On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 01:46:37PM +0200, Dennis Wecker wrote:
> i'm searching for a cd like knoppix but just with a minimal X and gcc
> compiler. and the cd shoud not write any files to my hdd. any ideas?
I haven't seen anything like this supported officially, but I have before
created my own almost-live Debian CD.. If you're looking for a ready-made
image I can't help you (on a modem now), but I may still have the scripts
I wrote to generate the almost-live ISO image..
Basically, I had a 40 meg loopback filesystem which would be kept on a
vfat partition in /debian/vdisk.img which held several files from /etc as
well as the contents of /home. If you had one of these with the proper
signature file, it gave you some small measure of persistant work space.
If you didn't have one, it'd create one for you. =)
I can't seem to find the script now, but I am in the process of a (very
slow) upgrade/reinstall of everything and not all of my files are online
yet. If you're interested I'll look to see if I still have the ISO
builder scripts once /dev/hdg is back online later today. It shouldn't
take more than half an hour to make it work with woody or sid - there are
probably a number of things still hardcoded, but since then Debian's
gotten tools for building chrooted images which may help generalize the
process a bit.
If you're curious, I used to use this at school. I could not get away
with a Linux installation in this basically windows shop, but the faculty
were all technologically inept enough that nobody noticed a 40 meg file
laying around in a directory which was not on the desktop. Given that it
was only 40 meg, the one faculty member who knew what I was up to didn't
mind, and the whole thing gave me ready access to the software I needed.
The image was about 400 megs and contained X11 with a modest wmaker/gnome
setup, ssh, the X11 vncviewer, epic4 and a script, lynx, netscape4 (I'd
use mozilla today), vim, gimp, gcc, cvs, and a few other things. It was
very cramped on the vdisk.img at times (netscape took up half the space
for its cache) but it generally worked well enough. I'm not really sure
how to make it useful without writing to disk at all, but I was after a
functional system rather than a rescue or demo CD.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@bluecherry.net> Do not write in this space
<cas> well there ya go. say something stupid in irc and have it
immortalised forever in someone's .sig file
Attachment:
pgpXJUwTLxyXj.pgp
Description: PGP signature