Porteus

Now that I have Porteus+VirtualBox-on-a-stick up and running, I'm looking into tying some loose ends. Here are two questions but I'm afraid more will follow:-)

1. Number of modules in /modules and overall performance : does the module concept scale well, ie is a Porteus install with say, 30 modules in /modules almost as fast as a Porteus install with only 5? If there's a significant performance hit, it'd probably make sense to merge modules into one or more bigger modules packs (I've just found mergexzm, a script which does that... this actually triggered that question). Perhaps there's even a practical upper limit for the number of modules.

2. Is the save.dat file basically structured like a module? If so, I could clean it up and move the whole thing (or those parts that do not change) to /modules. In what sequence are those modules loaded?

I have 20 modules in a separate Modules folder that I add via the extramods= cheatcode. Many are small, >10 KB. My biggest are Wine and my Wine apps which are about 500 KB total and I usually leave them off the flash drives.

If you rename your save.dat file to save.dat.xzm and include it with the extramods= cheatcode when you boot all your changes will present and no further changes will be saved. A good way to demo Porteus to friends or let the grandkids use it.

1. ... does the module concept scale well
Yes. You can put hunreds of modules in there. Boot time may suffer a little but you are only limited by RAM or 1023 aufs branches.

2 ... Yes a .dat file is the same structure as a module. While in a live session you may also save that session as a module using porteus-settings-centre.

Thanks, folks. Really appreciate that.

One small thing remains: in what order are modules from /modules (or extramod= folders) loaded? The naming scheme in /base seems to imply that it's based on alphanumerical sorting though I am not totally sure of that being the case for all module folders.

Ed_P wrote:f you rename your save.dat file to save.dat.xzm and include it with the extramods= cheatcode when you boot all your changes will present and no further changes will be saved.

That's a nifty idea. I sometimes use Always fresh mode to test something and wish I could have some of my bits and pieces in place (mostly bash related aliases and configs). So if I save (a subset of) save.dat to a module, put that into some folder and add an extramod= cheatcode to Always fresh... voila!

The more I see the more I like Porteus. Great stuff.

The order is: base/modules/extramods/rootcopy
The order is alphanumerical.