>Why do you use a Live CD Linux for this and not just a Debian Squeeze or
>what?
To have a simple and well known starting point to recreate in 64-bits. But I'll try out starting from a minimal 64-bits Debian, yes.
And "Knoppixify" that.
>GRML comes in a 32- *and* in a 64-bit flavor. But then the biggest GRML
>form factor is a CD. The Knoppix DVD can hold quite a lot more packages
>which would have to be built for 64-bit in order for a full 64-bit linux.
Actually, having recently purged ca 2GB packages from Knoppix DVD during remastering, it's not that attractive to start out recreating the DVD. And of course I don't have to compile all the packages - though even if I had to, that could be automated.
>> This was the main reason to add the 64 bit kernel since 64 bit Linux
>> installations on servers are very usual nowadays. The performance
>> increase having a 64 bit userland is not that big to make up for the
>> work of building and testing two Knoppix releases.
>Now thats a reason I consider important for a Live Linux CD.
>Okay, no body stops anybody from installing Knoppix to harddisk / SSD and
>using it as a permanent operating system, but I would use a regular Debian
>GNU/Linux installation for that. I usually would reinstall such a
>permanent Linux often. I did a reinstallation when I switched to 64-bit,
>but my 32-bit laptops use the same Debian linux installation that I just
>copied over.
I tried to explicitly state that this thread should not be about why/whether, but as the postings demonstrate the need for explanation: I'm running Knoppix from poor man's installs, and being a Linux user since 1994, I think I know a bit about installations and what I am doing. Updating and remastering is an important part of this, and running from USB disks, we don't even have to copy the system over to a new machine, if we don't want to. With USB3/SSD this becomes even more efficient. Frequent updates are easily accomodated, but I have found that for most of my use, it may be enough updating following new Knoppix releases, plus of course the occasional package upgrade. It is also very much easier and safer to update by just copying the few Knoppix files onto a partition than copying file systems. (Unless those reside in loop-mounted files, in which case the system is already halfway knoppixified.)
As a typical use case, I must have native Win7 available on a laptop, but normally I don't want to use it, I'll rather run Win7 in a VM. Then I shrink the NTFS partition as much as possible, create a huge ext3/4 partition (plus evt a small one for /boot). The virtual machines are placed on the huge partition, a Knoppix package w/4GB persistent store is dropped to NTFS, and set as the default boot option, mounting the huge partition on /store. With Vmware workstation in the cloop image, this gets me very efficient multibooting of different systems. But I need native 64-bits to run 64-bits guests efficiently, one important case for 64-bits Knoppix. With, for example, 16 GB RAM, it is easy to run several VMs at once, which is very handy for a number of development uses.