Installing Knoppix
Recently for some reason I thought about trying to get some more use out of an ancient notebook. Almost 8 years old, it had served me well for many years, has crossed the Atlantic with me on numerous occasions. Still, with only 64 MB of memory and 4 GB of hard drive and a slow CPU -- in this day and age, anyhow: AMD-K6 475 -- it hasn't seen much use of late.
On the other hand, Knoppix has been really impressive the last couple of years, including excellent hardware-recognition. Ought to be a snap to install it, particularly on something this old.
Well, maybe not. Notebooks, proprietary as they are, can be very difficult to install software on. This one gave me considerable grief early on with SuSE because there was a problem with PCMCIA on initial boot after installation.
Lest anyone think what is described in the following worked like this off the starting blocks - this was my 3rd attempt. For me, it's always the 3rd attempt that works: the first time, I learn what is going on; the second time, I figure out what really makes sense; and the third time is pretty much what I really wanted in the first place.
Preparations for Installation
Also:
The first part of this article introduced the basic idea of using an inexpensive USB stick instead of a laptop for home/work demands. This part turns the bare-bones script (a glorified wrapper around tar) into a robust, conveniently usable day-to-day solution.
One of the main drawbacks of the basic version is that one has to explicitly state the maximum age of files (--days x option), and this is the first thing that can/will go wrong - especially when synchronising only once in a while. Imagine taking your last batch of files home, going on vacation and then coming back after some weeks. The question then is 'When was it I last synced my files from work ... 3 days or ... wait a minute ... could be 5 ... better make it 7?' This is tedious, therefore a timestamping mechanism is implemented.
The second aspect that complicates usage is that directories can be synchronised as they grow, but not as they shrink - and this is again tedious to keep track of. A simple script to automate this process is presented.
The remainder of this article contains brief discussions of further add-ons. These can be used as-is, but the intention is rather to illustrate that a usable solution requires neither expensive hardware nor complicated programs.
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