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Re: [Axiom-developer] 20081202.02.tpd.patch (website download.html add D


From: William Sit
Subject: Re: [Axiom-developer] 20081202.02.tpd.patch (website download.html add Doyen Thumbdrive)
Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:54:10 -0500

Tim:

This email is not Axiom related, but Doyen OS related. Maybe it is because I do not know how Doyen functions, but I believe the Doyen USB version is not meant to replace an alternative bootable version in the sense that the Doyen drive is not "writable" (the USB drive is writable, but Doyen seems to treat it as if it is a CDROM, since, as far as I can tell, the OS that boots up only resides in memory, and all files changed are in memory, which would not survive a shutdown). This is likely because a separate OS is "installed" rather than "booted" from a writable drive. The Doyen files are read-only, and even if one makes them "writable", the resident OS would not update it without some hacking, because an image of the OS at boot time is compressed by the volumes (like usr.lzm, var.lzm, home.lzm, in the DOYEN/base directory). It would be great if there is a command like "saveSystem" to pack the memory system back onto the drive, sort of like for a virtual machine, and preserve the state of all the computation frozen at the time of quitting Doyen. The resident OS need not even be shutdown. I think the tools are already available in DOYEN/tools, so that a script can easily perform it at shutdown. Something like (after making DOYEN/base writable):

cd /mnt/sdb1/DOYEN
tools/dir2lzm /var base/var.lzm

and similarly for the other volumes. This however takes a fairly long time, and I notice there is also a /mnt/live/memory/changes directory in the running system, and I wonder whether it would be possible and enough to just save just the changes (instead of /var, use /mnt/live in the illustration above), and the loading routines at boot time can restore the changes at "install" time. The problem with this approach, however, is that as the OS carries out the command, some files such as log files, may be changed, and some cron jobs may also change other files, during the operation. Thus such "save" should best be done at shutdown time.

When the system is shutdown (and I mean using "shutdown -g now" from a terminal), it shuts down drivers, including the network connections, and then offers a menu to reboot, or to fix packages and some other choices, but there is no choice to update the USB drive images. Moreover, to fix things, it needs internet access for the packages and it fails, of course, despite the connection is still live. One is brought back to the reboot menu and this can go on looping forever until one really shuts down the machine from a booted system by going to system-quit on the menu bar. And then, everything is lost.

I know this is not the original purpose of Doyen and so this is not a complaint, but a suggestion. Unfortunately, I don't know enough to implement the suggestion.

I am still not able to set up the wireless (for a network with hidden ESSID) because the OS needs to download the drivers, and even though I did download the drivers with a wired connection, the system must be rebooted to take effect, but the system reboots from the USB drive! Occasionally, however, I am able to connect to an open wireless network from the neighborhood. I don't quite know why.

Thanks,

William




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