Project: Merging Knoppix and Debian Live to get 64 bit Knoppix derivative?
Some years ago, I merged Knoppix 6.4.4 and Debian Live to get a pure 64 bit Knoppix version. It was done by a lot of handwork and some guesswork, and 64 bit busybox then had kind of persistent bug preventing it from working quite correctly in 64 bit Knoppix init, but the result worked fine in practice. When I later looked into upgrading this merger, I found that Knoppix and Debian Live had then grown apart, so the perspective was doing an increasing amount of handwork over and over again with each release. For my needs, it has been easier to use standard Knoppix w/64 bit kernel, and on demand occasionally run a pure 64 bit distro.
Looking into the Debian live init at that time, I simply thought Klaus K's approach was so much better. Therefore, there was never a question for me about the starting point: Standard Knoppix was to be updated with 64 bits Debian. It worked quite well, but it became too hard to repeat.
Debian Live has moved very far since then, and today I wonder if a better approach might be to "knoppify" Debian Live, swapping its init with a Knoppix derivative. I already routinely use squashfs in Knoppix instead of cloop in remastering, so adapting to the Debian Live environment should be no great problem today.
Any views on this?
With an upcoming major Knoppix update, quite a few of us will probably work with remastering, modifying init etc anyway. Therefore, I think it may be worthwhile to consider a 64 bit version at the same time. Unless Klaus K surprises us all with a 64 bit Knoppix version. But I haven't seen any hints of that.
First impressions of Debian Live
After having worked with Debian Live (7.6) LXDE for a short while, I have some initial observations:
* CD++ sized starting point is much more practical than I thought. A 900 MB squashfs image contains basic system, LibreOffice, Gimp and Iceweasel, in standard Debian versions (that's the basic philosophy) + a few accessories. No bloat, but quite useful out of the box.
* System setup is awkward, but usable. You can use the "iso/hybrid" image, which can be bare-bones copied onto USB media cp <iso.image> /dev/sdb. Then a read-only iso file system is created, so there is no direct configuration possible. But you can use e.g. gparted to create a partition on the rest of the stick, and set up a persistence loop file, live-rw, there. With boot parameter persistence, this loop image will be union-mounted and used just like knoppix-data.img in Knoppix. You may also use a separate home image.
* While I have been using and reastering Knoppix for years without an ordinary hard disk install, the methods are geared towards working from such an install. Which is no big deal to make, I use a 12 GB partition, it's more than enough. I ran qemu-kvm from that to setup the USB stick, using apt-get and synaptic in the VM.
* 64 bits and nobloat makes a bit of a difference - not very much, but it just feels more right. (And I need it for R, Oracle XEand VMware Workstation)
Debian Live work is very much geared towards making tools, so a partial Knoppification may not be that hard. First step for me will be setting up a complete system, then trying to remaster it.
Report of (some kind of) progress with Debian Live
I am quite a bit relieved to report that I have managed to coerce Debian Live into working quite similarly to a Knoppix Poor Man's Install.
Which means that I can use it with some degree of efficiency.
I byte-copied the ISO image onto a USB stick, created an ext2 partition on the rest of that stick, and created a live-rw file image there with an ext2 file system on it. Did some installs on it, it worked quite fine under qemu-kvm (necessarily 64 bit version).
So far, so good, but what about Poor Man's installs? I copied the /live directory from the ISO file onto a FAT32 partition (/dev/sda1), and the live-rw file onto an ext3 partition (/dev/sda8 ). Then I created a /boot/deb760_live directory on my boot partition (here /dev/sda6), copied vmlinuz and initrd.img from the live-directory there, and modified old legacy grub's menu.lst with an entry for Debian Live:
Code:
title Debian 7.6 64 bits live sda1
root(hd0,5)
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/deb760_live/vmlinuz boot=live config quiet splash initrd=(hd0,5)/boot/deb760_live/initrd.img persistence keyboard-layouts=no
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/deb760_live/initrd.img
And it worked! Debian complained it didn't find the persistence file at /dev/sda2 as it expected, but got around to mounting it from /dev/sda8 anyway. It passed by a file with the same name at /dev/sda1 - that's fine with me. Documentation says that several such files may be mounted, provided they are in separate directories and have different, compatible, mount points defined.
One of the great attractions with Knoppix is that you can always do a remastering from the version you use. Debian Live takes an almost diametrically opposite approach, making the creation of new images extremely simple, but with little interest in using them and remastering them - it seems to be more designed as a vehicle for Debian installs. We'll see how this works out.
The iso-hybrid image doesn't work on USB in many BIOSes, and unetbootin which is recommended as an alternative for creating bootable sticks, crashed for me. So I'll rather work around that, using Knoppix methods, I think.