> Message: 1 > Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 22:18:08 +1300 > From: Simon Geard <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: Subject: Re: shareable distro? > To: [email protected] > Message-ID: <[email protected]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 14:54 +0000, Hops Error, Line 21, alcoholi.c > wrote: >> Just this, from bitter experience: build everything so it boots from a >> USB stick first, and then write just your filesystem to a non-bootable >> CD second. > > In fact, not all that much reason to worry about CD boot these days. 1GB > or 2GB flash drives are dirt-cheap, easier to deal with, and can be used > on machines with no CD/DVD drive (netbooks, for example). > > Simon.
Too true. CDs have the advantage of being read-only, and thus indespensable for back-ups. But all CDs have this advantage, not just livecds. If having a read-only copy of some software you want to keep in a certain state is an attractive option, you can use mkisofs to make a cd image of just that software and burn it onto CD or DVD or (a neat trick I found on accident) burn an ext2 or ext3 filesystem image directly onto a DVD- linux WILL actually read it. If you do end up loading things from CD, you might want to look at either unionfs or aufs too. It acts like a transparancy sheet you can put over a read-only filesystem image, that you can color on with markers and white-out. It's nice being able to delete and write stuff to a temporary copy of a CD without actually burning a new one. You can save the transparancies so that the next time you boot your computer, your CD or DVD will be in exactly the same state it was in. http://www.filesystems.org/project-unionfs.html http://aufs.sourceforge.net/ One other thing: package managers are awesome. The two I can reccomend are rpm, and a combination of slackware's pkgtools and checkinstall. That way you can install software from source or grab a ready-made package from the internet, and then make a package that automatically gets reinstalled when you boot up your computer, without having to burn a new CD or DVD. The difference between this and saving transparencies, is that it's closer to being read-only. If you go the RPM route and do everything from scratch, it's simpler to use --nodeps a lot than it is to try to build your own database. The plus side, is that it's really easy to turn most book chapters directly into spec files. And if I didn't just get the digest I wouldn't have repeated all that stuff about the virtues of using an initrd :p -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
