persistence with KNOPPIX 7.0.4

[bytebucket]

I'm new to KNOPPIX and have been reading through "KNOPPIX Hacks, Second Ed." by Kyle Rankin. The book is some years old now so I would expect some differences.

One thing that interested me was the idea of persistent KNOPPIX, i.e. being able to boot off the DVD and customize it as needed, system settings, installing apps, and then saving all the changes to a thumb drive. The idea being you could later boot off the DVD with the thumb drive plugged in and it would start up with your customizations/changes. To me being able to do this would make exploring KNOPPIX much more rewarding since what you do would actually last and not have to be redone each time (other than installing to the hard drive but I'm coming at it from wanting to just boot off the disc without touching the machine's hard drive).

The book talks about using the saveconfig script and the knoppix-mkimage script. It says saveconfig saves some settings, but knoppix-mkimage is more thorough saving everything in /ramdisk IIRC.

The problem is, with KNOPPIX 7.0.4 I couldn't find either command as documented in the book. I figured things moved and had posted on the Super User site and someone suggested using "locate saveconfig". I did that and it found it, but when I ran it it just spit out a list of items and exited. There was no man page and I had no luck in figuring out how it worked. Besides, the knoppix-mkimage sounds better anyway, but locate didn't find that.

So.... all that to say, what is the current recommended approach for achieving persistence with KNOPPIX? I'm guessing things have just changed, but would like to know how its supposed to be done now?

[Werner P. Schulz]

Nowadays Knoppix uses persistent memory within a flash disk installation.

Knoppix menu => Knoppix => Install KNOPPIX to flash disk

If you uses for example an USB stick of 8 GB size you'll get at the end of the installation the ability to create a persistent memory (minimal 200 MB, maximal 4 GB).

If you use an USB stick of 16 GB size you can use the remaining space of about 8 GB to save other things like datas from a crashed Windows.

[bytebucket]

Thanks for the reply! I'll give that a try and see how it works.

Is there a way, though, to achieve persistence while still booting off a CD/DVD?

[Captainkorky]

i'm interested in knowing more about persistence as well from a flashed usb perspective. It seems that things like browser history, cookies etc are saved. Where are these saved?

[LX-1000]

If you choose to save personal data then Knoppix creates an image file knoppix-data.img in the /KNOPPIX directory on the USB drive and saves there all your installed programs, settings and personal data.