Q I have burned a Kanotix ISO, and it booted quite happily on my second system. I really like the look and feel of it as well as all the abundance of software installed. But my question is, how do I install it to a hard disk? Booting from the CD is kind of slow, and I really want to learn more about this awesome OS. I reviewed the docs and they said something about a ToHd=/dev/hdXX command line parameter, but I couldn't get it to work. The desktop I am using has a single ATA/100 HDD (/dev/hda) and a DVD burner (dev/hdc). Oh, and can you also recommend a good distro for an older laptop (P3 500 Dell 256MB RAM) that will support PCMCIA wireless? I have tried Fedora 2 an 3, SUSE 9.1 and three different PCMCIA wireless cards (Buffalo, D-Link and Linksys) with no luck.
A First you need to prepare your hard disk. To start the partitioning tool, press Alt+F2 and type:
sudo qtparted
Here you can resize existing partitions and create new ones in the space you create. You will need at least two partitions, for / and swap. Your / partition needs to be at least 3GB. Now save your changes, exit QtParted, press Alt+F2 again and type:
sudo kanotix-installer
Select the Configure Installation option and follow the instructions to have everything installed in a few minutes. If you need to do any further configuration after installation, go into the Kanotix section of the KDE menu. The installer did not set up networking on our test system, but it only took a couple of clicks in here to get back online. Now to answer your second question. Slackware and Debian are generally considered good choices for older hardware. The wireless configuration is largely independent of the distribution, although some distros have better graphical configuration tools than others. Are these 11Mbps or 54Mbps cards that you've tried? Direct support for the latter can be patchy, and you may need to use NdisWrapper and the Windows drivers. See http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net for more information.