Kapil Hari Paranjape 1
In order to add all the packages that I thought were relevant, some of the packages that Klaus Knopper put on his original version had to be removed. In particular, the KDE graphical interface and all GNOME applications had to go.
This CD in ``Live'' and pre-configured form offers you some of the vast amount of ``Free or Azad or Mukta'' software which is of use to those wishing to study mathematics and contribute to its literature. Moreover, it does not require installation to any fixed disk and can thus be used to work on a freely bootable ``PC'' environment which has at least a 486 processor and 20MB of RAM. Files can be saved to the fixed disk, floppy or over the network.2
If you actually have about 2.0GB of fixed disk space in a separate partition KNOPPIX offers the possibility of fixed disk based installation. The script knx-hdinstall is available for this. You can actually install in less space than 2.0GB but it would require too many words to explain how--figure it out! Once you perform a disk-based installation, you can install more software from the Debian site and elsewhere. I have also included enough tools to download and install other packages that are available in the GNU autoconf style package.tar.gz collections. Finally, you can also get rid of packages that you believe I installed in error!
...but if it does not then perhaps your computer is setup not to boot from a CD. You can then interrupt the boot procedure at the point where you can enter the BIOS setup (usually by hitting F2 or Ctrl+Alt+Esc at an appropriate moment just after the first messages appear on the screen). In the BIOS setup it is usually possible to instruct the machine to boot from the CD. In some older machines this may not be possible ...
...In that case go through a normal boot on the PC (either into GNU/Linux or Windows(TM)). Then open the CD in your usual way. Under the directory KNOPPIX you will find a file called boot.img which is the image of a floppy that can boot your CD. Under GNU/Linux you can then issue the command:
The boot-up procedure should then take over and work automatically. In some very rare cases the booting may stop with a message like ``...could not find KNOPPIX image''. In such a case you can copy copy the entire contents of the KNOPPIX directory to a similarly named directory at the top (root) of your Linux/DOS/Windows partition (for example E:/KNOPPIX is to be copied to C:/KNOPPIX). After this you should be able to boot from the floppy.
However if you would like a different interface, this and other such things can be changed at boot time or later by selecting a different Window Manager under the left-click mouse menu. You can also get a regular text based root interface by the keys Ctrl+Alt+F1 as usual under XFree86 in GNU/Linux. The file KNOPPIX/knoppix-cheatcodes.txt describes various alternate booting mechanisms that are available.
One you have this interface you have a lot of interesting software at your finger-tips. Explore and enjoy!