[sf-lug] USB 3.0 Flash Drives - Penguin shaped and others

[Rick Moen]

Quoting aaronco36 (aaronco36 at SDF.ORG):

[a number of well-articulated, good points with which I heartily concur]

> A helpful use-case scenario for me for using a live distro booting
> with persistent storage as per #3 above is to install Knoppix onto a
> 64GB USB stick -- as the prices for this capacity seem to be falling
> over time -- and then save each individual guest Virtual Machine
> disc images from a full host install of a Virtual Machine Manager
> (e.g., the virtualbox VMM) up to ~54 GB as persistent storage on
> that selfsame 64GB USB stick.  This way, one could have the
> advantage of using Knoppix's portable live boot utilities and
> features when needed as well as having the ability to save and
> transfer guest VM disc images between different hosting systems,
> making the assumption on my end that a) the hosting systems
> themselves could be disc-space limited for containing too many
> _multiple_ VM disc images and that b) the VM disc images can/should
> optimimally be copied via the USB stick onto the hard drives of host
> systems for reasons of performance but for _limited-time-use_ on
> each host system (because of possible disc-space limitations on a
> particular hosts system.)  One could even make certain in this
> scenario that the _maximum_ size of each virtual machine disc image
> can only be something like 40 GB, in order to use the remaining 10
> GB+ of persistent USB-stick storage for portability of non-VM disc
> image data as required.

Useful indeed.  Without differing at all from what you say, I just
wanted to remind people of something about Knoppix.  Knoppix is just not
built in a way that makes it suitable for long-term, ongoing use as a
desktop system.

As a brief review (before detailing what I mean), I was part of the team
at Linuxcare in SOMA, San Francisco that invented live distros with the
Linuxcare Bootable Business Card ('BBC') in 1999.  Within about a year,
Klaus Knopper invented Knoppix as a _much_ larger burnable ISO 'live CD'
(and later 'live DVD') distro using tricks he learned from studying the
Linuxcare BBC.

We found Knoppix to be a stunner, and I've kept recent Knoppix around
ever since then, for a variety of utility purposes and as a cool tool to
show off Linux on unfamiliar hardware.  But pretty much everyone who
played around with Knoppix quickly found out that the software on it is
not maintainable.  What I mean is:  Early Knoppix incorporated a nice
third-party script called knoppix-installer that bulk-copied Knoppix to
a target drive as a locally-bootable (ergo much faster) system without
the need to keep the 'live' media around.  IIRC, the result was about
90% a Debian-unstable desktop system, with about 5% packages from
Mandrake Linux, and 5% nobody-seems-quite-sure.  So, in trying to
maintain that using apt-get or equivalent, it tended to quickly turn
into a dysfunctional mess.

Some would say 'Fine, but you can fix that by not maintaining it.'
Sorry, not a good solution.  If you do that, you accumulate unfixed
security and other problems.