VMWare and Knoppix and Redundancy
Posted on February 26th, 2006
I spent most of the afternoon fiddling around with Knoppix and a related project, Kanotix, to see if they could be used with VMWare to separate the common portions of a desktop environment from the user-specific settings and configurations. The theory was that running a live CD ISO from VMWare would be more portable than installing the whole operating system since most of it would never need to change. The stuff that would change could be carried around separately, and would be extremely small.
Although Live CDs have the means of saving your settings to a disk image, it was a hassle to get all the pieces to fit together. First you have to create the disk image; this is easy. Then you need to remember to put in some extra parameters every time you start up so that the Live CD sees the image. Knoppix asks you to explicitly confirm the use of the disk image during the startup process, and if you aren't careful you'll wind up back with the default, uncustomized environment.
Some other unexpected complications also came up. There's a lot of software on a Live CD that I could otherwise do without. In some cases, programs like Firefox and Thunderbird aren't the most recent versions. The impulse is to upgrade, but that's not necessarily feasible because much of the system is effectively read-only.
One solution to that problem is to remaster your very own Knoppix CD. That's a bit much for me, especially given VMWare's capabilities.
Meanwhile, my regular desktop is sitting around doing nothing. Creating a separate desktop environment for the sake of portability isn't making a whole lot of sense any more because so much disk space and system resources are being spent on things I already have.
Maybe a portable OS shouldn't have a GUI at all. Maybe it's just a collection of services which extend the capabilities of the host computer and provide a container for everything that's user-specific.