Quote Originally Posted by Werner P. Schulz View Post
... it is hard, to classify Foresters excellent analysis as spam.
Thank you Werner for your encouragement. I do rather seem to have upset utu.

The point I failed to make was that KK might not want something that only half of Knoppix users could use. Of course any solution offered to KK would have to satisfy utu. He is the sponsor and possibly the only test bed. Do the math.

utu, the points glossed over.

On the first, I think the answer is yes. I used a USB installation because I needed a portable solution. Yes, I backed it up to hard drive every day. I know many people think back ups are an imposition and don't/won't/can't do them. I had a second USB stick in case I lost the first. I know many people don't. My script 'remastered' from the first to the second without requiring any 'additional' (aka temporary) file space. It seemed to me that that modest investment in a second USB stick might be easier for inexperienced users than repartitioning their hard drive or learning to use virtual machines. That is, of course, just a personal opinion.

On the second, I should have written that squashfs is not supported as an alternative to cloop. The Linux kernel squashfs module is in 6.4.3 and 6.4.4. I have every reason to believe that it is also in 6.7.0 (but haven't checked). However, you can't boot Knoppix from squashfs because the init script does not support it. There is a long thread that discusses this. I posted a patch for init that supported this (and I think dinosoep tried it). The patch works for 6.4.4 but it might not for 6.7.0.

I write scripts for two purposes: for things I don't do often and things I do do often. This is to be less dependent on my poor memory and my poor typing. Scripts are meant to be read and changed. I have little experience of writing scripts for others to use, especially those who can't read and change them. I made a mistake when I published the one utu can't use. I won't do that again.

If I ever do such a thing again, I will provide a GUI front-end but I have no experience of writing such things and have no idea when or if I could start such a project. It is easy to say I want simple GUI script but it is quite something else to write one. After all, when a command line script goes wrong the user can see what has happened and is supposed to figure out what to do whereas with a GUI, the script hides the error and tries to figure out what to do by itself.

My analysis, as far as it has gone, is that the first step is to replace the install to USB script. As it stands, it uses vfat, which has the distinction of being the only hard drive file system I know of that does not support files with holes (or sparse files or whatever you call them). That's why the backup / restore functions I did for 6.4.4 were dismissed as 'too slow'. It imposes other limitations that make doing something nice and simple like utu wants very much more difficult that it should be.