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.)
For Lenovo IdeaPad 3 15IIL05 15IML05 15ADA05 15ARE05 Palmrest Keyboard Touchpad
$59.25
NEW Palmrest Keyboard For Lenovo Thinkpad E15 Gen 2 20T8 20T9 Black 5M10W64513
$80.99
New For Lenovo Yoga 7 14IRL8 Palmrest Keyboard 5CB1L40794 82YL0005US 82YL0006US
$147.95
Lenovo ThinkPad T480 14" Touchscreen Laptop i5 256GB NVMe 16GB RAM Win 11 Pro
$249.00
Lenovo - LOQ 15.6" Gaming Laptop FHD - Intel Core i5-13420H with 8GB Memory -...
$629.99
Lenovo 100e Chromebook Laptop 2nd Gen | 11.6" HD | MTK 1.7GHz | 4GB RAM | 32GB
$34.99
Lenovo Ideapad 1i 15.6" FHD Notebook Intel Core i5-1235U 8GB RAM 256GB SSD
$349.99
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano 13" Touchscreen 2K i7-1180G7 16GB/256GB Win 10 Pro
$535.00
Lenovo ThinkPad 14" Laptop Computer Core i7 16GB RAM 256GB SSD Windows 10 Pro
$229.99
Lenovo Yoga C940 2-in-1 Laptop, 14" FHD 400nit, i7-1065G7, 12GB, 256GB SSD
$472.49