[TAG] Article Ideas

[Ben Okopnik]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 10:44:26AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting John Karns (jkarns at etb.net.co):
> 
> [Debian:]
> 
> > One of these days I'm going to try installing in natively on this 8100.  I
> > *did* install Knoppix 3.3, and it seems to work well, although I haven't
> > had much time to devote to cfg'ing it etc.  I'd like to switch to using
> > Debian / Knoppix eventually.  
> 
> In the past, I've had some sets of notes[1] about various potholes in that
> road.  They'd be a bit out of date, at this point:  For one thing, the
> installation script's name has changed (again) as of the Knoppix 3.4 series, 
> from /usr/local/bin/knx-hdinstall to something else.
> 
> Among the items you were best advised to take care of then, and I'm sure
> you still are now:
> 
> 1.  Boot the Knoppix CD, just prior to installation, using 
> 
>   knoppix lang=XX  2
> 
> at the boot prompt, where XX is your preferred country code, one of
> {cn|de|da|es|fr|it|nl|pl|ru|sk|tr|tw|us}.  This eliminates those
> Teutonic linguistic tendencies later on, that Ben referred to.

I'd originally expected it to (oh, for the innocence of my younger days!
:) It doesn't, in various odd corners, of which KDE is one. I used to
know precisely where in the depths of .kde that "Language = de" (or
something like that) string lived. These days, downloading the "-EN"
version of Knoppix does exactly what starting the older versions with
"lang=en" used to, AFAICT... all the way to the still-German KDE
default.

> If desirable, you can also set VGA modes, framebuffer modes (I like
> fb1024x768 screen=1024x768, myself), and a whole lot of other things
> that may come in useful later.  You are strongly advised to play with
> these boot parameters using the default run-from-CD mode _prior_ to
> installing Knoppix, take notes on what works well, and then replicate
> those during the boot immediately prior to your HD installation.

Oh yeah. *Really* good idea. I've got that one on autopilot, which is
the only reason I'd skipped it.


* Ben Okopnik * okopnik.freeshell.org * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette *
-*- See the Linux Gazette in its new home: <http://linuxgazette.net> -*-