@nina_kali_nina That’s not surprising at all 🙂 I fully agree with your conclusions at the end of the thread: back in 2004, Knoppix was the only real solution to build live CDs. Its only natural Ubuntu would have gone that way. Ubuntu 4.10 was also the first release and it was SO CLOSE to Debian you could switch a running system between the two distribution without issues.
The alternative was Linux Live (which I *just* discovered they are still around) a set of shell scripts that would pack your current running system onto a CD and overlay SquashFS once booted off the read only medium. They also had support for downloading and overlay “extensions” on top of a running system.
There was a Slackware derivative demoing how Linux Live would work. I ported that setup over to PowerPC since it was around the time I had a lot of fun porting Slackware Linux over to that architecture.
I remember looking into Knoppix for building a live version of Slackware for PPC but their build system was too tightly coupled to Debian tooling for even attempting to make it work.
Linux Live was way easier to port because, well, shell scripts duh. And the only real work was making sure to have the squashfs kernel module and some binaries for the userland bits of squashfs and iso packing.
I think the original Kali Linux, before switching from Slackware to Debian as base system, was the only successful implementation of Linux Live. I don’t remember anything else come remotely close to it.
So when Kali stopped using it, Linux Live was basically forgotten but I’m happy to discover it is still being maintained.
Anyway, thanks for sharing this insight! It was a wonderful trip down memory lane 😄