Playing with WFTL Knoppix

Once the system has booted, you can start playing with Knoppix. If your system doesn't have a lot of memory, you can speed things up a bit right off the bat by letting Knoppix create a swap file in your Windows partition. This won't hurt anything on your system. All it does is allow Linux to use some of your disk space as though it were real memory. That is what we mean by swap space.

Doing this is easy. Click on KDE's program launcher (the big K in the lower left-hand corner), and move your cursor up to the KNOPPIX entry in the menu. There are five submenus here. One of them is Configure; under that menu, you'll see an entry labeled SWAP file configuration (Figure 2-2).

Figure 2-2. The Configure menu allows you to create a SWAP file on your hard disk.

Click this option, and you'll get a nice little warning that you are about to create a file named knoppix.swp on your existing DOS (Windows) partition. Click Yes, after which you'll be asked for the size of your swap file in megabytes. What qualifies as a good size depends on how much real memory you already have, but taking the default is probably a good bet.