[vox-tech] emergency: please help. /lib keeps disappearing

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Issac Trotts (ijtrotts@ucdavis.edu):

> I wonder if there's a way to get a blend between knoppix and hard-drive
> based installation.  It would be nice to be able to save files and
> keep programs around that become available...

The current Knoppix 3.4 series has an "install packages" option that
apt-gets (I assume) optional software into the RAMdisk, if that's what
you mean.  And you can always write out your current installed packages:

     # dpkg --get-selections >selections.txt

And get their current versions:

     # COLUMNS=150 dpkg -l > packages.txt

...and then put that on a USB flash drive or something.

But it's important to realise that Knoppix is specialised as a
run-from-CD distribution that never has to evolve in place, so it's
inevitably suboptimal as an installed system.  Sure, there's a nice 
(but beta, third-party, and unsupported) install-to-HD script.  But the
resulting system is an uneasy mixture of 70% Debian-unstable, 5% Red
Hat, 5% Debian-stable, and 10% God-knows-what, and thus tends to
encounter bobbles as you try to keep the system properly maintained.

A lot of what people like about Knoppix as an HD installer are (1)
extensive hardware autodetection and (2) immediate access to fairly
cutting edge versions of practically all software, including the
installation kernel.  If that's what you're looking for, there are
alternative installer images that converge with fewer problems onto
the canonical Debian maintenance tracks (stable, testing, unstable).
I cover a bunch of them here:

"Installers" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Debian 

That page's entry for the installer I want to play with next follows:

  http://people.debian.org/~jgoerzen/dfs/:
  Debian from Scratch  a run-from-CD full rescue disk capable of working
  with all major filesystems, LVM, software RAID, and even compiling a new
  kernel. Also includes installers for i386 sarge, i386 sid, and amd64
  sid. Includes DFSbuild utility to construct custom DFS CD images.
  Compatibility to Debian: excellent. Last checked: 2004-05-26.

-- 
Cheers,             "Don't use Outlook.  Outlook is really just a security
Rick Moen            hole with a small e-mail client attached to it."
rick@linuxmafia.com                        -- Brian Trosko in r.a.sf.w.r-j