Hm, what do you mean with "swapoff -a is part of Debian"?
The command works in Debian now, it's not a wish-list item.
Huh?! http://grml.org/files/README-0.9.php =>
OK. Over several months we've observed anomalous behaviors for swap, tmpfs, etc. We'll double check the latest grml.
As far as cheatcodes making sense for CDROM vs. hard drive, we see few diffs (but some of course). Mobile USB for us is just a read-write version of live CD with more software capacity and easier data persistence across boots. So it's not the same as the usual hard drive installation to fixed workstation.
We've previously discussed the lack of / need for a mobile user model in Linux, astride the usual server, workstation concepts. Devices and computing capacity are growing exponentially while 40-year-old *nix assumptions still slow Linux a little from filling these niches. There are many more user models than stable server (i.e. Debian stable) and desktop workstation (i.e. fixed hard disk PC install). Live CD is one of the new ones! ;-) So is ours. Grml has been a big help pushing it forward!
M