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
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