You will need to set the root password in Knoppix before you can start remastering. To do so, run the following commands:

  $ su
  # passwd

Remastering Knoppix requires the use of a hard drive. The hard drive must meet the following requirements:

  1. The partition on the drive must be formatted 
     with a Linux filesystem.

  2. The partition must have at least 3 GB of 
     free space.  In addition, if you have less than
     1 GB of ram, you will need to create a swap file
     on the partition.  It is safe to estimate that
     you will need at the very least 4.5 GB of free
     disk space in order to remaster.

If you need to create or alter partitions on your hard drive, use Knoppix's QTParted program to do so.

Once you have a partiton that meets the above requirements, go to your root shell and mount it with read / write permissions with the following command:

  # mount -o rw /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

Replace hda1 with the partition and mount point you are using. For simplicity, these documents will use hda1.

Remastering Knoppix requires about 1 GB of ram. You can check the ammount of total RAM on your system by using the free command and adding up the total column for both the Mem and Swap rows. For example:

  # free -m
  ...(OUTPUT.  Numbers are in terms of MB)...

If your total memory (swap + mem) is greater or equal to 1024(MB), you are good to go. If not, you will need to run the following commands in order to create a swapfile to increase your memory to 1 GB:

  # dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs 1M count 750
  # mkswap swapfile
  # swapon swapfile

The dd command creates a 750 MB file full of zeroes. You are advised to change the number 750 to whatever size swapfile you need. The mkswap command formats that file with the swap filesystem. Finally, the swapon command starts using the newly created swapfile.

You now need to copy the complete filesystem to the disk so that you can edit it. In order to do this, you will need to run the following commands:

  # cd /mnt/hda1
  # mkdir source
  # mkdir master
  # mkdir source/KNOPPIX
  # cp -Rp /KNOPPIX/* source/KNOPPIX

The cp command will take a long time to complete since it is copying 2 GB of data.