Re: Debian 11 Live USB with persistence?
tomas@tuxteam.de [2021-08-19 09:11:00] wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 10:24:27PM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> > I wanted to do something exactly like that some months ago.
>> > What I ended up doing is using a normal Debian installation
>> > with an overlay file system mounted over the root.
>> FWIW, you can do simpler and just use a normal Debian install on
>> a USB key. That saves the trouble of the overlay filesystem.
>> And if you want to be able to revert easily to the initial state, then
>> you can probably get a similar result using an LVM snapshot.
> There's still some charm to Santiago's approach: the device is (nearly?)
> read-only after install.
I'm not sure I see the difference: the LVM snapshot can also be tagged
as read-only.
In both cases (LVM snapshot or overlayfs) the overall system is not
read-only. That's of course indispensable for the "persistence"
property, but it's also a disadvantage compared to a Debian Live system
in that the /var subtree will sometimes be modified "gratuitously".
[ I usually try to reduce this aspect by using a tmpfs for /var/cache
and also by moving /var/lib/apt/lists to /var/cache (with a symlink),
but there are various files that can get written depending on the
packages you have installed. ]
Stefan
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