Boot-Up Run Of Of Space - Porteus3.0

[jimwg]

Seasons Greetings!

I hope all had happy holidays, while I have a small emergency on my hands.

It might have with trying to use CopyAgent service after after installing and configuring 32bit Porteus 3.0 XFCE 4.10 on my 8gig flash. There's a possibility that Copy downloaded its cloud copy of my files into the File System folder instead of /mnt/Documents/Copy while I trying to install the Copy app overnight. I woke up to a black screen. I had re-run Porteus several times and take out my Seamonkey and OpenOffice and GIMP modules to fix a boot-up screen I could copy the following from.

First the start-up screen alerts Normal boot-up until --

Recovering journal. Triggering udev. events /sbin/
Failed to start message bus: Failed to close
"var/run/dbus/dbus.pid". No space left on device.
Sed: Couldn't flush /etc/sedoHW4KIT No space left on device
INIT: Entering runlevel: 4 sed couldn't flush /etc/lxdm/sedgf0JHT: No space left on device

And similar lines go on. So ironically I can't even access the file I made of my evaluations of 3.0! Or my most recent SeaMonkey files since they're locked up in the File System folders some where (Why I must find a way to use a alias/short-cut way of having Seamonkey store its Mail files in my safe Documents or Copy folder). By using another Porteus flash to look inside the plighted Porteus one, I see that the File System folder has 960 megs free while the Documents folder where Copy is has 5.1 gigs free, so there's a count error somewhere when boot-up reports no more space.

I spent a lot of time configuring and getting this rendering of Porteus right and I'd hate to chuck it without a fight. Is there anyway to fool or fix the save file so it doesn't know or see that there's no space left on the device?

Thanks for any assist!

Jim in NYC

[Ahau]

It sounds to me like you filled up your save.dat file as you suspected. When you booted into the other system, you're seeing space available to that system (whatever is in RAM if you don't have saved changes turned on or whatever is left in the save.dat for that installation). Free space you see on the disk is likely the free space outside of the save.dat, whereas your plighted porteus install only sees the free space inside the save.dat (hopefully at least some of this makes sense lol). You can continue to boot from the second drive or you could even boot from the one with the full save.dat so long as you hit TAB at the bootloader menu and then use the arrows and backspace key to delete the "changes=.../" cheatcode with the location to the save.dat. This will boot you into a clean system without any of your saved changes. You can then navigate to the save.dat's location on disk and loop-mount it. You can use the mloop utility for that, e.g.:

Code: Select all

cd /mnt/sdb1/porteus #or whatever location holds your save.dat
mloop save.dat

This will mount the filesystem at /mnt/loop. You can open that location from a command line or a file manager (thunar) and poke around for the large files that were placed there inadvertently, and delete them to free up space.

Once you've done that, try rebooting and see if it works for you. You might have some borked files or a messed-up filesystem journal due to it getting full in the middle of a write and then getting jerked through the shutoff process without getting properly synced and journaled. If that is the case, I would reboot again without saved changes, save a copy of the save.dat to a hard disk with plenty of room (in case anything gets messed up you'll have a backup to try and recover from), and then use the tool to try and recover a save.dat. If that's not working let us know and we can try to walk you through manual recovery procedures.

[jimwg]

Ahau, thanks for your suggestions! Everything I'm doing with Porteus is being closely watched and spread bu students and members of our home school who want to ditch all their "Gatesmobile" machines!

I did as you directed and opened the file and did some pruning but it was probably too corrupted as you indicated because it wouldn't start up after that. I just started a new one and I take away from this the lesson that I'll duplicate every save.dat file after making great changes in my set-up (can "versioning" saves like this be script automated?). I am fortunate that guys like you are here to guide my way and educate me because I'd be totally lost, so I can imagine a total newbie would just chuck trying Porteus out after an accidental or fumbled crash. I would like to recommend that Porteus default with a auto-save save.dat setting to avoid that pitfall. Yes, I read http://porteus.org/info.html for info and it's an EXCELLENT guide, but respectfully, the newbie or blog cruiser shouldn't have to jump hoops tweaking Settings Center config panels in order to save a first or second session the first time out tasting Porteus like that. Yes, I understand the no-size-fits-all philosophy mentioned the info htm, so why not just create a default session autosave that can be disabled for the more adventurous Porteus dabbler as you'd prefer? It's not that newbies are too lazy to read a manual, but to them, if it first takes tinkering under the hood to make a new car run why buy it? Porteus should steer clear of the stain Ubuntu and even Mint people have that Porteus or Puppy are for built for "uppity geek clubs". Porteus has far too much potential to confine itself as such.

I always do Copy to Ram boot-ups. Also, some in Puppy forums say that's the closest way Porteus simulates how Puppy reduces wear and tear on flash drive RAM (don't know how accurate that is but it'd be a cherry on top if it's true!)

I found that locale setting with UTC time messes up in SeaMonkey Mail too, so far the ideal setting for SeaMonkey and Menu clock is local time and your geographic place, though I've been unable to test this with Stellarium because it refuses to boot in XFCE for some reason (unlike in KDE mode). Bummer. Interestingly enough, I initially had the XFCE Weather plug-in up and it kept reading NO DATA until I set time and place to America/New York. I haven't been able to get VLC to work in XFCE. Some claim "qt4-4.8.2.xzm" is required for VLC to work in XFCE but Puppy Package Manager doesn't work in Porteus 3.0 for me.

Yes, it's cosmetic and only for XFCE (but supposedly works in MATE too) in Puppy and Mint, but a very attractive eye-candy feature to sell newbies on Porteus is to have different backgrounds tailored for each desktop like this Puppy maven recommended in this script:

#!/bin/bash
# The Poor Man's Desktop/Workspace solution (version 2)
# Requires: wmctrl
# Make sure you edit the WORKSPACE configuration parameters to suit.

# make sure that only one instance of this script is running
lockfile=/tmp/.wspm.lockfile
if ( set -o noclobber; echo "locked" > "$lockfile") 2> /dev/null; then
trap 'rm -f "$lockfile"; exit $?' INT TERM EXIT
echo "wspmDEBUG: Locking succeeded" >&2

######### EDIT THESE VALUES #########################################################################
###
### WORKSPACE_WALL -> image file or backdrop list (slideshow images)
### WORKSPACE_STYLE -> 0=auto, 1=centered, 2=tiled, 3=stretched, 4=scaled, 5=zoomed
### WORKSPACE_CYCLETIMER -> for background slideshow, spceify how often in minutes to cycle image
###
### Note: You need one set of configuration parameters for each available workspace
###
### Workspace #1
WORKSPACE_WALL[1]="/home/toz/Pictures/avatars/avatar.png"
WORKSPACE_STYLE[1]=1
WORKSPACE_CYCLETIMER[1]=0
### Workspace #2
WORKSPACE_WALL[2]="/home/toz/Pictures/avatars/avatar.png"
WORKSPACE_STYLE[2]=2
WORKSPACE_CYCLETIMER[2]=0
### Workspace #3
WORKSPACE_WALL[3]="/home/toz/Pictures/avatars/avatar.png"
WORKSPACE_STYLE[3]=3
WORKSPACE_CYCLETIMER[3]=0
### Workspace #4
WORKSPACE_WALL[4]="/home/toz/.config/xfce4/desktop/backdrop.list"
WORKSPACE_STYLE[4]=0
WORKSPACE_CYCLETIMER[4]=1
#####################################################################################################

######### DO NOT EDIT BELOW #########################################################################
CURRENT_WORKSPACE=$(($(wmctrl -d | grep \* | cut -d' ' -f1)+1))
xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p /backdrop/screen0/monitor0/image-path -s "${WORKSPACE_WALL[$CURRENT_WORKSPACE]}"
xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p /backdrop/screen0/monitor0/image-style -s "${WORKSPACE_STYLE[$CURRENT_WORKSPACE]}"
xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p /backdrop/screen0/monitor0/backdrop-cycle-timer -s "${WORKSPACE_CYCLETIMER[$CURRENT_WORKSPACE]}"

while true
do
sleep 1
NEW_WORKSPACE=$(($(wmctrl -d | grep \* | cut -d' ' -f1)+1))
if [ $CURRENT_WORKSPACE -ne $NEW_WORKSPACE ]; then
wmctrl -s $(($NEW_WORKSPACE)-1)
xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p /backdrop/screen0/monitor0/image-path -s "${WORKSPACE_WALL[$NEW_WORKSPACE]}"
xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p /backdrop/screen0/monitor0/image-style -s "${WORKSPACE_STYLE[$NEW_WORKSPACE]}"
xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p /backdrop/screen0/monitor0/backdrop-cycle-timer -s "${WORKSPACE_CYCLETIMER[$NEW_WORKSPACE]}"
CURRENT_WORKSPACE=$NEW_WORKSPACE
fi
done

rm -f "$lockfile"
else
echo "wspmDEBUG: Lock failed - exit" >&2
exit 1
fi

===============

Continuing to beta-test Porteus!
Keep up the great work!
Jim in NYC

[francois]

Why don't you work with a linux partition? It would make your life easier.

[brokenman]

Thanks for the feedback. I like the idea of having a default save.dat file for newcomers that aren't aware of the pitfalls. It may take some tweaking and slow down the initial boot. I'll also take a look at the changing wallpaper for different desktops script. It is just eyecandy (and a useless process in my opinion) but if that is what draws newcomers then it is probably worth having.

PS: It should be noted that Porteus is proudly a direct descendant of slax which was born sometime before 2003 (the first puppy release) and this release supported copying into ram, so copy2ram is hardly something that is emulated from puppy. I tried puppy and found it to be an excellent distro, and we have even borrowed pburn from it, but this is as far as emulation goes. Perhaps we should take a closer look at how it targets newbs. TBO i got lost in all the different versions and puplets.