Re-master your flash installation

[Capricorny]

I really appreciate that you share this!
The first rule about remastering is, don't do it. But it's not the last rule...

I would like to postulate a few more good (IMHO) reasons for remastering, I fully agree with yours.
3. Bloat. The DVD contains gigabytes (uncompressed) of programs we will probably never run. While some essentials (every man his own!) are missing.
4. Bugfixes made permanent, moved from "user space".
5. Extra package install/updating made more systematic.
6. Smaller total system footprint. Will always be relevant, if not so important economically as storage gets cheaper.
7. Possible to make several cloop images. Could be useful for things like heavy development tools.
8. Could even try other approaches than through cloop.

I imagine that a good way of doing the full KNOPPIX upgrade, would be to copy the newly made compressed image to, for example, an external USB HD, and do the "field testing" on that. Speaking for myself, I'm pretty sure I would want to make quite a few adjustments.

[dinosoep]

I created an account just for this tutorial.
I tried your method of remastering as I like the way it works.
But did however made the mistake of trying to do the source/master directory on a ntfs filesystem. this caused all persmissions to be lost while copying and after the remaster nearly everything was broken.
Of course I was going to rage on this tutorial when I realized it maybe couldve been because it was ntfs and took another memorystick and formatted it to an ext2 filesystem. this did the job

is there a way to not break anything while still copying to a ntfs filesystem?

[Forester]

dinosoep wonders ...

is there a way to not break anything while still copying to a ntfs filesystem?

Well, yes there is. Have you noticed how Knoppix uses (compressed) loop devices a lot ? You can think of these as filesystems-in-a-file instead of filesystems-on-a-partition. You can use the same trick to create an Linux file system on an ntfs partition.

There are four steps:

1. Mount your ntfs partition under Knoppix (if not already mounted). That will probably be something like:

mount /media/sda1

2. Create a large file on it. How big depends but for remastering the Knoppix CD let's guess 4 Gb is enough. You need something like:

dd bs=4K count=1M if=/dev/zero of=/media/sda1/big.one

3. Create a file system in the big file:

mkfs -t ext3 -F /media/sda1/temp/big.one

4. Mount the file as a loop back device:

mount -o loop /media/sda1/temp/big.one /lots_of_free_space

You may need to sudo one or more of the commands and, of course, adapt the parameters to your particular situation. The mkfs command takes many parameters and some may be more useful in this situation than others.

[Harry Kuhman]

Well, yes there is. Have you noticed how Knoppix uses (compressed) loop devices a lot ? You can think of these as filesystems-in-a-file instead of filesystems-on-a-partition....

As a moderator, I passed the above post, as it is not spam and on topic.

However, as a user and someone who has been on this site for nearly 8 years and seen over and over again the reports of disaster after writing to NTFS, I couldn't just pass it and not warn others that it is not a universal opinion. Yea, you can create a file system within another file system under Linux. But to do so you still need to write to the physical file system. Not just to create it but during all of the writing processes. I know of no reason to think that this is safer than just writing to NTFS (which is unfortunately still not safe).

If you want another file system on your hard disk consider shrinking the main partition, or use that "back up" partition that the vendor wasted disk space to create (after making a backup disc), and create a second Linux or FAT partition there, or even just add another inexpensive hard disk. An extra partition can be a Linux partition or a FAT partition (A FAT partition will be subjected to the 4GB-1 file size but lets you transfer files easily between Windows and Linux). But if you write to a NTFS partition, have very good backups of everything and keep making backups, the effects of corruption are often not noticed for some time after the damage is done.

[kl522]

However, as a user and someone who has been on this site for nearly 8 years and seen over and over again the reports of disaster after writing to NTFS, I couldn't just pass it and not warn others that it is not a universal opinion. Yea, you can create a file system within another file system under Linux. But to do so you still need to write to the physical file system. Not just to create it but during all of the writing processes. I know of no reason to think that this is safer than just writing to NTFS (which is unfortunately still not safe).

This subject has been mentioned quite many times. 8 years of observation is quite a long time, especially in the world of IT. I am not sure how extensive your observation is substantiated with facts, as software version changes, some bad experience in the past with bugged software may not be applicable to newer versions of software.

The fact is over the recent years, the use of NTFS (for read and write access ) in Linux has got wide spread usage and penetration. If you look at embedded devices, quite many of them are Linux based, they read/write usb flashes and SATA harddisk. I came to know quite many of the media players are Linux based. I also know that Samsung TV is Linux-based too. These devices read/write on NTFS file system (and FAT32) !

I cannot help but to think that read/write of NTFS on Linux has gotten to a usable degree of safety - if one does not use those fancy features of NTFS. But if indeed your observation - substantiated with facts - does indicate that NTFS writing is still unsafe, perhaps it is a problem unique to Knoppix ? I am wondering ......