Re: Making a localized, educational live-usb version of Netbsd? Possible, and is worth it?

[Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost>]

Eric Haszlakiewicz <erh%nimenees.com@localhost> writes:

> On April 6, 2014 1:52:29 PM EDT, Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost> 
> wrote:
>>It is relevant and this is exactly what constitutes major difference
>>when you work on such a project. You don't need to think how to handle
>>various things that require data persistency even if temporal one.
>>Your /tmp and /var are writable from the very beginning as if you are
>>using HDD. This alone makes USB pen drive a lot different to place it
>>into another category.
>
> Well, you clearly have a different idea of what a "live usb"
> system is than I do. I expected it to be something that could be
> booted repeatedly and have the exact same environment each time
> (i.e. no changes allowed to the usb storage), while you seem to
> be talking about just a normal install on a usb stick.

If we want to use this definition, I'd argue that "live USB" in your
sense is wrong approach to attack this particular problem.
"No changes allowed" is rather strange for an educational platform,
it means that you cannot save your work across reboots (so that you
could revisit it in a week or in a month, for instance) except on
another medium (which is, most probably, another USB pen drive).

>>Even if you decide to install some additional software, you don't need
>>to create the image from scratch, with USB pen drive you follow the
>>usual
>>routine.
>
> How the image is created seems to me like something that is not
> at all relevant to how it is used, and I imagine that 99% of the
> time will be people *using* a pre-made image, not creating their
> own.

Sure, for end user it doesn't matter. One of original questions was
about how to create such images and if a "newbie" can do this.

> The times that I've used livecd images the grab-it-and-go
> feature has been the biggest reason for using it, so I don't
> care what steps might have been needed to create it.

I don't think that grab-it-and-go requires that it provides exactly
the same environment across reboots. Perhaps, the latter has its use,
but I'm not sure it is needed that often.


-- 
HE CE3OH...