Okay, as indicated by my previous posts I am creating a liveCD. I have come a long way in the process, however now I am sort of at a fork in the road, and I wanted to get some advice.

So basically since /var, and /etc are on R/O filesystems, I get a ton of errors on startup. Those directories need to be written to during startup, and there is no getting around that.

Here's my idea: Have the distribution be quasi-live, meaning during the first boot, it will create a couple of partitions, mount them as /var, and /etc, then copy all of the important files there upon the first bootup. Sounds ridiculous, I know, because it defeats the entire purpose of having a liveCD, but honestly the logs generated from what will be on this CD will take up a lot of space alone.

First, how well do you think this will work?

Second, is there a better way without having to install a bunch of crazy stuff like busybox etc?

What do you yall think? Any advice?

Thanks,
Pair

You'd be better off creating a ramdisk and using unionfs. Have a look itno those, it doesn't touch the disk (which is a big no-no for a live CD) and it's rw.