Puppy multi-session live-CD version 1.0.0-alpha has been released

As far as I am aware, this is a world first, a live-CD that saves back to the CD at end of session.

A few extra usage notes for this release:

1. The live-CD is only mounted temporarily during bootup. During a session the CD drive may be used for other purposes. However, if you wish to mount the multi-session live-CD to view its files, I am intending that the standard mount-point will be /mnt/home, although there is no entry in /etc/fstab for this. This command will do it: mount -t iso9660 /dev/scd0 /mnt/home
2. During a session, note that any directory with a name starting with "tmp", for example "tmp", "tmp1", "tmp-anything", will not have its contents saved to CD at end of session. This is handy if you need a temporary scratchpad area.
3. If you use a CD-RW to evaluate Puppy multi-session live-CD, after completing the evaluation and you then want to erase the CD-RW, do a "full" erase. A "fast" erase, at least with cdrecord, does not properly erase a multi-session CD.
4. The multi-session live-CD does not by default create a /etc/pupxxxbackup file. See the above link for details. If you want to backup each session to hard drive, and you have an existing "pup001" file, I suggest make a copy of it, say "pup002" and use that. When the multi-session live-CD has booted, create /etc/pupxxxbackup with the content: hda1:pup002
where hda1 (for example) is the partition that has the pup002 file.
The current version of multi-session live-CD does not create a pupxxx file.
5. Although this is an "alpha" release, it works fine on my PC. The only disconcerting thing is the error messages spitted out by the ide-cdrom driver during bootup -- but these do not seem to compromise actual operation.
6. I am not (yet) supporting USB CD drives. So far only tested with a IDE CD burner drive, not with a true SCSI drive.
7. Please boot with the live-CD inserted in the CD/DVD-burner drive. Do not boot from any other CD/DVD drive. This is because Puppy will automatically assign that drive as SCSI-emulated, which is required for burning-to. Any decent BIOS should automatically scan the CD/DVD drives (if you have more than one) and find where the bootable CD is.

Announcement on the news page
An introduction to the multi-session live-CD concept
Download (MD5: c978c7785297a9ab286310541082bb06)