[Nottingham] USB LiveDistros Persistance (or, Going Diskless)

[Michael Quaintance]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 10:09:20PM +0100, Martin wrote:
> Michael Quaintance wrote:
> [---]
> > I've used slax ( http://www.slax.org/ ) for livecd / liveusb work and it 
> > has very good support for persistent changes on USB media. I really like 
> > the slax architecture for live distro work.
> [---]
> 
> There's Slax 6.0 on the latest Linux Format DVD (LXFDVD110) with the
> comment "scorchingly fast"...
> 
> So ok, what's its special features that make it such a good and fast
> architecture?

http://www.slax.org/documentation_key_features.php

"Slax has participated in development of so called sqlzma patches; the 
code implements 7-zip compression (LZMA) into squashfs filesystem. 
Moreover, squashfs evolved by the time and it now supports bigger block 
sizes than before. The combination of these two enhancements makes Slax 
one of the best-compressed operating systems in the history.

"All Slax modules are much smaller than any other compressed packages 
available nowadays for all other Linux distributions, while the speed of 
decompression remains usually faster than reading the full data from 
disk."

If you use USB devices labelled with the ReadyBoost logo you can easily 
take Slax from powered off to full GUI in 40 seconds and with no 
noticeable slowdown once it is up. If running from CD, there is the 
CDROM spinup time but from USB, it's as good as installed if not better.

I like it for that reason. 

Plus the modularity it gains from that .lzm architecture means you can 
add/remove features as required as long as you are sensible when you 
create your modules. Want to free the space taken by Vim, just delete 
the vim.lzm and you're done.

Also:

"In Slax, you are not limited to just a persistent home directory - the 
whole root filesystem is fully writable, so we talk about 'persistent 
changes' (rather than about 'persistent home', known from other live 
distributions). You can modify /bin/bash the same way like ~/kderc."

-Michael