I think I will use this method with the upcoming knoppix 7.1. Until now I had not really considered this possibility.
Safe and compress overlay's size sound good.
.
There is an intriguing comment by Klaus Knopper regarding an otherwise
little-advertised capability of Knoppix to bring in additional cloop-
compressed overlays and to combine their contents with that of the master
KNOPPIX compressed file at boot. Klaus uses this feature to add non-free
material, which CeBIT is licensed to distribute, to CeBIT versions
of KNOPPIX liveCDs, LiveDVDs and their isos. This may be found at:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-knopp.../msg00005.html
AFAICT, Knoppix can handle, at present, eight overlays,
KNOPPIX0, KNOPPIX1,...KNOPPIX7. The LiveCD iso has only KNOPPIX, aka
KNOPPIX0. That leaves, for a LiveCD-sized LiveUSB, KNOPPIX1, KNOPPIX2,
...KNOPPIX7 unassigned and available.
For rather-permanent, unchanging parts of one's persistence, there are
at least three reasons one might want to utilize some of these unassigned
overlay positions, assuming one uses a LiveUSB with persistence.
1. A read-only version of the persistence material is safeguarded
against inadvertent write-over;
2 A read-only version may be compressed to 40% its ultimate size after
boot, with the same scant time penalty with which the master KNOPPIX files
are brought in; and
3. A read-only version will decrease the amount of writes associated
with its contained material over that which would occur if the material
were both read/write and uncompressed. There is a wear consideration
peculiar to USB write cycling.
Prior to Knoppix 7, I had added and/or changed a number of files and
programs beyond the standard files which come with the standard LiveCD iso.
With the advent of Knoppix 7.0, I converted these to a cloop-compressed
KNOPPIX1 and added that alongside the master KNOPPIX file in
/mnt-system/KNOPPIX/. I have developed a few additonal such additions
using Knoppix 7 since it first came out. I've recently converted these
additional changes to KNOPPIX2. I am now looking forward to further
adapting these efforts to an upcoming Knoppix 7.1. Two Screenshots, mtab
and df-h illustrate this; see Attached Images below.
I used a small bash program to facilitate and position the cloop-compressed-
read-only KNOPPIX1 and KNOPPIX2. The essential part of this program uses
Klaus K's magic formula, in essence, and for example:
One may account for the content of Knoppix changes in two groups:Code:cd /; sudo mkisofs -R -U KNOPPIX-DATA | create_compressed_fs -B 131072 -m - - > /mnt-system/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX1
1. The totality of files in /home/knoppix/ plus a small number of
individual files that may have been changed or added.
These changes may be recorded with a small bash script, like Keep*.
These changes may be restored with another small bash script, like Restore*.
2. The totality of files added via apt or Synaptic, may similarly be
expressed by another small bash script, like Uncommon.dpkg*.
*These or similar small programs, may be added to /etc/profile as follows:
Code:Keep() { # Aid to backing-up unique user files cd /; KEEP=/mnt-system/keep$(date +"%m%d%H").tar.gz echo -e 'Compressing data; patience, this may take a little time..\c' tar -cz --exclude *gvfs* --exclude *cache* \ -f $KEEP home/knoppix/ \ etc/profile etc/rc.local etc/X11/Xsession.d/45* etc/syslog-knoppix.conf \ etc/chromium/ mnt-system/boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg echo ".Done."; echo "Restore using the command, tar -xzf '$KEEP' -C /" } Restore() { # Restore $PEEK given the date, $1 in %m%d%H format PEEK="/mnt-system/keep$1.tar.gz" echo "Restoring '$PEEK files to /."; tar -xzf $PEEK -C / } Uncommon.dpkg() { # Packages uncommon to dpkg.current & "dpkg.$1" dpkg --get-selections > /tmp/dpkg.current comm -3 --nocheck-order /tmp/dpkg.current "dpkg.$1" | less | tee uncommon }
I think I will use this method with the upcoming knoppix 7.1. Until now I had not really considered this possibility.
Safe and compress overlay's size sound good.
I used this to prevent errors:
Code:cd / sudo mkisofs --exclude *gvfs* --exclude *cache* -R -U KNOPPIX-DATA | create_compressed_fs -B 131072 -m - - > /mnt-system/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX1
Greetings, Blacksimon.
Excluding .gvfs may be a good idea; it may louse up the command.
This annoying file may or may not be hanging around to cause trouble.
I suspect it got into my distro when I added a program which uses
some gnome material. I complained to Klaus K, but he was not
sympathetic with calling it a bug. Its a feature, apparently.
An i/o re-direct command might be a more professional way of
handling the way that .gvfs trips up a command. Maybe some Bash
expert will suggest something appropriate here.
FWIW, I think .gvfs trips things up using a console command or as
part of an /etc/profile function, but as part of an executable shell
script, I don't think it gives (me) the same trouble. I can't explain
why this should be the case.
The only reason to exclude [Cc]ache files is to save the space.
I don't think they'd cause trouble unless you are a real miser on
space, like myself.
.
I get into trouble with .gvfs while in /home/knoppix.
I usually execute my bash script from a root lxterminal.
My theory is that /home/knoppix is polluted with .gvfs, while / is not.
For example, try ls -a | grep .gvfs as root in both places.
'~/.gvfs' isn't a ordinary file; it is the mountpoint for GVFS. Therefore you cannot delete or copy it.Excluding .gvfs may be a good idea; it may louse up the command.
This annoying file may or may not be hanging around to cause trouble.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GVFS
Greetings, Werner, nice to hear from you.
I've been reading about this (.gvfs) some.
It turns out, as you say, that .gvfs is a mount point put there by some program,
possibly LibreOffice, which I use. In my case the .gvfs, as a file, never has any contents;
it does show up as in an mtab entry related to fuse.
One post I read suggests unmount and delete and see what happens.
The notion being is that if some program needs to mount something it will re-
establish the mount point. I'm trying this route at present.
FWIW, Ubuntu and others are re-routing this mount point to what we would call /run/knoppix/.gvfs,
all with no more explanation than for the earlier home directory location.
Users have been perplexed by .gvfs for as far back as 2008 I've noticed.
.
It turns out that .gvfs is re-established in /home/knoppix within
a few minutes or hours of normal operation using at most: pcmanfm,
lxterminal, libreoffice, firefox 19, leafpad and this forum's editor.
From this I conclude that removing .gvfs probably causes no harm, but also
solves no problem. Using the exclude option for scripts in /home/knoppix
will prevent triggering error messages.
The exclude option may not be necessary for scripts making overlays from
/KNOPPIX-DATA, if .gvfs is not in this part Knoppix. One may assess the
situation, for all of Knoppix with the commands: updatedb; locate .gvfs
Greetings, Utu.
in my case:
options --exclude *gvfs* prevents the error messages to complete KNOPPIX1 creation options --exclude *cache* is to reduce size of KNOPPIX1
I had already set up by default to move cromium cache, ~/.thumbnails, proxy cache to ramdisk.
option -iso-level 4 is to prevent file/directory name truncation as you can see at the beginning of the process of mkisofs.
I'm testing KNOPPIX1 without overlay at the moment and everything goes well.Code:cd / sudo mkisofs --exclude *gvfs* --exclude *cache* -iso-level 4 -R -U KNOPPIX-DATA | create_compressed_fs -B 131072 -m - - > /mnt-system/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX1
The size of KNOPPIX1 is only 720MB instead of 3GB overlay (2GB really used)
With KNOPPIX1 ramdisk is used by default by knoppix
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