Re: portable Debian

[Mark Allums <mark@allums.com>]

On 2/15/2010 10:36 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> > Some "live" distributions have "USB environments" (I call them) which allow
> > you to create a bootable image complete with a good-sized /home/ space for
> > data on a USB thumb drive.  An example is Knoppix
> > (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/), which has a utility just for that
> > purpose.  Knoppix is basically Debian; it is binary compatible.  It uses the
> > LXDE environment, which is KDE 3, but with GTK instead of Qt.
>
> The problem with most (all?) of them is that they're based on the idea
> of a read-only partition plus a separate partition that will hold
> the changes.
>
> In many cases, this is perfectly fine, but I hate re-installing so
> I want to be able to keep updating my "Debian Live" via "aptitude
> upgrade" for the foreseeable future (say 10 years).


Knoppix does something like this, yes, but I have updated it and 
installed to it, and the changes were persistent.  I don't recall any 
problem during the era that I used it (though there were other issues; 
nothing is free.)  At any rate, a 16 GB USB flash drive is less than 
US$40.00 and that is enough space even for a swap partition, should one 
be required.  Whether you use a "live" distribution or roll your own, it 
should be possible to do what OP wants to do without too much fuss.

Mark Allums