Do live Debian images have a future?

[Bulkley]

I've used live-CDs for trouble shooting and for occasionally to discover how someone else solved a problem. I also have some specialty tools on live-CD. Clonezilla, Gparted, Kaspersky, SuperGrub and more.

[ruffwoof]

Take a full install, add in live-boot and squashfs-tools, create a /live folder and add a empty filesystem.squashfs (mkdir p;mksquashfs p filesystem.squashfs;rmdir p) to that folder, set the partition label to persistence and add a persitence.conf file to the root directory containing / union (space between, new line after) ... and you can boot that as though a frugal install. The main filesystem is in effect seen as being the 'save' (persistence) holding/space.

Live boot choices include booting persistence persistence-read-only ... which means no changes are stored ... so in effect you're booting your system where it all runs in ram, with any changes being preserved in ram (so runs a lot quicker compared to writing changes to disk) and you can test things out knowing that a reboot has none of the changes being recorded. Great for testing purposes.

I boot mostly that way all the time, but where /home is outside so all changes under that tree are preserved (browser history, user configuration changes ...etc.). Only when updates are apparent do I reboot to full-install type rw mode and apply those changes before rebooting frugally again.

From that setup, its easy to take a snapshot of the full install and have that as the filesystem.squashfs content (cd /live;mksquashfs / filesystem.squashfs -e live) ... which along with initrd and vmlinuz (three files) in effect is a portable live type set (just have to exclude certain files that associate it to a particular device/kit such as /etc/X11/xorg.conf, /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent* ....etc).

Forward direction there are problems with live-boot as that uses aufs. So in Stretch that has moved away from aufs you'd have to apt-get install aufs-dkms and add a union=aufs kernel boot parameter for booting frugally.

Long backgrounding ... to ask whether if live images were withdrawn, would that also mean live-boot and squashfs-tools (mksquashfs, unsquashfs ...etc). packages being pulled from the main repository? And what about the modified initrd boot file(s) that support live booting? If they were continued to be supported then third party provision of live-cd's would be relatively easy. Whilst support of just that limited set would be much less of a burden for those upon which live was 'dumped'.

[milomak]

btw where can i download these latest live isos?

[Bulkley]

This might be what you want. Live install images