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Porteus 3,0 First Newbie Look

Posted: 24 Dec 2013, 12:01
by jimwg
Seasons Greetings!

Thanks for the early present!

First newbie quibble: Booted up okay into XFCE on flash, logged out as guest and back into root, changed password. All okay. Spent 20 minutes configuring the panel, making a top and bottom one with GIMP and SeaMonkey and OpenOffice icons which all worked. Logged out, logged back in -- all panel work evaporated like never was. No warning to save session or how. I did go into Porteus utilities to find a way to save a session, and it seemed to default to making a session module which swelled over 200 megs before I stopped it. Tried to create a file to save session but it balked that it can't save with acfs(?) filesystem. (flash is formatted in FAT, which maybe is why I was able to install Porteus over an existing Puppy install without it deleting anything -- that was neat and a migration timesaver!!!) I highly suggest to make Porteus newbie-proof by flagging a warning and option to save a basic session prior logging off -- even automatically as a safety-catch if possible. I don't understand why save module swelled over 200megs if all I first did was configure the panels and desktop. I can see saving the whole banana bunch ala Time Machine, since I did move over OpenOffice and SeaMonkey from my other stick and they work, but is it necessary to include those apps in a save session file when just recording their and desktop and panel and such configurations and settings should be enough and infinitely smaller, like saving sessions in Puppy? Outside that 3.0 seems to work well but I haven't checked out the time-stamp thing yet -- not until I'm sure all that setting up isn't all going to evaporate later. Get to you shortly on that.

Have a Merry!

Jim in MYC

Re: Porteus 3,0 First Newbie Look

Posted: 24 Dec 2013, 15:24
by brokenman
Thanks for your feedback. It will help to streamline things.
Booted up okay into XFCE on flash
You didn't mention how you booted up. Did you choose the fresh mode option, or the GUI XFCE option? If it was the second (and you are booting from a FAT formatted USB) then you should have received a warning during boot that changes could not be saved and advised to make a save.dat file.
but it balked that it can't save with acfs(?)
Yes. You can't save your session onto the filesystem that you are saving. If you do so you are filling up the very filesystem that you are trying to save and a never ending loop ensues. I use the analogy of trying to save a sinking boat, and you are throwing the water back into the boat you are trying to save.
I don't understand why save module swelled over 200megs if all I first did was configure the panels and desktop.
Is it possible you did more than that, such as put large files into /home or /root? The extra modules that you added should go into the porteus/modues folder on the installation media which is outside of the aufs (live file system e.g /home /tmp/ r/root etc).

Do a test. Boot into fresh mode and then make a few small changes to your panel or wallpaper and then save a session. It should be fast and small.

Re: Porteus 3,0 First Newbie Look

Posted: 24 Dec 2013, 15:30
by Ahau
Hi Jim,

First, a point of clarification -- you said you logged off and when you logged back on, your xfce settings were gone. Did you reboot your computer, or did you log out of xfce and then entered your username and password to get right back into xfce without shutting down the machine? If you did not reboot, that's a bigger issue and a bug I'll need to sort out.

Regarding the size of your save.dat - these do not grow dynamically as you add files. Rather, you select a size up front. You weren't adding 200MB+ of data, you were making a container 200MB+ in size to hold your data (the actual data that would have gone in the save.dat would likely be only a few MB to start with).

Unfortunately, there's no reliable way for us to store linux system files directly on a FAT or NTFS filesystem -- they can't handle the symlinks and permissions that are required for safe and effective functioning of a linux system (this is why we need a save.dat in the first place, see here: http://www.porteus.org/component/conten ... d-one.html

There should have been a warning when you were starting up Porteus, in text mode (yellow text on a black background), saying: "A Windows filesystem (FAT, NTFS) or other non-posix compatible filesystem has been detected on $CHANGES (your flash drive). Your changes cannot be saved directly to the specified storage media with this setup. Please use the 'Porteus save file manager' to create a .dat container and use it for saving your changes after your next reboot."

If that warning doesn't show up, please let us know.

It's always going to be easier to run a linux system off a linux partition. I reformat all my flash drives to have a FAT partition at the front and an ext4 partition at the back. Of course, I also don't use saved changes, but I do use rootcopy, and it's best to have that on a linux partition as well.

HTH and sorry you got burned on this one -- I've lost work a few times as well and it's never fun!

EDIT: looks like brokenman beat me to the punch!