Re: Live File System
On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Ari Makela wrote:
> I'm interested in contributing to the developement of the installation
> of Debian GNU/Linux. When this was discussed in debian-devel I came to
> think that I could work with live file system. A bootable CD with a
> bootable floppy for those systems that cannot boot from a CD. It would
> be a good thing for fixing systems and for installing Debian.
>
> It was pointed out that this has been discussed before, probably six
> months earlier, and that I should ask from debian-cd.
>
> So, is someone working with this? If yes, I'd be willing to help, if
> not I'd be interested to start working with it.
AFAIK, there's no one working on this at the moment, but we would welcome any
kind of contribution.
There are, as I see it, several possibilities for a "live" filesystem. The
first thing would be to decide what's our best option, and work from there.
I think of two possible (orthogonal) categories:
read-only read/write
+-----------------------------------------
size: small | current rescue disk
medium |
large |
This is about the functionality as seen from the user, _not_ yet how to
achieve it.
Size: small: barely enough tools to do some basic system administration;
intended to be single-user (namely root)
medium: basic multi-user without fancy stuff, no X etc. Something
like the current base system (probably a little bit larger)
large: Full-featured system, with X, mp3-player(!! ;-), gimp, gnome
etc. Something like on the Corel CD (well, I've only seen the
directory listing ;-)
Writable: no: Users can take a look, but not change anything big. Some
pre-defined limited number of config files (hostname, X config,
etc) copied at startup from DOS/Win partition; /home mounted
from DOS/Win partition (UMSDOS or ext2 loopback)
yes: Users can change anything they want, (un)install packages
etc.
To me, a relatively large read/write system seems the best option. Allows new
users to fully exploit Debian's possibilities without repartitioning and
installing. When they want to use the system "for real", repartitioning and
copying is all that's needed.
I hope everyone can agree with this "fundamental analysis"; if not please
speak up now.
Then the question of "how". Let's say first that we do not intend to use much
of the user's harddisk space. So it's (at least at this time) not an option to
simply prepare a large ext2 loopback and copy it to the harddisk and run from
there in read/write.
This means that there's got to be some kind of hybrid CD - harddisk system,
with the users' changes residing on the harddisk. At the moment I see two
options for that:
- An small ext2 loopback on harddisk with lots of symlinks to a fs
on the CD (may be ext2 loopback, but I think RockRidge is lots faster)
- Use an Overlay filesystem, details on
http://home.att.net/~artnaseef/ovlfs/ovlfs.html
Any other options?
I really like the last one, but that's quite unmaintained and may/will need
some development to work with 2.2 kernels and large amounts of files. Maybe
you can help out there.
Are other distros doing anything that might be worth considering?
Regards,
Anne Bezemer
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