Live-CD is back plus zram support plus partition override

Version 1.0.8 was the last version that supported booting from optical media, the current release, 1.0.14, does not.

However, those who want to boot Easy from optical media will be very happy, live-CD|DVD is back, and then some...

The live-CD will boot up running in RAM, specifically zram, which is compressed storage in RAM. This means that you get almost double the storage than the RAM capacity.

That is as before, however, the really great news is that Easy now supports overriding of BOOT_DEV, BOOT_DIR, WKG_DEV and WKG_DIR on the kernel commandline. They are case-insensitive.

For example, if you append "wkg_dev=zram0" to the kernel boot parameters, then Easy will bootup running in RAM. You could do this for a frugal installation of Easy, or USB-stick installation.

You could also apply this overriding to the live-CD. There is a five-second pause at bootup, where you can enter extra boot parameters. If you enter "wkg_dev=sdc1 wkg_dir=easycd", then it will use that folder (create if not exist) in that partition, as the working partition. Thus you would have storage persistence.

For a live-CD, if you wanted to put that override into the CD permanently, you would have to remaster it, editing the 'isolinux.cfg' file (for non-UEFI bootup). I think that you should be able to do that with ISOMaster (see Multimedia menu).

UEFI bootup is more complicated, you have to open up 'efiboot.img' and edit 'EFI/BOOT/syslinux.cfg'. 

Of course, a GUI to remaster the CD would be nice, maybe one day. 

EDIT 2019-07-10:
Have added 'boot_uuid', 'wkg_uuid', 'boot_label' and 'wkg_label' as kernel commandline overrides.
For example, "wkg_uuid='7894567b-635b-44f7-b5d3-aa041bd9c054'", another example "wkg_label='intern1p6'".
You would specify one only of wkg_dev, wkg_uuid, wkg_label, whichever is convenient for you. Of course, in the case of USB drives, wkg_dev could change, so it would be appropriate to specify the working partition by its UUID or label. The label also may not be unique, but UUID most likely is. 

Tags: easy