# Installing new plugins/ programs in knoppix



## Sarkast (Sep 12, 2004)

Yeah i am back with more Qs - sorry. Well i have spent several hours with the knoppix CD and am quite impressed. Now i used my old PC for testing (733 celeron 192Mb RAM) and things are a little slow seeing everything runs off CD Rom.
What i am wondering (topic) is if i am supposed to be able to install programs even though i am only running the live CD or thats not possible. I was trying to figure out what i can do with the browsers - also if i could play videos online. Went to MSN and it asked me to install flash player. So i tried to - but it just doesnt seem to install.

So i thought - well i try to install it on my harddrive. It tells me i need 2 partitions. So i delete the partition that was on the HDD - make 2 new ones but it still doesnt let me install it. Keeps telling me i need 2 partitions etc. What am i missing ? The tool i tried to use was QT??? (sorry forgot the name). I also tried to download another tool suggested but again i unzip it into the home folder - run it - wine tells me it has to start and then nothing happens.

Is there another partiton tool on the knoppix CD besides the QT one that i tried ? I tried installing knoppix on the HDD with sudo knoppix-installer so it always brings up QT. The program seems to be very instabil too - just to get the 2 partitions set up i had to restart 2-3 times because sometimes it would let me choose what to do with a partition - and after all options were greyed out except the equivalent to properties.

Sorry - but i feel quite helpless - i can find my way around computers and windoze quite well but today i realised again how little i know when it comes to a diffrent OS. :dead:


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## Skie (Mar 15, 2003)

Theoretically, you could install programs on Knoppix while it's running off the CD, but once you rebooted, you'd lose those programs and have to redo it all over again. Also, you would use up your available RAM, so it's not really worth it. I don't believe that Knoppix was meant to allow installing programs while it ran off of a CD. Its main purpose is to allow you to "try before you install". It also allows you to use Linux when you're no where near a computer that has Linux installed on it. I've never tried installing Knoppix to the HD, but I believe there are a few people here that have.

As far as the partitioning tool, was it called qtparted? If so, qtparted is just the GUI for the actual program. If you're brave enough, you can run "parted" from the command line and try taking care of the partitions that way. 

How are you trying to set up the partitions? You need a main partition and a swap partition. The general rule of thumb for swap partitions is that it should be twice the size of your available RAM. If I remember correctly, a Linux swap partition is type 82. I don't know if Knoppix includes any other partitioning tools, but you may want to also try "fdisk" and "cfdisk" from the command line. cfdisk is more user friendly then fdisk.


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## Sarkast (Sep 12, 2004)

OK after messing with knoppix for some more time i managed to install it on my harddrive. It was quite interesting - especially considering that when i was done preparing a partiton with QTparted it told me after that that kind of partition isnt quite supported or something similar. Odd.

Thing is - no matter what i "do" to the second partition knoppix says there is no DOS partition available for the swap-file. I tried cfdisk, cant really get fdisk to work. I also tried to mark it as Win95 Fat 32, Fat 16, and probably 10 other partiton types (including linux-swap) and it just doesnt wanna accept it. When i choose to "format" in QTparted it just goes through this 15 second thing so i dont think it really formats it - maybe thats the problem. cfdisk doesnt seem to have an option for "format" - just to choose the type of partition. Am i missing something ?

Thanks for your help.


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## Skie (Mar 15, 2003)

For creating a swap partition, you need to create an empty partition. As far as the types, I believe type 83 is the type to use for a data partition, type 82 is for a swap. As far as formating, cfdisk isn't supposed to format anything, just set up the partitions. Also, use either ext3 or reiserfs for the filesystem types. 

Can you give me a listing of how you're trying to set up your partitions?


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## V0lt (Sep 14, 2002)

I found that installing a program to a folder in the desktop and then saving the settings to a file in the disk (making sure to include the files on the desktop) worked a lot better than installing the whole thing to the hard disk. In fact, my experiences with installing to the hard drive were unvaryingly bad- like for instance you can't act as root in X, you can only do it in a terminal window. I found that very frustrating. 

Anyway, give that a try and see how it works out.


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