Unionfs and making

[vanstrien]

I'm just in the process of customizing Knoppix to use on a project at work. I was wondering if anyone has tried to use unionfs for both managing the remastering process and also for the live CD?

Unionfs will let you mount two or more directories in the same place. You can then set precedence for which directory has takes on additions or deletions.

I was thinking of using this as part of remastering so I wouldn't have to unpack the CD. A R/W directory would be overlaid /KNOPPIX. Any changes using Apt, etc would have those files marked as removed, but of course the Cd would not be changed. Then the new iso would be made out of the mapped directory, and thus my changes would make it into the final version. Hopefully this would have the added side benefit that should a new KNOPPIX come out then I might be able to upgrade without redoing my actions. (although in reality any changes to apt configuration files would invalidate that). I could probably do a few layers and make it so that changes to bookmarks, desktop walllpaper, etc could be overlayed over chagnes to the FS that I put through manually.

The other use could be in the CD itself, so that a running version could make change to normall read-only directories. IE a user could add and remove stuff at will while KNOPPIX is running.

[Ghandalfar]

I strongly believe that relaying same fs over different knoppixes will not work.

[fabinho]

I'm interested too in a Knoppix with unionfs!

But I don't know from where to begin...

Well, ZenLinux, a Debian based live CD, uses unionfs:
http://zenlinux.org

And SAM, a Mandrake basede live CD, uses it too:
http://sam.hipsurfer.com/


I couldn't understand how do they work, but you'll find some clues there.


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[probono]

The recent Kanotix works very well with klik://unionfs - this allows you to use apt-get from Live CD, since it makes the whole filesystem writeable. The upcoming Knoppix 3.8 will have it, too.

Greetings,
probono

[fabinho]

The recent Kanotix works very well with klik://unionfs - this allows you to use apt-get from Live CD, since it makes the whole filesystem writeable. The upcoming Knoppix 3.8 will have it, too.

Greetings,
probono

Hi, Probono!

I tried to install unionfs with Klik but it seems to work only with Kanotix... But, in any way, Klik downloaded to my home dir a unionfs.ko module file. Does it work fine with Knoppix 3.6.9 Kernel?

Another question: if everything is ok with the module, how to use unionfs on an Knoppix remaster. I mean: how to activate it? Is it possible to burn/write the changes to an multisession CD-ROM (live the new Puppy Linux)?

Thanks a lot!!!

Fabio.


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[knopx4me]

Thanks for the inf. I have downloaded Kanotex. It is great distro and looks promissing. I installed Unionfs which made my system writable. I did ap-get update and installed several packages. However, when I rebooted my PC I lost everything I made because the system was vitually writable. I second Fabio, what should we do to create a live CD of the remastered Kanotex in order to make the changes permenant?

[deutschemonte]

I am not big on programming but I'll give my ideas and see what you think.

Have any of you seen Morphix? Last I knew they had a way to write the live cd to a multisession disk and then add morphs to another session. Morphix looked for these other sessions when it booted.

Now if Knoppix could do something similar but maybe have all the debian packages you would like installed in this second, third, etc session it could be great. But it would probably cause it to take longer to boot because the packages would essentially be individually installed at every boot.

Personally, I would like to be able to store settings on my web server and be able to access them via FTP with a sweet boot option. This way I can have MY desktop/settings with no reguard to where I am or what version I am using. But I realize that not many people have web servers so this would not be a great mass market idea.