[Discuss] Persistent mode with Mandriva live CD

[John Blomfield]

John Blomfield wrote:
> Murray Strome wrote:
>> John Blomfield wrote:
>>> Murray Strome wrote:
>>>> I wonder if anyone knows how to make the Mandriva live CD 
>>>> persistent. This is easy with Knoppix, difficult with Kubuntu, and 
>>>> I have been unable to find anything that would tell me how to do it 
>>>> with Mandriva.  Has anyone discovered an easy to do this?
>>>>
>>>> The reason I am trying Mandriva is that it is the distribution I 
>>>> have found that actually detects my wireless card and lets me 
>>>> configure it to access my secure wireless network without any 
>>>> difficulty at all.
>>>>
>>>> I don't want to actually install in on my laptop until I can be 
>>>> certain that I can find a way to do it that does not touch the MBR 
>>>> (I would want to boot from either CD or USB Flash Drive using the 
>>>> built in Boot Manager).
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for any help.
>>>>
>>> I am not sure I understand what you are doing with the Live CD?  
>>> When you run a Live CD it does not do anything to your MBR or 
>>> harddrives although it might use a swap partition if it finds one 
>>> that exists. I simply installs Linux in RAM and then accesses the 
>>> various programs on the CD and brings them into RAM as required. 
>>> i.e. uses your CD like a hard drive.  The only way a Live CD will 
>>> affect anything on your HD is if you click on the "Install" icon!  
>>> As I mentioned before the Live CD instance of Linux will access a 
>>> Pen Drive if its plugged in.
>>>
>>> John Blomfield
>> The problem with the Live CD is that I cannot install or update 
>> programs.  With Knoppix, for example, I can use a pen drive to 
>> AUTOMATICALLY save any changes I make to the system (such as adding 
>> software, saving documents to /home/<user>, changing configurations, 
>> etc.    I would like to do the same for a live distribution that 
>> supports my wireless card.
>> Of course, I can save documents, etc. on USB devices OK with any of 
>> the distributions, but that doesn't get me upgrades and I have to 
>> redo my configurations every time I reboot.
>> Kubuntu has a method, which is very complicated -- but since I 
>> haven't gotten my wireless card to work with it, that doesn't do me 
>> any good.
>>
>> Mandriva has a way of installing nicely onto a USB drive that does 
>> not affect anything related to Windows, but I would need an installed 
>> version of it somewhere (which I don't have right now, and won't be 
>> able to get going before I have to go out of town tomorrow). I think 
>> Fedora also has such a method, again requiring an installed version 
>> somewhere.
>>
>> I was hoping to find something a bit easier.
>> Murray
>>
> Which Distro do you have installed,  if any???
>
> John
I am beginning to think that what you are looking for is impossible at 
the present although a quick google yields threads of hackers trying to 
achieve something similar.  Saving data to a pen drive is no problem but 
updating packages and saving the results for a future sessions I think 
is conceptually a problem.  This is because even if you burn a Live CD 
iso image onto re-writable media such as a pen drive the iso is still a 
single file compressed image "splashfs.img" containing the file system 
and packages.  To update these packages you would need some means of 
patching this image file with the upgrades.  The tools to do this are 
not on the Live CD assuming they exist - hence the hacker's interest!

Live CD's are only intended to allow potential uses to view a distro 
before committing to a full install and for the occasional traveling 
user to use his own OS that is free from spyware in Cyber Cafes etc.  
You could achieve your objective by doing a full install on a pen drive, 
being very careful to keep the number of packages to a minimum.  Then 
you could either boot it from the BIOS if it allows that or boot into it 
with a boot CD.  You would not need an existing Linux installation to do 
this full install, just a Live CD.  You would need to be comfortable 
going through the install steps manually and not let the installation 
program take too much control particularly when it comes to partitioning 
and formating the pen drive.

John Blomfield
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