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 R730 Server 2x E5-2690v4 2.6GHz =28 Cores 128GB H730 4xRJ45
$458.00
HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9 8SFF Server - E5-2698 v3 - 32Cores - 128GB Ram - 1TB HDD
$299.00
HP ProLiant DL360 Gen9 Server 2x E5-2620v4 2.1GHz =16 Cores 32GB P440AR 4xRJ45
$220.00
DELL PowerEdge R630 8SFF Server 2x E5-2680v4 2.4GHz =28 Cores 128GB H730 4xRJ45
$379.00
Dell R630 Server 2x E5-2620 V4 2.1GHz =16 Cores 128GB DDR4 1x 960GB 2x 1G 2x 10G
$210.00
Dell Poweredge R210 II Server Xeon E3-1220 v2 3.1ghz Quad Core / NoRam / 1x Tray
$69.99
HP ProLiant DL360 G9 Server 2x Xeon E5-2690 V3 24 Cores 2.6GHz P440ar 128GB DDR4
$249.99
Dell Poweredge R220 Server Xeon E3-1270 v3 3.5ghz Quad Core / 16gb / 1x Tray
$139.99
Dell R730xd 26 Port SFF 2x E5-2697v4 36-Cores H730 128GB Server 2x SFP 10G ENT
$490.00
DELL PowerEdge R730XD Server 2x E5-2697v4 2.3GHz =36 Cores 32GB H730 4xRJ45
$378.00