Project: Merging Knoppix and Debian Live to get 64 bit Knoppix derivative?

[dwstarke]

Would this be a one-off or would you maintain and improve a separate distro? Would you take each successive Knoppix and Debiam Live release and "Re-Knoppify" it or will you do that once and fork off of Knoppix?

[Capricorny]

Would this be a one-off or would you maintain and improve a separate distro? Would you take each successive Knoppix and Debiam Live release and "Re-Knoppify" it or will you do that once and fork off of Knoppix?

I really don't know what may turn out to be practical. If the modifications are mostly made in the init, it should be possible to adapt to new Debian releases fairly simply, as long as they don't make huge changes to the default init setup. In Knoppix, quite a few users have routinely patched the init for different purposes, like using squashfs, and there has usually not been a lot of new challenges with a new release. So, "Re-Knoppification" could at best reduce to a few patches. In which case it can be routinely carried out and patches posted. But it could also involve a lot of work, in which case it might be too much work to carry out with every new release. For me, even, say, a 64 bit "Knoppification" every third release would help a lot, as one can (in many cases) easily run more updated OS versions in VMs. I wouldn't call it a fork in any case, just a modest Knoppix-inspired derivative of Debian Live.

[Capricorny]

After having worked with Debian Live (7.6) LXDE for a short while, I have some initial observations:

* CD++ sized starting point is much more practical than I thought. A 900 MB squashfs image contains basic system, LibreOffice, Gimp and Iceweasel, in standard Debian versions (that's the basic philosophy) + a few accessories. No bloat, but quite useful out of the box.

* System setup is awkward, but usable. You can use the "iso/hybrid" image, which can be bare-bones copied onto USB media cp <iso.image> /dev/sdb. Then a read-only iso file system is created, so there is no direct configuration possible. But you can use e.g. gparted to create a partition on the rest of the stick, and set up a persistence loop file, live-rw, there. With boot parameter persistence, this loop image will be union-mounted and used just like knoppix-data.img in Knoppix. You may also use a separate home image.

* While I have been using and reastering Knoppix for years without an ordinary hard disk install, the methods are geared towards working from such an install. Which is no big deal to make, I use a 12 GB partition, it's more than enough. I ran qemu-kvm from that to setup the USB stick, using apt-get and synaptic in the VM.

* 64 bits and nobloat makes a bit of a difference - not very much, but it just feels more right. (And I need it for R, Oracle XEand VMware Workstation)

Debian Live work is very much geared towards making tools, so a partial Knoppification may not be that hard. First step for me will be setting up a complete system, then trying to remaster it.