[Fedora-livecd-list] persistence and "install to harddrive"

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2008-08-04 at 12:35 -0500, Jerry Vonau wrote:
> Just been playing around with a LiveUSB stick and persistence, and it
> occurred to me that if you make any changes at all, anaconda will not
> pick them up. The reasoning for this is that /usr/sbin/liveinst looks
> for: 

Yes, this is intentional.  Some of the changes that are made to the
system, eg, as part of the livecd initscript aren't things that you
would really want to persist into the installed environment.  

> "live-osimg-min" is setup as part of the livecd init script and is made
> up from the squashfs.img and osmin.img. Just wondering what the
> advantages are in having the init script setup this device over trying
> to create this device just before anaconda is called. 

It's done from the initramfs as that's really the only place we have the
information on where to find things.  Otherwise, we'd have to recreate
that mapping.

> Now the real question, what would be the best way to have anaconda
> pickup the persistent overlay for the "install to hard-drive" part.
> Could you just create a second device-mapper snapshot using the same
> overlay and squashfs.img just presented as read-only in /dev/mapper?

Yeah, you could easily just do a snapshot and then set LIVE_BLOCK to
that. 

> then do something like:
[snip]
> I'm thinking that an overlay file might be a mode that could be used in
> the future to update the livecd just before you install to the disk.  

So you're thinking like an overlay you'd download which would have the
updates pre-applied?  What's the advantage of that over just downloading
the updates post-install?

Jeremy