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.)
Dell PowerEdge R630 8SFF 2.6Ghz 20-Core 128GB Mem 2x10G+2x1G NIC 2x750W PSU
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Supermicro 4U 36 Bay Storage Server 2.2Ghz 16-C 128GB 1x1280W Rails TrueNAS ZFS
$716.98
Intel XEON E5-2699 V3 CPU PROCESSOR 18 CORE 2.30GHZ 45MB L3 CACHE 145W SR1XD
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Dell PowerEdge R740XD Server | 2x Gold 6140 | 128GB | H730P | 8x 3.5" HDD Tray
$2589.00
Intel Xeon Gold 6126 2.6 GHz LGA 3647 Server CPU Processor SR3B3
$17.99
Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 2.4GHz 35MB 14-Core 120W LGA2011-3 SR2N7
$17.99
Intel Xeon Gold 6140 SR3AX 2.3GHz 18-Core Processor CPU
$44.99
Intel Xeon Gold 6138 2.0GHz 27.5MB 20-Core 125W LGA3647 SR3B5
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INTEL XEON GOLD 6148 PROCESSOR | 2.40GHZ | SR3B6
$99.99
HP Workstation Z640 2x Xeon E5-2623V4 32GB Ram Dual 256GB SSD K420 Linux GA
$234.98