this howto.

Note about swap:
You don't realy need 1G swap as there are two new tools to create compressed filesystems. Here are some cadidates for make_compressed_fs:

If my howto is too confusing, or you'd like a second opinion, check out charan's very nice remastering howto : httphttp://gnubox.dyndns.org:8080/~sunil/knoppix.php . Another Howto is at httphttp://www.stirnimann.com/mystuff/doc/knoppix.txt

Be sure to check out the httpKnoppix Customization Forum for ideas and help with remastering.


Last edited on March 26, 2003 2:02 am.