[CentOS-devel] LiveCD suggestion

Sun Jun 6 12:29:42 UTC 2010
Patrice Guay <patrice.guay at nanotechnologies.qc.ca>

Douglas McClendon wrote:
>
> One more related installer suggestion, is zyx-liveinstaller.  This is 
> just me shilling my own project that has yet to gain serious traction, 
> but I still find rebootless livecd installation very cool, and it is 
> just 100kb or so.
>
> Executive Summary: Like traditional fedora livecd installer, except 
> instead of copying just the readonly livecd filesystem image to the 
> target and then rebooting, it uses devicemapper mirror tricks to copy 
> that image, as well as the live ram overlay into a new normal filesystem 
> on disk, which is then already running for real, sans the need to 
> reboot.  Only 'real' difference is that until the next reboot, your 
> rootfs is accessed via a dm-linear layer

The main issue I see regarding a live installation process is the fact 
that the LiveCD has been stripped from several files in order to reach 
the 700MB target. Language and documentation files are removed to give 
some space for OpenOffice.org. As a result, the LiveCD environment is 
different from the one obtained via the normal installation process. 
While this should not make a difference for English-speaking users, 
others may be confused by the missing files. This could result in more 
load for the support channels as they will have to explain why package 
xyz installed via the LiveCD is different from the same package 
installed via RPM.

--
Patrice