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

[Capricorny]

I must admit, that's a bit of a shock.

Of course there have been a few upgrades to that version, but.. On the other hand, come on, it's still not three years old

user@live-debian:/media/sda8$ uname -a
Linux live-debian 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.60-1+deb7u1 x86_64 GNU/Linux
user@live-debian:/media/sda8$

The basic philosophy, their "paradigm", is worse, though. How can anyone hit on the idea to use partitions for persistent storage? Even on a small USB stick you would like to be able to place some files there too, outside of the image file. And the raw-copy-iso "installation" method makes it impossible to tweak parameters, while the creation of more user-friendly install versions is delegated to unetbootin et al. I'm not very fond of that bunch, they have been less than reliable to me.

There are a lot of comical aspects, too. Using gparted to partition the rest of the USB stick after raw copy of the ISO image, it is equipped with a label that Debian truthfully copies to the device name on automount of the stick.
Resulting in a mount point that the OS is often not able to handle correctly parsing commands, creating errors&problems.

So I have had to manually unmount, and remount using the more prosaic /media/sdb2. Problems gone.

[Capricorny]

The Debian-Live approach also provides some good opportunities. First and foremost, the very easy remastering makes it efficient to run with no persistent store quite often. For instance, upon remastering, I just start without the store, and the image I run is union-mounted with the persistence file and copied&compressed. Then I have to boot something else to copy the new squashfs image in place, but that's all that has to be done outside the system.

Boot the new image without persistence, create a new persistence file.
For further adaptations, the new persistence file can be mounted in an instance run under kvm, programs can be added and settings tweaked for an eventual new remastering.

Storing the series of squashfs-compressed images, one can always go back in this process if needed.