Installation: can't save ISO after configuration
Posted: 29 Mar 2016, 22:43
Hi there,
Today I gathered my first experiences with Porteus Kiosk 3.7.0. I invested several hours and it wasn't the best experience to be blunt (I may add some feedback on that later on), but let's get to the bug that bothered me above all else:
Procedure
After I am done configuring the installation either by using the wizard or by loading a config file from a medium, I was never able to save that ISO, but only to directly install it on the machine.
When I tried to save the ISO, I was given the message
"Porteus Kiosk 3.7.0 ISO was not saved as /media/Porteus-Kiosk.iso. Suspecting unsupported file filesystem, not enough space or read only media. System will shutdown in 10 seconds ...".
And then the system just reboots and resets everything.
This happened to me several times on a physical machine, as well as in a virtual machine.
Problems
There are 2 things to remark here
1) from a UX point of view this is pretty terrible behaviour, especially for users which have used the wizard and may have given a lot of though into setting the configuration according to their needs, but missed to save it. All of their work is suddenly gone, along with an error message that is only partially helpful to alleviate the problem in the future.
2) From a technical POV, I highly doubt the provided reasons. In the recording from a VM given below, I used a fat32 formatted USB drive with 4.1GB of free space, where config files could have been previously written by the installation system. When I install the system on the virtual machine disk directly, the disk file takes up 2.7GB in total; so that should be enough free space AFAIK.
Expected behaviour
1) on an "ISO save" failure, the installation system should go back to the previous dialog without automatically rebooting
2) The error message should be more descriptive; there might be some overall technical bug with the ISO saving function.
Recording
Here's a recording of that failure from a VM installation attempt, where the config was loaded from the same stick (with 4.1 GB of free space)
http://i.imgur.com/qavicbM.gif
Some sidenotes about the recording:
a) yes, the homepage url is not publicly available
b) it's not a perfect recording (sorry for that); e.g. at some I eject the USB drive from the VM and the host system mounts it, overlapping the window over the Virtualbox window/recording view
c) I had to mount/eject the stick in Virtualbox after I read the kiosk-config from it, as the installation system seems to automatically unmount the medium after reading the file (and does not seem to auto mount an added USB drive, if not in the "correct dialog").
If required I can provide the kiosk-config.txt file contents via private message or the like; but I don't think that there's anything relevant in there.
You can see the contents already in the recordings.
Today I gathered my first experiences with Porteus Kiosk 3.7.0. I invested several hours and it wasn't the best experience to be blunt (I may add some feedback on that later on), but let's get to the bug that bothered me above all else:
Procedure
After I am done configuring the installation either by using the wizard or by loading a config file from a medium, I was never able to save that ISO, but only to directly install it on the machine.
When I tried to save the ISO, I was given the message
"Porteus Kiosk 3.7.0 ISO was not saved as /media/Porteus-Kiosk.iso. Suspecting unsupported file filesystem, not enough space or read only media. System will shutdown in 10 seconds ...".
And then the system just reboots and resets everything.
This happened to me several times on a physical machine, as well as in a virtual machine.
Problems
There are 2 things to remark here
1) from a UX point of view this is pretty terrible behaviour, especially for users which have used the wizard and may have given a lot of though into setting the configuration according to their needs, but missed to save it. All of their work is suddenly gone, along with an error message that is only partially helpful to alleviate the problem in the future.
2) From a technical POV, I highly doubt the provided reasons. In the recording from a VM given below, I used a fat32 formatted USB drive with 4.1GB of free space, where config files could have been previously written by the installation system. When I install the system on the virtual machine disk directly, the disk file takes up 2.7GB in total; so that should be enough free space AFAIK.
Expected behaviour
1) on an "ISO save" failure, the installation system should go back to the previous dialog without automatically rebooting
2) The error message should be more descriptive; there might be some overall technical bug with the ISO saving function.
Recording
Here's a recording of that failure from a VM installation attempt, where the config was loaded from the same stick (with 4.1 GB of free space)
http://i.imgur.com/qavicbM.gif
Some sidenotes about the recording:
a) yes, the homepage url is not publicly available
b) it's not a perfect recording (sorry for that); e.g. at some I eject the USB drive from the VM and the host system mounts it, overlapping the window over the Virtualbox window/recording view
c) I had to mount/eject the stick in Virtualbox after I read the kiosk-config from it, as the installation system seems to automatically unmount the medium after reading the file (and does not seem to auto mount an added USB drive, if not in the "correct dialog").
If required I can provide the kiosk-config.txt file contents via private message or the like; but I don't think that there's anything relevant in there.
You can see the contents already in the recordings.