Questions and patches related to casper.

[Akkana Peck]

Ben Greear writes:
> 
> I have been having issues trying to do a persistent-usb image for
> Ubuntu 12.04.

I got it working once on Oneiric, but only on a multi-distro USB
stick using grub, with a separate partition for casper, like this:
http://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/install/ubuntu-persistent-live-cd.html
I've never had any luck on either O or P in getting a single-boot
USB stick to be persistent.

I'm currently setting up some USB sticks to use in a classroom/workshop
setting, with everybody booted from the same image. After wasting
most of a day trying to make persistence work, it occurred to me to
wonder why I was doing all that work: for a USB stick, why not just
install Ubuntu to the stick, and have a normal install that saves
whatever changes you make? No need for overlays like casper, just
install to a normal filesystem on the USB stick.

So I tried it. The grub install failed the first time so I had to
re-run it (be careful that you're installing grub to the USB stick,
not to your hard drive) but otherwise it seems to work fine so far.
I've installed several extra packages on it, customized the user
theme and added a few programs and icons. It seems like a much
easier solution than fighting with the undocumented casper
persistence stuff.

Ubuntu should consider shipping a filesystem image that can be dd-ed
to a USB stick, in addition to the CD ISO iamges that require
special magic to be made persistent. It would make it so much easier
to introduce newcomers to Ubuntu.

	...Akkana