Quote Originally Posted by proctor View Post
i also have been working on getting KNOPPIX-DATA onto a dvd. i have tested garaden's solution above and can verify that it works properly once all the "dot-wh-dot" (.wh.*) files have been removed from the tarred KNOPPIX-DATA directory.
Oh no, I wonder how people come to this conclusion about those dot-wh-dot files. In my view, if you want to copy a consistent copy of "file sets" ( ie collection of files ), you should rather copy the /UNIONFS counterpart, and not copy /KNOPPIX-DATA and omitting the dot-wh-dot.

A package is basically a set of files. Very often when you update a package (using synaptics for example), that might result in removing some older files on the read-only file system which does not have it's counterpart in the updated package. To mark that these read-only files as deleted, thereby there will be dot-wh-dot files created on the read-write file system.

The mechanism maybe too complicated to be explained here. But all in all, if you copy files on the read-write file system ( and omitting the dot-wh-dot files ), you will likely end up with having inconsistent packages.