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

[Eric Haszlakiewicz <erh%nimenees.com@localhost>]

On April 6, 2014 1:52:29 PM EDT, Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost> 
wrote:
>Eric Haszlakiewicz <erh%nimenees.com@localhost> writes:
>
>> On April 6, 2014 7:33:34 AM EDT, Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost>
>wrote:
>>>Ottavio Caruso <ottavio2006-usenet2012%yahoo.com@localhost> writes:
>>>
>>>> On 5 April 2014 16:56, Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost> wrote:
>>>>> LiveCD is of no use to people who have no functional CD drive
>>>>> or no CD drive at all. This is why it is the wrong approach.
>>>>
>>>> By livecd I meant any system which is not installed to local hard
>>>disk
>>>> and resets itself after reboot. It doesn't have to boot from a CD,
>it
>>>> can boot from any removable media, the principle is the same.
>>>
>>>Live CD is significantly different from live USB pen drive and SD
>card,
>>>it has to be in a separate category because building it is based on
>>>completely different principle. Same for live DVD.
>>
>> How is it any different? In both cases you create a boot image
>> that you don't change, and boot it on a machine whose existing
>> installation you don't change. That seems pretty similar to me.
>> The fact that in one case the media physically prevents you from
>modifying it seems largely irrelevant.
>
>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.

>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.  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.

Eric