wtfm … I like it

You are a transport operator on the Enterprise. An away team of Linux, Gcc, Rpm and Gtk go to planet RedHat. When you are beaming them back, you notice that something has attached itself to the team. You have 2 choices, first you can pass the input stream through the medical filters and remove the item if it’s a problem (or if it fails to remove the problem put the team into isolation or back on the planet until you can determine if it’s a problem or not), or else you can let the problem in and wait and see what happens.

The analogy is bad because the transporters in Star Trek shouldn’t allow option 2 because you just can’t let unknown stuff in without risking the whole ship and crew.

I just had to write it somewhere eventually, but while we were at the RDS, I had no problem using our 433MHz 128M machine with Kanotix (05-02) installed to run KDE 3.4, Firefox, OpenOffice.org 1.1.X and OpenOffice.org 1.99.X simultaneously! The OpenOffice.org was taken from klik while the others are part of the normal installed system. Performance was not inspiring, but anyone who would actually try and run such bleeding edge software on such a limited spec machine would surely not have expected any more? Certainly it proved to me just how useful klik could be as we could fire up ooo2 without having to risk breaking a display machine.

For anyone curious, the other machines on the stand were, afair, a PIII 700 w/256M and an amd64 2GHz w/1GB plus some laptops I could tell you nothing about and the Sparc monster which I think would make an interesting coffee table

I like the title of Brandon Robinsons talk for debconf5 so much I’ve stolen it for the title of this blog! wtfm = Write The Freakin Manual

Speaking of which I added a description of the union* cheatcodes on Kanotix (and fromiso) to the Kanotix Wiki StartParameters. Short description, unionro and unionrw allow you to use any directory/partition/loopback file as a read-only or read-write layer on top of the cd. This allows persistence with unionfs, a really easy way to “remaster” a cd, perhaps to a dvd.

I have also been hacking on trying to use Fabian Franz’s sarge-unionfs as a basis for an file image which you boot (initrd mounts it), makes all changes in a unionfs snapshot, compress the unionfs snapshot on shutdown (to cloop/squashfs etc) and then on startup remount all compressed snapshots over the original system. At any stage backup and consolidation of snapshots can reduce disk space usage back down by bringing your system down to having a minimal amount of live duplication. I’d also hope to create a script for the snapshot so you could have a cron job create new snapshots while the system is running but I wonder if this will work out ok (can processes with open files for writing handle the underlying system switching to read-only).

Of course I got to a first basic test image (just adding the startup and shutdown code) and it fell over … why? Well I think it’s cause the kernel/initrd doesn’t support sata So it’s burn a cd or hook up Paul O’Malley’s 80G ide driver which I still haven’t given back to him since the RDS! Or maybe I can get it to run off my 256M usb key