El Thu, Apr 15, 2004 at 08:57:50PM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow escribió:
> One thing I have seen in various mails in this thread (here too) I
> completly disagree with:
>
> Things like 'that is only used when booting from the LiveCD'.
Well, I think the main problem with this is that I'm always thinking
that the LiveCD is a system that always has to do the hardware
detection, autoconfigure some services and is limited by the use of
a read-only root filesytem that makes some programs unusable, but a HD
installation does not have those limitations.
> One main design trick of Debix is that all the live-cd specials are
> contained _just_ in the initial ramdisk (+ some files on the cd for
> space reasons). The ramdisk finds (when I get it finished) the CD (usb
> stick, CF card, harddisk install, whatever medium) and sets that up as
> a writeable snapshot (COW to ram) with device-mapper.
I agree on having all the specials on the ramdisk.
My proposal about config files only for the LiveCD is because I'm
always thinking about a read-only root filesystem, while you think
about it as a writable one.
I like the idea of writable snapshots, but I've never used LVM nor the
device-mapper and I don't know which requiriments or limitations does
it have ... can you give me some pointers to documentation?
> After that there is absolutley no difference between that snapshot
> device and any other _writable_ block device and I don't intend to
> artificially introduce any. You can HD install the image and it would
> still be volatile just like on CD. If changes should persist the
> initrd has to be changed (or better just a bootparameter). This could
> even be switched on/off at runtime at any moment. The HD installed
> live-cd should keep behaving just like the live-cd with all its
> autoconfig magic until the user chooses to change it.
I don't see any problem on that design if the user can install the
system and turn it into an standard CDD *image* when booting from HD.
> Preferably the live-cd autoconfig magic should keep working even with
> apt-get upgrade or dist-upgrade. In fact that should update the
> live-cd packages to newest versions and not revert the system to a
> normal debian.
In my proposal all specific LiveCD code does not conflict or replaces
standard tools, so there must be no problem on upgrades.
And of course I really like the idea of reusing and enhacing current
Debian tools to support LiveCD and standard systems with the same
packages, that should be the preferred aproach when possible.
> PS: Changing between volatile and persistent is realy great to test
> sid upgrades. Turn on volatile, upgrade, if it fails reboot. If it
> works go back to persistent.
I'm going to checkout debix now to test all this, i like the idea, but
at first it seems too resource hungry for a LiveCD ...
Greetings,
Sergio.
--
Sergio Talens-Oliag <sto@debian.org> <http://people.debian.org/~sto/>
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