A $19 re-mastering 'appliance'
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This is a status report on my experience with an adaptation of Werner's kn-recombine.
kn-recombine is an excellent and generalized algorithm for re-mastering Knoppix LiveUSBs.
My adaptation seeks to further simplify the use of kn-recombine specific to my particular
use of the algorithm. My end use is re-mastering 2 Gb LiveCD-size LiveUSbs with persistence.
I choose not to utilize the ntfs fields of the Windows 7 capability but rather to perform
all the necessary manipulations via external USBs attached to my laptop. Recent cost
reductions and speed increases of USB chips has now made this choice inexpensive & viable.
For $19 one can now create a re-mastering 'appliance' for CD-size Knoppix Flash Drives.
I use a 16 Gb USB card with a Class 10 rating. This seems to be 15 Gb formatted Fat32
initially. I use Gparted to re-partition this to one 1.84 Gb Fat32 partition, and then
create a second partition with the remainder and format that to ext3. I clone my current
2 Gb LiveUSB and its persistence on the Fat32 partition and install Werner's kn-recombine
on the ext3 partition. 1.84 Gb is the net size of my 2 Gb LiveUSBs.
Working with the 16 Gb unit's LiveUSB I find Werner's algorithm will re-master my LiveUSB
in about 41 minutes. In this 'appliance' use of Werner's algorithm, when it comes time to
write to a new flash-disk, the first prompt requests the location of the re-mastered
KNOPPIX file. Don't anticipate (as I did at first) the prompt to ask rather for the
location of the flash-disk to be modified. With a minor re-do of Werner's algorithm,
I have hopes that perhaps the partition location dialog may be further simplified, and
even possibly omitted in an 'appliance' adaptation of the algorithm.
As a bonus, the appliance serves as a backup, it may be noted. Also, my 2 Gb LiveUSBs
are on Class 2 USB cards; I would expect Classes less than 10 may be much too slow
for the remastering use of such a 16 Gb 'appliance'.
Some notes on kn-recombine
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My UNIONFS is about 2.3 Gb. The new stuff in KNOPPIX-DATA is probably
about about 500 Mb. Compressed KNOPPIX grows from 722 to 953 Mb in
39 minutes during re-mastering with kn-recombine.
The rsync phase of remastering with kn-recombine takes about 22 minutes
with my class 10 LiveUSB, 2.10 Ghz dual cpus & 32-bit kernel.
This is about the same as the result of cp -r UNIONFS /media/sdc2/knx.
Perhaps the rsync phase can be speeded up by first pre-loading recombine*
by expanding the un-re-mastered compressed KNOPPIX into that space before
finishing it off with an rsync againts UNIONFS. Otherwise, rsync is never
getting any benefit out of working on small differences.
I am also wondering, as another alternative to kn-recombine, if it might
be possible to just compress UNIONFS directly to compressed KNOPPIX at
/media/sdc2/knx without mirroring it first to recombine*.
* recombine is a folder (or directory) in /media/sdc2/knx in the
statements above.
A note about the 'lame duck':
'
The 'lame duck' may have the potential of a self-contained
re-mastering capability.
It doesn't need external storage nor another OS to complete
the re-mastering. After the kn-recombine rsync phase,
dismount the 'duck and reboot IT with the option 'noimage'
and proceed with the kn-recombine write operation.
This may require a slight tweak of kn-recombine to allow this,
but it should work since none of the files being re-arranged
are in use on a noimage reboot.
