Readonly root filesystem

trumee · Guru Joined: 02 Mar 2003 Posts: 551 Location: London,UK

Hi,
I want to build a gentoo box which has a readonly file system. The box is to be deployed in an environment which has a lot of electricity failures (UPS is not an option). Is there anybody who has modified the regular install to do this?

Thanks

Roman_Gruber · Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2014 6:21 pm Post subject:

sounds like a live-cd box or something like that.

there used to be guides for terminal only installations so when the box is restarted everything is back to the intial setup.

I think you are good when you clone such a live-cd setup and suit it to your needs.

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3131

Exacly, live CD is the way to go. Easy to setup, as it's well supported by default, readonly by design, and compressed image allows you save some disk space without sacrificing much CPU.
Of course the name does not mean you have to boot it from CD

. It will work just as well (or actually even better) when you boot it from disk. Just run regular install on some throw-away box, then optionaly remove stuff you don't need anymore and compress the rest into squashfs image. You will also need kernel and initramfs to boot it. Genkernel is the easiest (but not the only) way to get both of those.

trumee · Guru Joined: 02 Mar 2003 Posts: 551 Location: London,UK

Thanks for the tip. This http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Custom_livecd_/_liveUSB could have been of help, but it seems to be outdated.

djdunn · l33t Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 810

you can dd the newest live dvd right to the usb thumbdrive and it will work
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