Before You Begin

Before you begin the whole remastering process that will eventually end with the unveiling of Myppix before the world, you need to perform a step that looks completely unrelated at first. Trust me, though — it will all become clear by the end of this chapter.

Configuring Your World

Start by booting using your favorite Knoppix disk, the one that you're soon going to use as a basis for Myppix. Once Knoppix has finished booting, change things to your liking. For instance, here are a few things you might do whenever you start out with a brand-new Knoppix:

• Change the fonts: See "Beautifying Knoppix" in Chapter 1. Set your font choices everywhere, so that all your programs, and even KDE itself, look nice, crisp, and readable.

• Set up your printers: Using the advice given in the section "Setting Up Printers" in Chapter 1, you can set up all of the printers you might use with your Knoppix — your home printer(s), your office printer, your friends' printers — ahead of time.

• Choose your text editor: If your text editor of choice is vim, for example, you probably have a .vimrc config file (and perhaps a .gvimrc file for those times when you use vim with a GUI). Copy those vim files into Knoppix. Do you have any scripts that reside in your ~/.vim directory? You'll want to copy them, too, so you'll be ready to work with any text file.

• Set up other key system files: There are other important config files that you may want to have available whenever your custom Knoppix distro boots. Here are some examples: ~/.bashrc (aliases galore!), ~/.gnupg (be careful with this one — remember that it contains your private GnuPG keys!), ~/.mozilla (actually the location of your Firefox bookmarks, settings, and extensions), and ~/.openoffice.org. Again, copy any important or customized files and directories to your running instance of Knoppix.

• Set your KDE preferences: Your ~/.kde directory contains several important files that control how your KDE apps work. If you're in a hurry, you could just copy the entire ~/.kde/share/config directory from your usual Linux machine to the computer that's running Knoppix. If you want to go the slow ‘n’ steady route, once Knoppix is running, make all your changes by using the KDE Control Center and the Preferences found in the KDE programs you run.

  For instance, you may have very specific settings for KMail (and the rest of the Kontact suite, including KOrganizer and KAddressBook), Konqueror (both in file manager and Web browser mode), and Konsole (white text on a black background, perhaps?). It just won't be your distro until those apps are set up the way you like them.

• Copy your ~/bin directory: If you're always writing (and finding) new scripts that make your life easier, you undoubtedly follow good Linux practice and keep them in ~/bin, so you certainly want to copy that directory, too.

• Rearrange your KDE panel: When you first start KDE, it creates a default panel (see Figure 12-1) at the bottom of your screen.

  
  Figure 12-1: The KDE default panel, just begging for improvement.

You can change it, too. For example, you can banish the Window List and the big Home, Konsole, and OpenOffice icons by right-clicking each and selecting Remove. (You can get them back, if you like.) Right-click on the panel, and choose Panel Menu → Add to Panel, or just Add to Panel (it changes depending on the location of your right-click). Inside Add to Panel, select Applet → Quick Launcher. This adds a collection of smaller icons, including Home and Konsole. Three others appear by default: Control Center, Help, and KWrite. (Because Help is accessible through the K menu, you can right-click the little icon and select Remove to clear it off your panel.) Then rightclick in the Quick Launcher and select Add Application → Office → OpenOffice.org → OpenOffice, followed by Add Application → Editors → GVim Text Editor. That puts small OpenOffice.org and GVim Text Editor icons into Quick Launcher. Now your panel should look more like the one shown in Figure 12-2.

Figure 12-2: A much cleaner, more efficient panel

Caution 

If you've been paying attention, you've noticed that many of these files are very personal. Some of them contain unencrypted passwords, and others would enable someone to impersonate you online. The whole point of Myppix is that it's a distro made just for you, which means that you shouldn't be handing out copies of your Myppix willy-nilly to everyone you meet. The only person running Myppix should be you!

If you want to make any other changes, now is the time. Open the preferences, options, and settings of your favorite programs and configure everything to fit your needs. Close all your programs when you've finished. Done? OK, on to the next step: saving all your changes for eventual inclusion in Myppix!

Saving Those Changes

How to save your settings for later re-use was explained earlier in the book, and now it's time to put it to practice. From the KNOPPIX menu select → Configure → Save KNOPPIX Configuration. The Create KNOPPIX Configuration Archive window appears (see Figure 12-3).

Figure 12-3: Which config files do you want to save?

If you want to preserve all the changes you just made, make sure that you check both Personal Configuration and Other System Configuration. If you left some files or data on the Desktop, check All Files on the Desktop as well. I don't recommend that you check Network settings or Graphics subsystem settings because you'll want those to change with the machine and network on which you're going to use Myppix. Click OK, and then choose where you want the config files to be saved (see Figure 12-4).

Figure 12-4: Pick where you want to save your configuration files.

You can choose a floppy, but that's so 2002. A USB flash drive (/mnt/uba1) will work, and so will a hard drive (/mnt/hda2 on my computer), as long as you can easily access the files once you begin the remastering process. Make your selection and click OK. Knoppix shows you a progress bar as it saves everything, and then displays a window indicating success. Click OK to close it, and verify that the files are where you can get to them in just a few minutes.

For example, there could be two files on your USB flash drive: configs.tbz and knoppix. sh. configs.tbz consist of changed files from /etc and /home/knoppix, which is exactly what you want.

That's it for settings and configurations. Soon you'll use the files you just created.