Linux on a CD-RW

[SR71Blackbird]

This is kind of a weird question. I have seen DemoLinux which is a distribution of Linux on a CD-R that I believe runs in a RAM disk. The problem is that when you power down, you lose anything you have done unless you save it to a floppy or mount a hard drive partition. Is there a distribution that can boot off of a CD-RW and write to it as if it were a hard disk? I know that it would be really slow, but it would allow you to turn any computer with a CD-RW into a linux computer quickly. Well, what do you think? Thanks.

Shawn

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

yeah, it would be slow, i dont know...its possible i'm sure, but would be hard, i mean, i dont think you can just write to a cdrw w/o using a special program, so they would somehow have to integrate cdrw writing into a kernel module maybe (?) so it does it seamlessly, that would be alot of work.

also lots of people seem to think that cdrw's arent all that reliable at keeping data. i wouldnt know, i just use cdr's.

btw: welcome to anandtech

 

[SR71Blackbird]

Yeah, that's kinda what I figured. Thanks.

Shawn

 

[thornc]

Well since CDRW use packet writting filesystems like UDF, and since UDF has only
read only support in Linux ( last time I checked ) it can't be done, at least not yet!

Slackware has a zipslack installation that will run from a iomega zip disk, but it has
no X! You could use this if your planning on something like that!

 

[robisc]

I have used the distros like Demolinux and SUSE Live eval and while they run from the CD they actually do make a file on the Win partition that they use to save all the configured settings that you have made so there really isn't a need to write back to the CD-RW. Also thI'm guessing that this would probably be VERY hard to do since the OS would be running only from the CD-RW and then that same OS would be writing back to the CD.