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Re: debian live on eeepc 701, how whould you do it?



Ben Armstrong <synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca> writes:

> Since 2007 I have successfully run Debian on two of these systems (no
> live system, no squashfs).  LXDE is lightweight and is what I
> recommend to people wishing to save space, though you could start with
> gnome-core and add a few extras if you like, and still have enough
> room for your data (but a 4G SD card would help here).

+1; that's what I did when I ran a 701.

> Certainly you could run a live system, but I don't know if the
> benefits (squashfs saving space) are enough

Some numbers: using custom kludges (like excluding all documentation), I
can get an image down from 1.1GiB to 208MiB.  That's an extra 918MiB (or
23% of an 4GB SSD) of space for porn.

> to outweigh the down side (after a number of upgrades, your
> persistence snapshot will grow, so to enjoy space savings again you
> need to rebuild your live image, and of course the live system takes
> longer to boot and consumes more RAM).

I had the idea of implementing persistence by running mksquashfs on the
cow directory, writing the result to live/<timestamp>.squashfs.  That'd
give you good compression on the persistence changes, such that you
could keep doing that for a year or two, then copy them all to a grunt
machine and roll a new "master" filesystem.squashfs.

Obviously the mksquashfs would be very slow, even on a cow... my idea
was to normally run a volatile boot, but (say) once a week, to
persistent boot, apt-get update and dist-upgrade, roll a
<timestamp>.squashfs, then boot back into volatile mode.

...of course, this approach needs live-boot to support morphix-style
merging of multiple live-media, which IIRC the 3.x series will support.


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