Assuming you frugal boot using something like grub4dos then ....
Grab a ISO via the
Debian Live web site (I clicked on the i386 CD/DVD/USB link around two thirds of the way down that page and opted to grab the KDE version debian-live-8.5.0-i386-kde-desktop.iso )
Open that ISO with ROX or Thunar (or whatever filemanager) and copy the "live" folder over onto your hard disk, perhaps into a new directory called DEB (I created mine on the first HDD 4th partition (sda4) which is numbered hd0,3 in grub4dos terms
Edit your grub4dos menu.lst to include a entry that points to that - mine is shown below, and if you want persistence (changes saved across reboot) then set up a save partition for that (I believe there are ways to use a save folder or save file as alternatives (but I don't know how to do that myself- I'm just outlining the way I did it here).
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# menu.lst
color white/blue black/cyan white/black cyan/black
timeout 1
default 0
title DebianLive686 PERSISTENCE
#find --set-root /DEB/live/vmlinuz2
root (hd0,3)
kernel /DEB/live/vmlinuz2 boot=live config persistence quickreboot noprompt showmounts live-media-path=/DEB/live/ config
initrd /DEB/live/initrd2.img
I created sda2 as a new ext3 formatted partition to act as the save (persistence) partition. You have to use gparted or whatever to give that partition a LABEL of "persistence". Create a file called persistence.conf in the root of that partition and edit it to contain just a single line of :
/ union
(there must be a new line after that)
Reboot and you're away. Booting into Debian Jessie KDE and where all changes will be preserved in that persistence partition.
After I'd updated and installed/changed things to how I liked it, I booted a puppy (well DebianDog Jessie actually) and created a sfs (squashfs) of the persistence partition and then merged that changes.squashfs as I called it with the main filesystem.squashfs ... to create a new filesystem.squashfs (that normally sits in the /DEB/live folder) to boot from - that contained all of the original filesystem along with the changes I'd made in a single SFS. Which meant that the persistence partition (like a save folder) could be emptied of everything except the persistence.conf file.
These are the notes I copied off the web to do that (filenames are different, but provides the basis of how to merge two sfs's into one single sfs).
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Lets assume we have a directory on the hard drive where we’ve copied the casper/filesystem.squashfs file on the USB as fs.ro and the casper-rw file as fs.rw. First we mount the aufs by layering these:
mkdir -p tmp-ro tmp-rw tmp-aufs
sudo mount -o loop fs.ro tmp-ro/
sudo mount -o loop fs.rw tmp-rw/
sudo mount -t aufs -o br:tmp-rw:tmp-ro none tmp-aufs/
Now tmp-ro shows the squashfs, tmp-rw shows the changes stored in caster-rw and tmp-aufs shows the layered filesystem as the live OS would see it.
Next we can generate the new squashfs using mksquashfs (from squashfs-tools):
sudo mksquashfs tmp-aufs/ filesystem.squashfs
KDE is pretty heavy on the compositing/animation type effects, and also has a number of neat features that I've discovered so far, such as when you edit the panel you can resize it via dragging. You can drag icons from the likes of /usr/share/applications onto the desktop and then if you right click the desktop and select 'Unlock Widgets' you can then hover over a icon until a vertical bar pops up then grab/drag that bar to move the icon around, and there's even a drag to scale up or down the icon size (each icon can be sized independently of each other). Once finished moving things around right click the desktop and select the 'Lock Widgets' option.
A neat thing with Debian is you get security updates through quickly, and the repository is extensive, albeit stable versions that aren't the latest versions.
My 64 bit PC blew up some months back and whilst I have a new (to me) 64 bit PC gathering dust, I've been using a old single core Celeron 32 bit machine with 2GB of ram as a temporary measure. The above is all running fine on that older hardware ... KDE just isn't as resource heavy beast as it perhaps once was, at least not that I've noticed. Booting a liveCD type ISO boot, but with the files on HDD ... and it runs very well IMO. Took me a while to get to the above stage, so thought I'd share my experiences/observations here to make it easier for others. Don't blame me if you corrupt/crash your system (always remember to make backups first).
PS ... MasterPDFEditor and Skype aren't in the Debian respository, for Skype I just installed it as per how I posted here for DebianDog Jessie
Skype For masterpdfeditor I just downloaded and installed from their
web site directly. It did take a bit of fiddling around to get sound to work correctly for me. The trick was to install pavucontrol from the repository (via synaptic) and then reboot/run that and set the channels as being shared. Now I can hear both a youtube playing whilst talking on skype (other party doesn't however hear both, only your voice).
), eyes that track the mouse around the screen (which goes way back in time), and widget resize/move also include a rotation option