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

[William Sit]

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