Re: USB install with portability, persistence, and Xen with a GUI
"... My objective is to run a collection of virtual systems that are stored in
arbitrary places from a Xen/Knoppix installation that is on a USB hard
drive plugged into a variety of computers. I would like the whole filesystem
to be persistent rather than just the home directory tree ..."
Hello Jesse,
I have been using for quite a while a very similar setup in order to
replace my heavy working laptop environment with a light weight USB dongle.
My objectives was to Boot a robust host OS with virtualisation support
on multiple computers from a NTFS formatted USB key so the USB key
can also be used as a "traditional" storage device and store multiple virtual machine.
I selected Knoppix as the host OS because of it's great hardware auto-detection.
I use grub4dos as the boot loader to start Knoppix from the ISO file stored on the
NTFS partition so the setup only requires a few files to be stored on the USB dongle to work.
I added a custom compressed loop-back (also stored on the USB dongle next to the iso file)
which is loaded at boot time to "patch" live the official Knoppix release with my customization
which includes vmware workstation (but other virtualisation engines could be used).
I have two modes: Ramdisk and persistence mode (partition overlay) for Knoppix to boot
so the host OS can also be customized if needed but the default ramdisk option is preferred
as there is no previous history which could compromise a successful boot process.
So as a summary, at the end of my customized Knoppix boot, vmware starts
the virtual environment of my choice which could be some flavor of Windows
being freed from hardware dependencies.
My two cents,
Gilles
FYI: this exact same setup also runs on a local network from PXE.
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