any ideas for UOS - simple and reliable method for persistent live drives

[Nio Wiklund]

Den 2014-11-11 22:10, Walter Lapchynski skrev:
> Please join us for a Lubuntu-specific session at the Ubuntu Online
> Summit! It takes place from 1900-1955 UTC on Thursday 13 November
> 2014. It's called "Latest Developments in Lubuntu Development:"
> http://summit.ubuntu.com/uos-1411/meeting/22341/latest-developments-in-lubuntu-development/
> 
> It will cover the current state of the team and what we're working on,
> with lots of info on LXQt. If you look at the blueprint you'll get an
> overview of what we're going to cover:
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-1411-latest-developments-in-lubuntu-development
> 
> If you guys have any other topics you would like to discuss, please
> let me know. I plan on working on the presentation tonight, so please
> let me know as soon as possible. Thanks!
> 

*A simpler and more reliable method for persistent live drives*

Debian and Ubuntu based ISO files contain read only ISO 9660 file
systems and make read-only systems in USB drives (as well as in CD/DVD
disks), when copied/flashed/cloned with mkusb. They need a tool, that
recognizes and picks the pieces and install them into another file
system (usually FAT32), and after that a casper-rw file or partition can
be created for persistence.

openSUSE comes with different ISO files for live systems. I have checked
and both of

openSUSE-13.1-GNOME-Live-i686.iso
openSUSE-13.2-KDE-Live-x86_64.iso

contain UDF file systems and create an ext3 'hybrid' read-write
partition for persistence automatically, when installed by mkusb into
USB drives. mkusb is a shellscript wrapped around 'dd' to make the
copying/cloning/flashing method safe and convenient. I guess it works
also with read-write CD/DVD disks but I have not tried that (I have
never used such a disk).

So the openSUSE kind of live system will get persistence, when installed
with mkusb. This UDF system can be both an advantage and disadvantage.

+ It is very convenient to get persistence this way, and the success
rate making USB boot drives is higher than with other methods.

- You may not want persistence

. because it make the live session slower
. because you want to avoid the risk of virus or other malware

(but we can make a switch where to select persistence while making the
pendrive and another switch to use each time the pendrive is booted).

- There may be booting problems in very old computers, that might not
work with the UDF file system.

The following is cut and edited from the output of

sudo lsblk -fm
-----
sdb     udf  openSUSE 13.1 GNOME Live 2013-11-06-16-04-23-00
├─sdb1  udf  openSUSE 13.1 GNOME Live 2013-11-06-16-03-58-00
└─sdb2  ext3  hybrid  98aaa7f2-6f7e-4728-b937-d5fbf18639ab  /read-write

sdb       7.5G root  disk  brw-rw----
├─sdb1  910.2M root  disk  brw-rw----
└─sdb2    6.6G root  disk  brw-rw----
-----

I think it can be worthwhile considering for a future release of
the Ubuntu flavours, maybe before but at least for '16.04 LTS'. It
should be possible to borrow the technology and replace the ISO file
system with UDF and let the installer create a partition for
persistence, when the target drive can be written to.

Best regards
Nio