Filesystem overlay ?

[Adil Kodian]

What would it take to have a script copy /var from cdrom into the
partition on hdd at boot time, then mount this /var partition onto the
/var from cdrom, thus shadowing it.


you could do this, but depending on how large your default /var is, it will
extend the boot process. In pre-packaged OSs like Mandrake or Redhat, doing
this is overkill as they dump a lot of files in /var that dont need to be
written to in real-time. My /var is 260meg - and its simply a default
install of mdk10.1

there are two solutions - one is to simply roll your own - create a new
distro that has minimal use of /var and that too uses /var ONLY to write
stuff. YOu can also set all your configuration such that as soon as you add
a user, it creates the default user folder in /var/home. This approach
however requires significant linux abilities.

Another option is to use a regular mdk or rh distro livecd, and then simply
edit it to create/use a partition on the hard drive (instead of tmpfs) and
then also create swap space and mount it. You could also let the OS boot
completely and then use /var/ on a remote NFS/samba server and mount it
automatically.

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