Hi Everyone

I like live CD/DVDs but the data persistence can be a bit of an issue. I think a live CD would be a great way to deploy an application to a customer as there is no install, however asking them to save to a USB key or file server, open up other issues.

I believe there are some live distros such as geexbox that can have their live CD removed after the boot. I was thinking it might be neat to have a live CD that could write user changes to another CD creating a child live CD with those changes.

Does anyone see any serious flaws with this? I am assuming that I will need to allocate a lot of space but with a live DVD I don't see this being a problem.

If you happen to know of a live CD that will work after it's CD is removed could you list it please?

-Patrick

Many of the live sort of distros used to have a way to boot to ram or I think about three other terms used that allowed that. At some boot option you select it to load the distro to ram, usually when done the cd drive opens up.

Already there are some live cd's that can be burned to a cd-rw where the changes can be kept on the cd-rw. Think puppy could do that or some of that type.

I guess we'd need to know more about this application to decide if this might work on if there might be a more practical solution.

The most easy would be to send out a $4 flash drive I'd think but not sure of your market.

Might consider something like Susestudio where you can create a computer and let people access it from a web page.

You could host a server or even pay for a virtual server too.

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Hi Jefro

Thanks for answering my post

Thanks for the Puppy tip too. Yes CD-RW is pretty cool but having a bunch of plain old CD/DVDs would also give the option of rolling back changes and would create backups in the process. It would be messy to have CDs everywhere but it would be safe in terms of data loss.

The application pertains to controlling scientific instruments and will likely be just a console. I have been wrestling with this for a very long time as I don't like GUI programming much but the application would benefit from one.

The plan at this minute, is to have data collected in a console Linux live Distro and sent to a server. The data could then be viewed once it is retrieved from a file server, possibly on Windoze boxes.

What I am envisioning is that someone in the lab could be trained on how to configure settings on the live CD and then could write changes to other CDs. Other lab staff would not have to be able to configure anything, the methods to control their instruments would be hard-wired into the live CD.

Having one live CD burn another one would allow somewhat sensitive information like the IP addresses of file servers inside a NAT to be hard coded into the live CD(but not passwords) without people outside the organization knowing them.

I love Linux but it doesn't seem to going anywhere on the desktop at the moment. It seems to do better when there is either well qualified staff to use it or it comes preinstallled such as with Android(Yes it's linux-like only). Not having to install anything might be a huge plus, especially in an environment where Linux is totally absent, like chemistry / biology labs.

I have never heard of susestudio, I'll have a look.

Thanks again

If those machines are in a network anyway I would completely ditch the idea of booting them from CD, I would just setup a PXE boot server and boot the machines from network. This way maintaining of the system is managed on a central point, you wouldn't have to deploy changes over CDs or other media.

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I am sure you are right from a technical point of view but I think this is asking too much from a customer

In that case you might want to look at SystemRescueCD, they have an option to boot to RAM, I have learned much from looking at the init-script in their initrd. Basically it is pretty easy to achieve that. While usually such an initscript detects where the compressed filesystem container is (usually SquashFS) and then mounts it with RAM overlays you would have to change it to first copy the filesystem container into a RAM-disk or tmpfs and mount it from there. This means of course that you will have to have machines with enough RAM to copy the container to RAM and run the OS and applications, but with console based special purpose systems this shouldn't really be the problem.

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Thanks TobiSGD

This is exactly what i will do. I have marked this thread as solved.

Have a great day-Patrick