[Fedora-livecd-list] persistence and "install to harddrive"

[Jerry Vonau]

Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-08-04 at 12:35 -0500, Jerry Vonau wrote:
>> Just been playing around with a LiveUSB stick and persistence, and it
>> occurred to me that if you make any changes at all, anaconda will not
>> pick them up. The reasoning for this is that /usr/sbin/liveinst looks
>> for: 
> 
> Yes, this is intentional.  Some of the changes that are made to the
> system, eg, as part of the livecd initscript aren't things that you
> would really want to persist into the installed environment.  
>
OK, I'll check for the deference's, thanks.


>> "live-osimg-min" is setup as part of the livecd init script and is made
>> up from the squashfs.img and osmin.img. Just wondering what the
>> advantages are in having the init script setup this device over trying
>> to create this device just before anaconda is called. 
> 
> It's done from the initramfs as that's really the only place we have the
> information on where to find things.  Otherwise, we'd have to recreate
> that mapping.
> 
>> Now the real question, what would be the best way to have anaconda
>> pickup the persistent overlay for the "install to hard-drive" part.
>> Could you just create a second device-mapper snapshot using the same
>> overlay and squashfs.img just presented as read-only in /dev/mapper?
> 
> Yeah, you could easily just do a snapshot and then set LIVE_BLOCK to
> that. 
> 
Got a magic string? ;-)  DMC, Can you point me in the direction please? 
I'll play around...

>> then do something like:
> [snip]
>> I'm thinking that an overlay file might be a mode that could be used in
>> the future to update the livecd just before you install to the disk.  
> 
> So you're thinking like an overlay you'd download which would have the
> updates pre-applied?  What's the advantage of that over just downloading
> the updates post-install?

Ok, updates is a bit short sighted, but yes. How about an enterprise 
mass rolling out, incorporating customizations for the organization? Is 
that a better use for this potential "feature".

Jerry