OK, I now have some suspicion that I am definitely using things wrong. I have been playing around with various cheatcodes to try and determine if there is a relationship between the home and myconfig ones.
When I use home=scan myconfig=scan various things stop working, when compared to just home=scan alone. The list of non-functional things (so far) is:
- Starting QTParted, does not start at all! No error, just bouncy cursor for a bit, and then nothing. Most other applications start.
- The search box in Iceweasel, does not work. It just does nothing.
- When unmounting any mounted disk, I an error about /etc being full.
- Moving things to Trash (deleting them) does not work; things are just lost.

Is this some bug or an obscure feature?

I am doing this with 5.1.1CD

I made the same mistake, although there was nothing in O'Reilly's Knoppix Pocket Reference about this. I tried NO myconf, and home=scan. I had previously created a bin under /home/knoppix, and rebooted. It wasn't displayed consequently. When I tried only home=scan, it showed up fine. I also had a number of errors attempting to overwrite firefox subdirectories in my home directory at first, but not with only home=scan.

Also, I had tried home=/dev/sda1/knoppix.img. The persistent home wasn't picked up. When you are successful, you should see a text options screen, indicating that image has been found in /media/sda1.

Let me know if this works for you.

I am now using just home=scan and no myconfig, as that way I can get the most stuff to work. Although today I am having problems getting OOo to start up.

OK, I just tried OOwriter for the first time in knoppix. It prompted me through registration, and started up ok. I was able to open a spreadsheet from OOo in Windows. Can you tell me exactly what errors(s) you got trying to start OOo? Does anyone else have any ideas?

That's the thing: no errors, just bouncy cursor for a while (longer than what I would consider normal), and then just nothing.
I am quite certain that it is something I did setting up KDE. I changed like all the window dressing, the taskbar, etc., etc. I just have no idea what I did.
I backed up my whole home (I can post whatever parts you think might be relevant), but I am going back to starting things from scratch.

Unfortunately, I still have no idea what the relationship is between home and myconfig cheatcodes; which was the whole point of my original post. Is the stuff in one included in the other? Is there a point in using both? And most importantly, should the screen= and *sync= cheatcodes be preserved in either home or myconfig?

First, I had trouble with combining myconf and home. When I went to just home, it seems to work ok. I also found one peculiarity with home. You can change the size on your device allocated to the knoppix image, knoppix.img. I tried the whole partition, and then 200M. (it's a 256M Memorex TravelDrive) I could only get it working with the default of 100M. I haven't found a need for myconf once I started using home. I haven't been using screen or the sync cheats myself, so I don't know if they're preserved.

Now about Open Office, why don't you boot knoppix from the cd with no options, then fire up OO. If it's successful, then you may have done something with your configuration. You didn't install knoppix on your hard drive, did you? I can't imagine any changes to KDE that would muck up Open Office.

I definitely messed something up, perhaps unintentionally. I run Knoppix only from the CD, no HD install.
When I boot with no home (or any other cheats) everything is happy. When I boot with home, then things start to fall apart. Like I said OOo does not start up at all (but it certainly does try for a very long time); if I try to run Weasel (whatever the FF replacement is called), then I actually get an error from KDE, something about the KDE launcher not able to find the executable or some such.
I almost suspect an issue with KDE not Knoppix, however, I have no idea how to proceed to figure out what happened.

If you can figure out the changes you made to KDE, then maybe we could get down to what went wrong, and how to undo it. Did you edit the KDE menu entries for OO and Iceweasel?

The command for Iceweasel is 'iceweasel %u'
The command for OOo is 'soffice private:factory/swriter'

I went in to edit Iceweasel and OOo at the same time - bad move! I tried opening OOo and nothing happened. I tried again and it seemed that my machine froze. I rebooted and things were ok. I was able to run both the weasel and office. Try the commands above and let me know what happens.

You wrote:
When I boot with home, then things start to fall apart. Like I said OOo does not start up at all (but it certainly does try for a very long time); if I try to run Weasel (whatever the FF replacement is called), then I actually get an error from KDE, something about the KDE launcher not able to find the executable or some such.
I almost suspect an issue with KDE not Knoppix, however, I have no idea how to proceed to figure out what happened.

I played around a lot with the aesthetics: background image, all window dressings, taskbar size, etc. Man, I wish I knew more about KDE internals.


No, those I left completely alone. I did remove some of the buttons from the taskbar, though.


Got mine to freeze up today too.

Iceweasel seems to be working fine, today. OOo started up after some struggle, and then it complained that I do not have enough space left in my home!?!? Changing the dressings in KDE, does that take up a lot of space?

Also, when Knoppix boots, right after it tries to "load up" home, it reports a whole bunches of assorted errors. It flashes by too fast, is this logged someplace?

Hey, thanx for all the help. If this is too much hassle, then I have no problem just working around it. If it helps someone fix some bug then I am very glad to do this, but don't waste too much of your personal time on this.
Thanx!