On 6 April 2014 23:14, Aleksej Saushev <[email protected]> wrote: > If we want to use this definition, I'd argue that "live USB" in your > sense is wrong approach to attack this particular problem. > "No changes allowed" is rather strange for an educational platform, > it means that you cannot save your work across reboots (so that you > could revisit it in a week or in a month, for instance) except on > another medium (which is, most probably, another USB pen drive).
Well, that's exactly what is expected: you lend a USB pen to 10 year old and you don't want him/her to scr*w up with the pen because next week you're going to hand it over to some other kid. You just want to give a presentation of your project and that's it. Besides, a traditional read/write installed system on a USB2 pendrive is damn slow. A compressed filesystem like squash or a more old-fashioned cloop is way faster. This doesn't rule out that you can partition the usb drive and make some part of the fs permanent. Once could mount /usr/pkg and /home on separate partition and have a fully functional hybrid installation. Knoppix and Casper (Ubuntu) use FUSE to back up changes to a permanent location at some intervals. Damn Small Linux uses a clever, poorman's script to back up /home and /etc to a file and restore them upon boot. -- Ottavio
