Dear all, While you're thinking about Live 7.0,some reflections from running version 6.0 from USBs with students this last semester. I know your main target is DVDs but these may be of interest.
Firstly, it's pretty common when I'm working with students that they're not careful with disk space but are used to having lots of it. Even if you give them another partition on the USB stick, or even tell them about accessing the hard drive on the machine from the Live system, inevitably one or more will just download big ZIP files to their home directory, unpack the contents there, never clear it out, etc. So eventually the home directory & thus the system runs out of space. My observation is that the system degrades very poorly in these circumstances, becoming unpredictably unreliable and sometimes unbootable. Often it's PostgreSQL that seems to be the poorest to cope but this is all anecdotal and hasn't been performed in test conditions. Is there any way that this behaviour can be modified, or at least some system monitor be included to warn of the impending situation? As a long-term user of computers & Linux/Unix-based systems I can recognise the sort of system instability that arrises from out-of-disk-space conditions so I know to go looking for it but the students don't and it causes grief! Secondly, the university runs a proxy to the Internet. The proxy setting just in Xubuntu is fiddly enough (requiring updates to system files under sudo in a number of places) and then there's the proxy settings in the various packages. Even if it's not for this release, could there be a long-term aim to provide a means at least to set the system proxy, and better yet the package proxy settings? In part this is "my" problem as the instructor in creating a tweaked version of the Live image to install on our systems but actually if the students want to take the USB between the uni and home (and thus out from behind the proxy) it gets fiddly for them too. IIRC, plain Ubunutu has a settings panel that performs this task - I've no idea about lubuntu etc. A final issue is of ways to back-up from the system. I realise that a Live system is not exactly intended for long-term use, and particularly not from a USB drive. However I'd like to be able to use this with students across a period of ~15 weeks. This year I found that the batch of USB drives (Kingston DataTraveler 100 G2 16GB drives) did not perform well, and 3-4 of them have failed (at a low level in the hardware, it seems, so both partitions are lost & the devices are not recognised on the USB bus as mass storage devices (or at all)). In some cases of partial failure (e.g. when the booted system has filled and is not bootable) I can mount the drive on another Linux system, mount the squash and casper files and fish around to extract some of the contents, e.g. to copy to another drive before re-imaging with a fresh Live installation. I'd just support the requests to present an easy way to access the Live file system when the stick is plugged into another system, or at least documentation on how to mount the systems. I have, for example, yet to find where the PostgreSQL contents are when accessing from a separate system. Alternatively, advice on how to back-up the system would be very beneficial (maybe right up front on the Live GIS Disc Quick Start for USB wiki page?). I hope this helps. I realise the third topic is rather nebulous! Should I enter any of the above as tickets? (They feel like higher level concerns to me). Regards, Jeremy -- ------------------------------------------------------------ -- Jeremy Morley Geospatial Science Theme Leader, Nottingham Geospatial Institute, Triumph Road, University of Nottingham. NG7 2TU, United Kingdom. Web: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/ngi Twitter: jeremy_morley Tel.: +44/0 115 84 68411 Email: [email protected] This message and any attachment are intended solely for the addressee and may contain confidential information. If you have received this message in error, please send it back to me, and immediately delete it. Please do not use, copy or disclose the information contained in this message or in any attachment. Any views or opinions expressed by the author of this email do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nottingham. This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment may still contain software viruses which could damage your computer system: you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation. _______________________________________________ Live-demo mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo http://live.osgeo.org http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc
