<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 8:46 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:atllinuxenthinfo@techstarship.com" target="_blank">atllinuxenthinfo@techstarship.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi guys,<br>
<br>
I've been away from email for a few days, so if anyone sent something directly to me, I'll have to get to you shortly.<br>
<br>
I need some linux geekery and wizardry extarordinaire.<br>
<br>
Let's say I want to create a custom linux install to do some specific unique task, like monitoring the weather, be a vpn, or maybe mine bitcoins. So, say I boot a Mint 13 cd and either apt-get or copy programs and scripts to get the system working like I want and doing what I want. Actually, I don't understand how you can install anything on a system which booted from a cd, but that's another story. </blockquote>
<div><br></div><div>The way it used to work is all changes were stored in RAM, but things have changed...</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Anyway, assume the system is doing the task that I want. However, the problem is, when I reboot, everything goes away, and I have to configure it all over again. So, how do I change it so that I can save all my changes to another cd, and when I boot that one, the system is capable of doing the special task I wanted.<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Knoppix, <a href="http://www.knoppix.org/">http://www.knoppix.org/</a> or latest english version <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix705-en.html">http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix705-en.html</a>, was the distribution that popularized LiveCD's and it is based on Debian. In older versions it had something setup called persistence which allowed you to save changes to a thumb drive or floppy or whatever, but I don't recall it having an option to save it to the CD unless you had a second CD burner. Customizing the CD's took some substantial computer resources when I tried it a few years ago. At that time it had a patched kernel to gzip the whole filesystem, and later replaced with squashfs and I don't know what it uses now... </div>
<div><br></div><div>It appears the process of saving changes has improved quite a bit and they now offer the program flash-knoppix that should make saving changes much easier. </div><div><a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix705-en.html">http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix705-en.html</a></div>
<div><br></div><div><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knoppix">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knoppix</a> will explain things better... <a href="http://knoppix.net/">http://knoppix.net/</a> was, and probably still is, a good place to learn more and ask questions.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I'm considering booting from a CD and, maybe, not even having a hard drive. That means I don't have to worry much at all about maintenance, updates, and security, as long as it'd doing the task I want it to do. Don't have to worry about hard drive failures and power failures either. All the work I want the unit to do is network based.<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>I think hard drive failures compared to CD or thumb drive failures will leave you a much less reliable system.</div><div><br></div><div>Have you searched for a customized LiveCD that does what you want. Lots of people have created niche distributions and some are maintained better than others. Search via Google for bitcoin mining livecd finds a few possibilities. </div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Chuck</div></div>