[Discuss] Persistent mode with Mandriva live CD

[Murray Strome]

John Blomfield wrote:
> Murray Strome wrote:
>> I wonder if anyone knows how to make the Mandriva live CD persistent. 
>> This is easy with Knoppix, difficult with Kubuntu, and I have been 
>> unable to find anything that would tell me how to do it with 
>> Mandriva.  Has anyone discovered an easy to do this?
>>
>> The reason I am trying Mandriva is that it is the distribution I have 
>> found that actually detects my wireless card and lets me configure it 
>> to access my secure wireless network without any difficulty at all.
>>
>> I don't want to actually install in on my laptop until I can be 
>> certain that I can find a way to do it that does not touch the MBR (I 
>> would want to boot from either CD or USB Flash Drive using the built 
>> in Boot Manager).
>>
>> Thanks for any help.
>>
> I am not sure I understand what you are doing with the Live CD?  When 
> you run a Live CD it does not do anything to your MBR or harddrives 
> although it might use a swap partition if it finds one that exists. I 
> simply installs Linux in RAM and then accesses the various programs on 
> the CD and brings them into RAM as required. i.e. uses your CD like a 
> hard drive.  The only way a Live CD will affect anything on your HD is 
> if you click on the "Install" icon!  As I mentioned before the Live CD 
> instance of Linux will access a Pen Drive if its plugged in.
>
> John Blomfield
The problem with the Live CD is that I cannot install or update 
programs.  With Knoppix, for example, I can use a pen drive to 
AUTOMATICALLY save any changes I make to the system (such as adding 
software, saving documents to /home/<user>, changing configurations, 
etc.    I would like to do the same for a live distribution that 
supports my wireless card. 

Of course, I can save documents, etc. on USB devices OK with any of the 
distributions, but that doesn't get me upgrades and I have to redo my 
configurations every time I reboot. 

Kubuntu has a method, which is very complicated -- but since I haven't 
gotten my wireless card to work with it, that doesn't do me any good.

Mandriva has a way of installing nicely onto a USB drive that does not 
affect anything related to Windows, but I would need an installed 
version of it somewhere (which I don't have right now, and won't be able 
to get going before I have to go out of town tomorrow). I think Fedora 
also has such a method, again requiring an installed version somewhere.

I was hoping to find something a bit easier. 

Murray