Questions and patches related to casper.

[Ben Greear]

On 05/16/2012 08:30 PM, Akkana Peck wrote:
> 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.

Using 'dd' on windows is a royal pain, so if I can just point the
users at some third-party pendrive tools and feed our modified .iso
image into that, that is the easiest I think.  I also like that the
user can choose the amount of persistent storage based on their USB
stick size.

That said, if I can't find a way to cleanly un-mount the /cow
(or mount it (ro)) on shutdown, then I'm going to have to try
something else...

And, I'm seeing ubiquity panel cores on startup of the live-cd
image, which is almost worse.  I'm going to re-build the modified
cd image from scratch today in hope that that will somehow fix
the cores.  They started after I removed /var/cache/* in an attempt
to make the cd image smaller...seems that might have been a bad
idea...

Thanks,
Ben


-- 
Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com