I miss the persistence that was available in 5.x and earlier. Basically, I don't want to have to copy the DVD to an HD partition - I just want a blob of data and config changes to be available. I don't want to have to remaster the disc and store the data to the disc, because it should be able to change with use.

Ideally, I could persist to a USB stick, which would accompany the DVD, but say when running Knoppix as a virtual host on a PC, I'd just as soon mount the ISO and boot that, than dedicate another 4G of HD to _that_ virtual config (when I can use the ISO - or a real disc - for multiple VMs).

Creating a filesystem image isn't a problem, though I'm at a bit of a loss as to how I might manually mount it without chuffing everything

# mount host media
mount /media/sda1
# create ~1.5G image file on already mounted host media
dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/sda1/knoppix-data.img bs=1M count=1500
# format it
mke2fs /media/sda1/knoppix-data.img

# create mountpoint and mount the image
mkdir /KNOPPIX-DATA
mount -o loop /media/sda1/knoppix-data.img /KNOPPIX-DATA
# here's where I'm fuzzy - this will solidly hose the aufs stacked filesystem
mount -t aufs -o "prepend:/KNOPPIX-DATA=rw:/ramdisk=ro,noplink" unionfs /UNIONFS
#(br, and append both seem to act the same, killing the fs stack as well)

To reiterate: I don't want to have to install the entire Knoppix distro to HD or a USB stick, I just want to store the persistent data to one and continue to boot from disc, much as I was able to in 5.x. Yea, I got it that the aufs content won't necessarily port nice to the next release.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.