Refracta Snapshots for Debian Live Systems

**utu** · 04-17-2014, 06:00 PM

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There is an interesting development effort called Refracta which may
interest some of the more advanced Knoppix forum members. This effort
is concerned with the progression of the iso of a live system with
persistence to a subsequent iso which embodies the combination of an
original iso with the contents of a persistence element. Refracta has
three cardinal elements: refractasnapshot, refracta2usb & refractainstall.

Quoting from a Refracta README:

refracta2usb:
Creates a live-USB from a live-CD iso file or from a running
live system.

refractainstaller:
Installs a running live CD or USB to hard drive, copying any additions
or changes that were made during the live session.

refractasnapshot:
Makes a bootable live-CD image from your installed system, copying any
additions or changes you've made to the system.

Refracta purports to be broadly applicable to most any Debian or Debian-like
live system. There is some correlation with Debian.Live, where it seems
that Debian.Live focuses more on using a live system to achieve an hdd install,
whereas Refracta focuses more on persistence and the progression of isos of
a live system from one level of development to another through 'snapshots'.
In the Refracta clique, initial isos are referred-to as 'firmware'.

This may be where the action is these days that we used to call re-mastering.
I know that Debian.Live uses squashfs as part of its magic, so a lot of this
may be familiar stuff to those who are fond of remastering, and have had
some hankering to experiment with squashfs as a cloop replacement.

I've not seen the Refracta code, so these are my impressions from auditing
Refracta and Debian.Live forums and reading a few .deb README files.

For further info see also the following

http://sourceforge.net/projects/refracta/
http://refracta.freeforums.org/refracta-f14.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-live...4/threads.html