[Neurodebian-users] anyone from ...intra.cea.fr ?

[Yury V. Zaytsev]

On Mon, 2012-01-02 at 14:43 -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote: 
> Sure thing if it is too much hassle then it is not worth the sweat, but
> as I read it -- you run dd command to clone them, so it sounds like if
> you just  add following commands after dd-ing it should be just enough
> 
... 
> 
> you should be all set ... or am I missing something?

Yes, that would work for an ISO image, but our live USB sticks are built
in a way that the changes would persist across reboots.

For instance, if a tutorial during the school spans across several days,
the students can boot the stick the next day and keep all their files,
data and settings waiting for them in there.

In fact, the sticks contain syslinux which loads a custom ramdisk, which
in turn mounts the root from a read-only highly compressed squashfs
image and union-mounts a writable file from the stick on top of this to
provide persistence.

I'm creating the squashfs image from the ISO's and at this stage I can
chroot into it just as you suggested, but once the image is finalized
for the cloning the only thing that can change is the union-mounted
file.

I'm not sure of how to union-mount the squashfs image outside of the
boot process, because it is done by casper scripts which I borrowed
without even looking into them.

Probably it's possible, but requires quite some work. It's nice to know
that according to you dpkg doesn't need such a complex setup as apt...

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev