Last fall, I had to start running a pure 64 bit OS as the native OS on my pcs, and Debian 7.6 live, adapted in a "Knoppix" way and remastered several times, has served me very well. But, typically for the pure-Debian bunch, so much was changed wrt live booting and persistence in Debian 8.0.0 that I gave up upgrading. Furthermore, Oracle XE 11g has not survived the remasterings, and I have for now given up on making it work again. (It once did.)
So I am in a sort of squeeze for the moment, not being able to upgrade the OS, and without a working Oracle version. But VMware Workstation 10 works very well, and I have turned to running Knoppix 7.X in virtual machines to solve the problems coused by the native OS version. Once installed, that works extremely well. There are a few inherent problems, though. To avoid them, use Ryumbekes adapted miniroots (see threads in News), and create a new ISO image after remastering. There may also be problems increasing the persistent store, so I strongly suggest that to be set at 6+ GB from the beginning.
Even though it should in principle be possible, I have not been able to run with 64 bits kernel in VMs - but for this kind of use, it's not really all-important: Computationally heavy tasks are of course run natively.
I'm running a typical development system in Knoppix 7.X VM, with Oracle XE 10g, Eclipse EE, JBoss/Tomcat, Maven etc. It is in fact quite similar to Windows virtual machines (VDIs) we use for the same purpose at work, only much better, faster and more versatile. So whenever I can, I work in Knoppix. With just 8-10 GB total size, it's also very handy to take around, fits "everywhere" nowadays. And it's easy to make different variants to cater for different versions of components and tools.
With the upcoming Knoppix release, I will try to create a VM as soon as possible, and probably use that for a lot of daily tasks - instead of taking the trouble to upgrade the "native" OS. (No more ordinary hard disk installs for me, just live versions with persistent store.)
H261-Z61 2U 24SFF AMD Server 8x EPYC 7551 256-Cores 256GB RAM 8x25G NIC 2x2200W
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CSE-118 Supermicro 1U 3x GPU Server 2.1Ghz 16-C 128GB CX353A 2x1600W PSU Rails
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CSE-118 Supermicro 1U GPU Server 2.6Ghz 20-C 256GB 2x Nvidia K40 GPU 2x1600W PSU
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Dell R730xd 12LFF 2.6Ghz 20-C 128GB H730 2x10G+2x1G NIC 2x1100W 12x Trays Rails
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Dell PowerEdge R720XD Xeon E5-2680 V2 2.8GHz 20 Cores 256GB RAM 12x4TB
$510.00
DELL PowerEdge R730 Server 2x E5-2690v3 2.6GHz =24 Cores 32GB H730 4xRJ45
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Dell PowerEdge R730XD 28 Core Server 2X Xeon E5-2680 V4 H730 128GB RAM No HDD
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SuperMicro Server 505-2 Intel Atom 2.4GHz 8GB RAM SYS-5018A-FTN4 1U Rackmount
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Dell PowerEdge R430 3.5 1U 2x E5-2690 v3 2.6ghz 24-Cores 256gb 4x Trays 2x 550w
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HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9 16SFF 2x E5-2680v4 2.4GHz =28 Cores 64GB P840 4xRJ45
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