[Grml] Re: Suggestions

[T]

On Mon, 06 Nov 2006 23:23:23 +0100, Michael Prokop wrote:

>>    ... So I thought if it is possible to splitting the squashfs
>>    image into two images that are merged by unionfs, where the smaller
>>    one contains a basic system that includes all stuff from grml-small
>>    (which may be larger than 50MB, but as small as possible) and have a
>>    cheatcode to load only the small part into ram (and not use the large
>>    part at all). I do not know if this is feasible in the grml build
>>    process (obviously it will require some extra work of splitting the
>>    image), but it would be cool. I don't know any live cd that tries to
>>    do things like this, so perhaps it is not possible...?
> 
> Interesting idea. I'll add it to the todolist and will discuss it
> with other developers.

Thanks for the consideration. I wanted that long time ago. It is totally
feasible, and has been done in other live cd system, like slax
(http://www.slax.org/features.php):

,-----
| Other Live CDs contain all software in a single compressed file. If you run
| such a Live OS from CD-ROM, the CD drive has to seek back and forth really
| frequently, because different files are located on different locations of
| the CD medium. This makes the system notably slow.
| 
| With SLAX, all conformable parts of the filesystem are compressed to a
| standalone file, which doesn't contain anything else. For example, all files
| which belongs to Xwindow are packed in xwindow.mo, KOffice related stuff is
| in koffice.mo, etc. If you work with KOffice, you usually need only files
| from KOffice and nothing else, and hence all files from that part of the
| filesystem are separated from the rest of it, your CD drive has to seek only
| in a 10 MB area. This significantly improves the speed.
`-----

This is just an example. I think the most advanced Live CD regarding using 
unionFS is Puppy Linux, it allows 5 layers to work together, and it has
detailed docs on how it is done:

http://www.puppyos.com/development/howpuppyworks.html

BTW, I have planned long time ago to write the author of Puppy Linux a
personal email to invite him join on board to develop grml, but haven't
go time to do that yet. :-)

-- 
Tong (remove underscore(s) to reply)
  http://xpt.sourceforge.net/