Some years ago, I merged Knoppix 6.4.4 and Debian Live to get a pure 64 bit Knoppix version. It was done by a lot of handwork and some guesswork, and 64 bit busybox then had kind of persistent bug preventing it from working quite correctly in 64 bit Knoppix init, but the result worked fine in practice. When I later looked into upgrading this merger, I found that Knoppix and Debian Live had then grown apart, so the perspective was doing an increasing amount of handwork over and over again with each release. For my needs, it has been easier to use standard Knoppix w/64 bit kernel, and on demand occasionally run a pure 64 bit distro.

Looking into the Debian live init at that time, I simply thought Klaus K's approach was so much better. Therefore, there was never a question for me about the starting point: Standard Knoppix was to be updated with 64 bits Debian. It worked quite well, but it became too hard to repeat.

Debian Live has moved very far since then, and today I wonder if a better approach might be to "knoppify" Debian Live, swapping its init with a Knoppix derivative. I already routinely use squashfs in Knoppix instead of cloop in remastering, so adapting to the Debian Live environment should be no great problem today.

Any views on this?

With an upcoming major Knoppix update, quite a few of us will probably work with remastering, modifying init etc anyway. Therefore, I think it may be worthwhile to consider a 64 bit version at the same time. Unless Klaus K surprises us all with a 64 bit Knoppix version. But I haven't seen any hints of that.