On Wed,10.Feb.10, 18:56:49, Albretch Mueller wrote: > ~ > I get those "what are you really trying to do?" questions all the > time. Let me start by explaining to you, why I do things in a certain > way It is not rare that when given the *real* problem a different solution is found which is easier/more efficient/..., that's why I'm asking. > I love live CDs and use them all the time. I carry one of them, my > pen drive and/or my external micro drive almost everywhere in one of > my pockets. I am not the kind of person that could be carrying a > laptop around if I have to carry something I would rather carry a good > book Makes sense. > live CDs actually mount "/" in "/ramdisk" (or similarly) so any work > you do you may lose since it is not saved in an actual drive > ~ > I am trying to tax RAM the possibly least I can, because I usually > have more than one long running program needing resources in my home > computer(s) > ~ > When I get to some place with a free x86 seat (I teach), sometimes > you can restart/reboot it, but sometimes you can not. When you can, > usually you have no way of knowing which drives/partitions may > correspond to your micro drive AFAICT removable storage is always mounted in /media/<label> if it has a label. Or you can add a custom fstab to the Live CD with a LABEL= entry. My first thought for the use case you are implying would be to install a complete Debian on a pen drive. Without bothering too much I was able to install stable (including X, but no applications) in less than 1 GB without any compression (the filesystem of a Live CD is usually compressed). You would need some more for applications and all X drivers, but I think it should fit in 2 GB and the smallest pen drives I have seen lately are at least 4 GB. This means a reasonable amount of additional space. For older computers which won't boot from USB you can use a CD containing only /boot (I'm doing this on the same machine running from the USB stick). That would fit on a business-card size CD if you can find one (or even better a CD-RW). If you just need some additional apps on the Live CD consider building your own image (package live-helper), it's not very difficult. I'm sure other suggestions can come up if you provide more details about your use case. GNU/Linux and especially Debian is extremely flexible. Regards, Andrei -- Offtopic discussions among Debian users and developers: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-offtopic
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature