Automa(t/g)ic Saving/Loading of /etc and /home to solid disk

[Dan_Netwalker]

Since I've seen knoppix detecting my 256MB solid disk at the first try (I didn't even tried to test it, I just forgot to unplug it. What a lovelly surprise!) I started to think about what crazy things I can do with it, and this idea came to my mind:

How about taking /mnt/sda1/etc as /etc and /mnt/sda1/home as /home if the directory exist? It's just a simple test in a .sh and not to harmfull/difficult to implement. Hell, I'm going to try and burn my custom CD with this and other tricks added, and I don't feel it's so dificult! Why don't we can have this idea in the standar official CD, then?

[David Douthitt]

I've already put my USB portable memory to use this way; however, I copy the data over what is already there, using rsync with backup options - which not only preserves the data, but allows "overwriting" of links to CDROM data.

Doing a copy also means that I don't have to have the "solid disk" tied up when the system is running; I can swap it out.

However, you can change the environment variable KDEHOME to point to whatever location you want. This variable normally points to ~/.kde, but you can copy that to your solid disk and keep on working with a persistent KDE home.

For that matter, you could do this on startup from knoppix.sh on a floppy:

if mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 ; then
rm -f /home/knoppix
ln -s /mnt/sda1 /home/knoppix
fi

You could do this with /etc as well, but that seems like overkill and not worth a lot... just copy the few files you want to change.

[Dan_Netwalker]

Thanks for the tip, It's simpler than what I was trying.

By the way, it would be very nice to be implemented on the standar CD in a next release. Just a tip for the project leader... :P

[aay]

You should check out the persistent home script. I believe it is to be included on the next release. This thread should fill you in on what it is.

You can downlaod it <a herf"http://www.centernetworx.de/knx_persistent_home_0.4.zip">here</a> , unzip and look at the readme too.

[aay]

Actually you may want to check out this post from Mr. Knopper to see what's on the horizon.

Cheers.