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

[Ottavio Caruso <ottavio2006-usenet2012%yahoo.com@localhost>]

On 6 April 2014 23:14, Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost> wrote:
> 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).

Well, that's exactly what is expected: you lend a USB pen to 10 year
old and you don't want him/her to scr*w up with the pen because next
week you're going to hand it over to some other kid. You just want to
give a presentation of your project and that's it.

Besides, a traditional read/write installed system on a USB2 pendrive
is damn slow. A compressed filesystem like squash or a more
old-fashioned cloop is way faster.

This doesn't rule out that you can partition the usb drive and make
some part of the fs permanent. Once could mount /usr/pkg and /home on
separate partition and have a fully functional hybrid installation.

Knoppix and Casper (Ubuntu) use FUSE to back up changes to a permanent
location at some intervals. Damn Small Linux uses a clever, poorman's
script to back up /home and /etc to a file and restore them upon boot.

-- 
Ottavio