Hi. For some days I was working to compile a customized live distro based on Armbian and live-boot for my BananaPi M2+ board. Finally, it is ready to use. It boots from the builtin emmc flash and is completely readonly. It uses overlayfs together with squashfs. It also uses zram as swap to enhance memory capacity. A nice effect is that the sd/flash image becomes only 400mb, since it is squashed..

 

I would share the image and the details of making it, if somebody is interested, send me a message...

1 hour ago, iiivanich said:

I would share the image and the details of making it, if somebody is interested, send me a message...

 

What about sharing it here? Highly appreciated to get a tutorial with as much details as possible!

Really cool! I like to read all about it too. 

3 hours ago, iiivanich said:

I would share the image and the details of making it, if somebody is interested, send me a message...

 

Sounds great - please share

Hi,

 

Here is a link to the image: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9rkZNVvi3bINkFTMXpwbjZEZ1E/view?usp=sharing

A tutorial describing how I built it, is coming soon ...

 

Enjoy

43 minutes ago, iiivanich said:

A tutorial describing how I built it, is coming soon ...

 

Eagerly waiting for this to be able to add useful improvements to Armbian if appropriate.

2 minutes ago, tkaiser said:

Eagerly waiting for this to be able to add useful improvements to Armbian if appropriate.

Well, it's not that hard to make a squashfs based image. The main question is - how useful it will be in read-only mode or with an RW filesystem overlayed on top (like it's done on OpenWRT), and I don't know any boards that have storage space requirements that call for using squashfs (others than currently unsupported OPi 2G-IOT)

So, here is a first version of the tutorial - it is surely not perfect, so please comment, I would improve it:

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9rkZNVvi3bIaks1N2pQWEh3S1k/view?usp=sharing

 

In the tutorial, I tried to motivate why I think it is useful. Certainly, there are also other ways of avoiding writing to SD-cards (e.g. log2ram, etc.), but live-boot is really convenient, after you get it working.

 

Hello,
I have followed the steps to make an Armbian Live Distro (for an Orange Pi Zero in my case).
Unfortunately, if I remove any directory (one of bin, dev, etc, ...), my image/sd-card is not ready to boot alive.
The only thing that differs from instructions is that I've replaced "setenv bootargs "boot=live live-boot-path=/live ..." with "export bootargs "boot=live live-boot-path=/live " within my /boot/boot.cmd file.
Could you please provide me some help with this?
Thanks in advance

I finally had to chance to use this feature of debian, it gives me something like the snapshot capability of vmware. The tutorial is well written, all you have to do is to change the keywords required by the current mainline. Everything else works the same:

setenv bootargs "boot=live live-media-path=/live union=overlay persistence persistence-media=removable ${consoleargs} consoleblank=0 loglevel=${verbosity} ubootpart=$...

 

For persistence, create a USB partition named "persistence" and specify the directories you want to persist in persistence.conf. The USBs would contain all of the snapshot changes. You then decide what to do with the snapshots just like vmware.