Prerequisites

emKnoppix is basically Knoppix and Debian. So familiarity with these two are expected. If you are interested in hacking emKnoppix you have to know how Knoppix works and must be able to successfully remaster Knoppix.

Setup

you will need 2 directories, BUILD and TEST. BUILD for storing the uncompressed file systems and temporary space for building KNOPPIX disk images. TEST is for testing emKnoppix. Once you have successfully built a KNOPPIX image you can boot to it using grub for testing. This also means that you do not need to be an embedded developer to benefit from emKnoppix. All you need is just a PC.

BUILD directory can be any where with enough file space, some thing like 1G free is adequate. The file system has to be mounted with options rw. Other wise you will get errors while chroting. The The uncompressed file system is what finally appears in KNOPPIX image file. Any change you want in final image has to be made here and then converted to compressed image. The procedure is fully explained in Knoppix remastering howto. Basically it involves chrooting to the file system and making modifications.After the modifications are done, run the cdwrite.sh script and you get the KNOPPIX file. Boot using that for testing.

Testing

The TEST directory has to be in the root of the partition, also /etc should not be present in that partition. This is required since we need to cerate our own /etc in the root of the file system, for use of emKnoppix. Apart from /etc, a /boot and /KNOPPIX also needs to be created. The file system image created before has to be copied into /KNOPPIX directory. kernel and miniroot.gz has to be copied to /boot and any files in /etc that will be changed (for example network/interfaces) also has to be copied to /etc.

After copying edit the /etc/grub.conf to include these lines

title emKnoppix
        root=(hd0,5)
        kernel=(hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-xfs
        initrd=(hd0,5)/boot/miniroot.gz

Where (hd0,5) is the partition where the TEST is mounted. After this you can reboot to boot into your newly created emKnoppix