[Quantian-general] Apache and Samba

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Robert,

On 22 December 2005 at 21:06, Robert Kopp wrote:
| My comments may seem somewhat peculiar to those more
| experienced with Quantian (or even Knoppix). I was
| somewhat surprised that I was able to start Apache,
| but then I navigated to /var/www and discovered that I
| was able to edit index.html as root. I'm sure it
| didn't get melted into the plastic. What's going on?

Do a 'df' or look at 'ls -l /' and some of the subdirectories: Certain
directories (/etc/, /home, /var, ...) are actually copied to the ramdisk and
linked back. That way you can alter them in the running session ... but the
change will be gone when you reboot again from the DVD.

As that is suboptimal, there are options to e.g. save user configurations,
printer config, network configs, desktop layout, ... which when set up under
KDE tend to get saved under ~/.kde anyway.  To make this work, a smallish
file is typically save on a writeable partition (so it can't be NTFS as that
is read-only; FAT32 or VFAT or any Linux partition are fine; you can also use
floppies or USB drives) and you can then point to the config file on the next
reboot.  

For tricks like this, some Knoppix books may be helpful. There is 'Knoppix
Hacks' at O'Reilly, and there is also a free pdf manual called 'Knowing
Knoppix'.

| I had a similar experience when editing smb.conf, and
| by changing the name of the workgroup made a
| connection with a Windows computer. I hope this
| indicated that you can, in general, edit the white
| files, and that the changes are preserved between
| reboots. I would still like to install Quantian to the
| hard drive, but it is surprisingly versatile as is.

Of course, once you've installed to hd, changes are yours to keep and will
not vanish.  For system wide changes (like the samba and apache config) I am
not entirely sure what to recommend when running off the iso or dvd.  As a
shortcut I would just write a shell script I'd re-execute after fetching it
from a local web store.  But as your question is generic for all Knoppix
derivatives, there may be a more powerful answer somewhere. If someone knows,
please post back!

Dirk

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison