Project: Merging Knoppix and Debian Live to get 64 bit Knoppix derivative?

[Capricorny]

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:

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.

[utu]

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.

I concur in this assessment. Another feature of Knoppix that is unique & valuable, not to be lost in adapting to Debian-Live.

[dwstarke]

Is an iso available? TIA

[Capricorny]

Is an iso available? TIA

Actually, the basic idea in Debian-Live seems to be that you roll your own. I have used the standard 7.6 LXDE Live ISO from July as starting point, but I may try to create a new ISO from scratch myself.
I could use the package list from my current running system - but the three most important additions for me, VMware Workstation, Oracle XE 11g and SqlDeveloper, are not available as .deb packages. The two last were converted from .rpm by alien.

The somewhat fundamentalist Debian approach also shows up in hardware problems. I couldn't get Wifi to work on a Asus N53S laptop, but found out that I could fix it by downloading and installing the firmware-iwlwifi package. It works perfectly, but I have to start it manually! With non-free components, wireless is disabled by default!!! While there are no such problems with more politically correct drivers.