Very Computer

by **Lee Alle** » Fri, 06 Nov 1998 04:00:00

I am putting a 'live' Linux system on CD-ROM. My intention is to enable our
company's field people (sales, installation & training) to run Linux and our
Linux-based application on their laptops, without disturbing Win95 or
whatever is already on their systems.

I have it mostly working. I am running into lots of little problems that
are related to the root filesystem being read-only.

Examples:
Obviously you can't have syslogd writing to /var/log/messages, or modify a
database.
Not so obvious: something happens to /dev/null that the 'w'rite attributes
are removed, so things like "command > /dev/null" fail.

I can figure out ways around each of these problems (so far)... but it seems
like I am re-inventing the wheel. I imagine others have done this before,
probably more elegantly. Can anyone point me to some documentation?

Thanks.

-Lee Allen

by **gus** » Fri, 06 Nov 1998 04:00:00

> I am putting a 'live' Linux system on CD-ROM. My intention is to enable our
> company's field people (sales, installation & training) to run Linux and our
> Linux-based application on their laptops, without disturbing Win95 or
> whatever is already on their systems.

> I have it mostly working. I am running into lots of little problems that
> are related to the root filesystem being read-only.

> Examples:
> Obviously you can't have syslogd writing to /var/log/messages, or modify a
> database.
> Not so obvious: something happens to /dev/null that the 'w'rite attributes
> are removed, so things like "command > /dev/null" fail.

> I can figure out ways around each of these problems (so far)... but it seems
> like I am re-inventing the wheel. I imagine others have done this before,
> probably more elegantly. Can anyone point me to some documentation?

> Thanks.

> -Lee Allen

Have a look at some of the Distribution multi-disk packs. I know SuSE
(in 5.1 5.2 and 5.3) had a "live" disk in the set. This should give you
a good start.

gus

by **Jason Ha** » Mon, 09 Nov 1998 04:00:00

> I am putting a 'live' Linux system on CD-ROM. My intention is to enable our
> company's field people (sales, installation & training) to run Linux and our
> Linux-based application on their laptops, without disturbing Win95 or
> Not so obvious: something happens to /dev/null that the 'w'rite attributes
> are removed, so things like "command > /dev/null" fail.

You're out of luck as far as /dev goes - there's quite a lot in there that
needs to be writable. You can mount /dev as a separate partition, so you
could use a ~2Mb ramdisk to copy the CD copy of /dev onto, and then
mount it over the top of /dev...

--
Cheers

Jason Haar

Unix/Network Specialist, Trimble NZ
Phone: +64 3 3391 377 Fax: +64 3 3391 417

Very Computer

CD-R: Linux read-only system

CD-R: Linux read-only system

CD-R: Linux read-only system

CD-R: Linux read-only system