A question on the "read only" kernel details.

[Jon Pruente]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 1:09 PM, Oren Beck <orenbeck at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Leo Mauler <webgiant at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  >  If you can mount most of the "frequently-used" stuff
>  >  on an actual hard drive, you could simply use the USB
>  >  drive as /boot, which gets written to only when the
>  >  kernel changes.  This sounds roughly like what you
>  >  want in the first place.
>  >
>
>  THANK you !!! That is perhaps the dragon slayer.
>
>  Sighing and fumbling for the Linux in a nutshell book...
>  Ah - guess I know where this evening is going to:>

Puppy and DSL have been heading down this road for some time.  Recent
Puppy releases (ie. 3) and DSL (ie 4) have a very nice setup to store
the OS as basically read-only files, and also to store software
"modules" or packages on the same filesystem, or a different one on
another drive.  It is extremely simple to setup Puppy to boot from a
read only USB drive from which it will then scan the system for other
volumes, either USB flash or ATA hard drives, which have a set of
files that can contain user storage, programs, etc.  These modern
releases are being purpose built with this very kind of idea behind
them.  I recently came into a system that has USB boot and a fairly
decent CPU (my first P4 didn't have USB boot, bah!) and I've been
thinking of doing a Puppy or DSL boot volume on USB and using the HDD
for extra program storage (which are only read to RAM and executed
there and have configs written to simple user files) and user file
storage.  Puppy automatically asks about encryption of the user file
"container" it generates, for added peace of mind.  If you look at no
other distros, Puppy and DSL won't likely fail you at being suitable
for this task.

Jon.