MyLiveOS... Web-Based... Ready to Go!!!!!

The project is called MyLiveOS, while based on what a lot of people have been trying with the gmailfs, and some others i have seen. There is a screenshot on the main page as well as some other stuff. The site is fully functional including the forums. http://myliveos.com/modules.php?name=Forums
1st Release is scheduled for October 15, 2004. More information can be found on the sites homepage. Features include configuration and possible data storage saved on a ftp mounted filing system. Optional one click windows touch and feel config. and many other goodies. Please leave all feedback on that sites forum as I am often checking and configuring that site. and not as often on here.

Nice page, good starting point for community project.

I couldn't resolve what MyLiveOS and 'What everyone seems to have wanted' means. I couldn't find any information that would help me decide if this is something I want or simular to something I am already working on. Maybe a more detailed description of what makes MyLiveOS distinct from other distributions. What is it based on and what does it include?

Sorry Steve, most of that info (IE based on knoppix, system requirements, etc), is on the main page if you read everything in the middle. http://myliveos.com
again sorry for the inconvenvience.

Um.

1. I don't want to carry a full size CD, can it be done with a flash keychain or mini-CD ?

2. Paying for storage ? Not a good idea. I would rather have it stored in another flash keychain, it cost next to nothing, much faster than accessing over the net. Beside, I get 1G storage for free already on gmail.

Basically, not impressive, I would say.

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Originally Posted by garyng

Um.

1. I don't want to carry a full size CD, can it be done with a flash keychain or mini-CD ?

2. Paying for storage ? Not a good idea. I would rather have it stored in another flash keychain, it cost next to nothing, much faster than accessing over the net. Beside, I get 1G storage for free already on gmail.

Basically, not impressive, I would say.

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The flash keychain Idea was already more than an idea, but after testing we found soo many machines, that had no usb boot support. So then you would also need to carry around a boot cd or boot floppy, to boot from the keychain. Which seems now more than a full size cd to carry around.

Unfortunately with the smallest we got it, we have missed mini-cd size(s)

I am not here to step on any toes, but yes i know you get 1GB on gmail, and there is an AWESOME development with gmailfs, but like i have said before, and read before here in these posts. Do you think google, is just going to let thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people bombard their server's with a persistent connection. so you can throw around Gb's of data. That is not what they meant it for. in fact anyone in marketing knows you could probably give away 10 Terabytes for email, and it wouldn't matter because of the way it is sent and stored.

I honestly hope the gmailfs takes off, but i don't think google, is going to think very highly of it. and will definitely do something to prevent its usage in the event it gets as big as everyone hopes.

I also figured with a pay for storage, that I wouldn't have to addon to any software with html links to donate pages (I use software that has this, and if it wasn't for the fact that i either really need the software, or i really liked it, i would toss it) So no beggers here :lol:

Plus we also tried to make the cost next to nothing. I mean $5/mth isn't really much, and I know its far from a Gig of storage, but it will be much faster than the gmailfs, plus the whole idea of ours was not so somebody could bring 1GB of data all over. I don't see how anyone will be able to do this for a while, no matter what the costs of storage, servers, or internet lines.

Like we have said on our mainpage and in other forums, this isn't for everyone, and we can accept that.

But to just come out and bash us with a non impressive for no real technical issues, really isn't all that great either.

Of course I wish i could give, or receive an 1GB account with blazing 100Mb speed dedicated to me. But think about it, you get 1000 accounts on a line that is even 100Mb, that you can be paying upwards of $10,000/mth for with all the transfer bandwith you might be using. The speed is going to be slow. and i don't know anyone who can afford to have a couple gigabit lines, to use to just freely give away the type of storage, and speed required to do this for free... Maybe when in the future houses have 100Mb lines, and people frown upon oc13 because oc838383 is out, such a thing could happen. But we are just trying to work with whats available.

Ah, when I followed the link to the forums I didn't find anything there to explain what it was. When I clicked on the 'Home' link I got the same forum page (probably something with my WebWasher settings). I just assumed there was no overall information available.

I just now I went to the link on you reply and I can see the kind of information I was looking for. Thanks,

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Originally Posted by conrad10781

But to just come out and bash us with a non impressive for no real technical issues, really isn't all that great either.

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I think I have outlined why it is not impressive.

1. full size CD is cumbersome. If you really want to make it, I would suggest mini-CD + keychain flash. There may be machines that cannot boot from USB, but there are that many machines that doesn't have USB.

2. Even I don't care about GMAIL, why would I want a network based FS when I can save everything in a keychain flash ? A network baseed file system requires a very fast network with low latency. That is not a situation we have now. The current state of broadband give us pretty fast upload/download speed for things like zip file but not for remote fs. Therefore, gmail/yahoo as a backup storage for zipped file is the best compromise, at the moment.

3. The remote desktop/VNC approach is better where I just need a minimal PC running its client and the network requirement is not that large comparing with remote FS. I have the benefit of a much faster machine on the server side too, if I want.

I have been toying with this computer/data with me all the time idea for over two years because I have a real need of it(always on the move) and have tried/thought about a lot of ways to do it.

A mini-notebook under 2lbs. This is the easiest but the bulkiest comparing with other methods I have tried. But I relies on no one.

A 2.5" IDE USB 2.0 DISK enclosure. less bulky than the above and similar to your idea. This means I need to borrow machines. The advantage(comparing with yours) is that I have all my stuff with me(20G is quite some space, much larger than a CD, even DVD) and don't need a network.

USB keychain and/or mini-cd, even smaller and easier than 2.5" USB enclosure. With the price drop of microdrive/flash, this idea is getting better if I don't 20G+ storage all the time.

A VNC server at home. This means I carry nothing and just run a VNC client on whatever machine I can get hold of. I have a wake-on-lan capable machine at home with a broadband connection(which I have to pay anyway as family members still need it when I am away). I don't even need to worry if the machine can boot CD or read USB. So long it can browse the net, I can use it.

As for gmail, storage is cheap, processing power is too so I believe they will continue to provide it. Beside, I believe google/yahoo would have a better backup strategy than what you are going to provide. One needs to look at this for third party remote storage. I recalled a very nice photo sharing site which went belly up leaving its users in the dark and charged them to get their stuff back(if it can finally do it is another issue).

Now you may understand why I said your idea is not impressive, because I have thought through a lot of the alternatives, their pros and cons and cost as well.

Just for discussion, in what way do you think your idea is better than what I have outlined above ? I am not here to bash you, just trying to have a constructive discussion. may be it is expressed in the wrong way.

[quote="garyng"]

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Originally Posted by conrad10781

A 2.5" IDE USB 2.0 DISK enclosure. less bulky than the above and similar to your idea. This means I need to borrow machines. The advantage(comparing with yours) is that I have all my stuff with me(20G is quite some space, much larger than a CD, even DVD) and don't need a network.

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This was thrown around the most when we were suggesting USB Flash Keys, and the original idea of the whole distro.. again only prob we had was we would have to have so many variations of the distro, because we would have to have one for USB Hard Drive Enclosure, one for cd, some with boot disks etc.

The only reason I bring this one up, is because we are going to probably still be pushing this as a 2nd option. Either the CD carry version or 2.5" portable. But let me ask you. Who would want to pay as much as you would have to (at least $100) to get the hardware, when it seems the biggest complaint is the cost of everything?

I know you weren't bashing either, sorry for any inconvenience.

[quote="conrad10781"]

Quote:

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Originally Posted by garyng

Quote:

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Originally Posted by conrad10781

A 2.5" IDE USB 2.0 DISK enclosure. less bulky than the above and similar to your idea. This means I need to borrow machines. The advantage(comparing with yours) is that I have all my stuff with me(20G is quite some space, much larger than a CD, even DVD) and don't need a network.

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This was thrown around the most when we were suggesting USB Flash Keys, and the original idea of the whole distro.. again only prob we had was we would have to have so many variations of the distro, because we would have to have one for USB Hard Drive Enclosure, one for cd, some with boot disks etc.

The only reason I bring this one up, is because we are going to probably still be pushing this as a 2nd option. Either the CD carry version or 2.5" portable. But let me ask you. Who would want to pay as much as you would have to (at least $100) to get the hardware, when it seems the biggest complaint is the cost of everything?

I know you weren't bashing either, sorry for any inconvenience.

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Um,

I can have a 2.5" enclosure for 8US. I can grab a 3-8G 2.5" HD from a used notebook(the very old one) for almost free. A 256MB flash is selling like may be 20 US and a 512MB is far from 100. At your rate of 5/month, I can balance it for one year of usage. I see a net saving starting from year 2. Beside, I get 512MB flash which I can used for other things if I find it to be no longer needed. If I choose CF rather than keychain, I can use it in my digital camera.

A mini-CD + keychain version is all that is needed. Both CD and keychain can be bootable. USB enclosure is not different than a keychain technical wise. Put syslinux on the keychain as well as USB IDE disk so it is bootable if the machine support it. If the machine can only boot from CD, it can be used as the hosting device for KNOPPIX. This way, I only need to store a 1.44MB boot image on the CD which makes mini-CD by all means possible.

The System is Done, and ready to be mailed!!!!! we are working on a few things in the signup process. The buy buttons will be enabled once that is. I will also update this forum


AGAIN MANY THANKS TO MATTA! :lol:

This concept is appealing I believe to corporate road warriors. At my place of work we have at any time 10-15 of our customer reps onsite. They all have laptops they access remote systems with across broadband internet we provide. One major pain in the A** for all of these guys is what to do when their POS laptop gets corrputed and won't boot. They go days without email or mainframe access while their laptop is shipped back to their overworked/understaffed IT department to rebuild Windoze. When they get it back it they have invariably lost loads of data, because we all know that end users *always* backup their local data :-)

I beileve there is a market for your product to companies that have certain people on the road all the time. Even if their laptop breaks physically, they can beg borrow or steal a computer in the interim while theirs is repaired. It would be very cheap for them to have a few LiveOS Cd's in their baggage to ensure they have access wherever they go.

I would concentrate on making sure your package includes easy to access (via icons) to features like VNC, Remote Desktop Connection, Citrix (is that available for Linux?), Cisco VPN client (Avaliable for Linux?) and other remote access tools. One potential stumbling block is the lack of IE and ActiveX that some of these guys depend on for coroprate portals.

I believe you should also provide companies with ability to buy your server end software (for a decent fee) so they can host it themselves. Many companies will be unwilling to put their data on a 3rd party server they have little or no control over.

Good project.

Conrad, If you want to persue this opportunity email me at [email protected] and I can let you know names of potential clients you could market your product to.

JP

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Originally Posted by JPWhite

This concept is appealing I believe to corporate road warriors. At my place of work we have at any time 10-15 of our customer reps onsite. They all have laptops they access remote systems with across broadband internet we provide. One major pain in the A** for all of these guys is what to do when their POS laptop gets corrputed and won't boot. They go days without email or mainframe access while their laptop is shipped back to their overworked/understaffed IT department to rebuild Windoze. When they get it back it they have invariably lost loads of data, because we all know that end users *always* backup their local data :-)

I beileve there is a market for your product to companies that have certain people on the road all the time. Even if their laptop breaks physically, they can beg borrow or steal a computer in the interim while theirs is repaired. It would be very cheap for them to have a few LiveOS Cd's in their baggage to ensure they have access wherever they go.

I would concentrate on making sure your package includes easy to access (via icons) to features like VNC, Remote Desktop Connection, Citrix (is that available for Linux?), Cisco VPN client (Avaliable for Linux?) and other remote access tools. One potential stumbling block is the lack of IE and ActiveX that some of these guys depend on for coroprate portals.

I believe you should also provide companies with ability to buy your server end software (for a decent fee) so they can host it themselves. Many companies will be unwilling to put their data on a 3rd party server they have little or no control over.

Good project.

Conrad, If you want to persue this opportunity email me at [email protected] and I can let you know names of potential clients you could market your product to.

JP

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Out of curiosity again, for corporate users, just setup VNC/Rdesktop server and let the road warriors access it through VPN should solve the problem you mentioned as all that is needed for these road warriors would be a standard notebook that has VNC/Rdesktop client. Why would one use a remote FS which can be slow and not reliable instead ?

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Originally Posted by garyng

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JPWhite

This concept is appealing I believe to corporate road warriors. At my place of work we have at any time 10-15 of our customer reps onsite. They all have laptops they access remote systems with across broadband internet we provide. One major pain in the A** for all of these guys is what to do when their POS laptop gets corrputed and won't boot. They go days without email or mainframe access while their laptop is shipped back to their overworked/understaffed IT department to rebuild Windoze. When they get it back it they have invariably lost loads of data, because we all know that end users *always* backup their local data :-)

I beileve there is a market for your product to companies that have certain people on the road all the time. Even if their laptop breaks physically, they can beg borrow or steal a computer in the interim while theirs is repaired. It would be very cheap for them to have a few LiveOS Cd's in their baggage to ensure they have access wherever they go.

I would concentrate on making sure your package includes easy to access (via icons) to features like VNC, Remote Desktop Connection, Citrix (is that available for Linux?), Cisco VPN client (Avaliable for Linux?) and other remote access tools. One potential stumbling block is the lack of IE and ActiveX that some of these guys depend on for coroprate portals.

I believe you should also provide companies with ability to buy your server end software (for a decent fee) so they can host it themselves. Many companies will be unwilling to put their data on a 3rd party server they have little or no control over.

Good project.

Conrad, If you want to persue this opportunity email me at [email protected] and I can let you know names of potential clients you could market your product to.

JP

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Out of curiosity again, for corporate users, just setup VNC/Rdesktop server and let the road warriors access it through VPN should solve the problem you mentioned as all that is needed for these road warriors would be a standard notebook that has VNC/Rdesktop client. Why would one use a remote FS which can be slow and not reliable instead ?

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Wow, gary, that hurts!. but to get to that point. since the WHOLE operating system isn't run remotely. it is as stable as your cd drive. the webspace that is alloted, is for user config files. IE Desktop settings, and some small files you wanted to save. IE a document or spreadsheet. Speed shouldn't be much of a problem, since the servers are on a rack, that by next week should be going from 5Mb to 10Mb, and up to 100Mb by the end of the month if things really start to pick up. We have 2 servers. one only being an entire mirror of the other, and both servers already have RAID 5 setups. I am a little bit of a overkill kind of guy anyway. I am sure one server with raid 5 is enough, but we figure if we have 2 we not only did it right, but we would have almost no downtime, as we would just switch ip's, to limit downtime to minutes ifnot seconds.

all done!!!!, buttons are enabled.

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Originally Posted by conrad10781

Wow, gary, that hurts!. but to get to that point. since the WHOLE operating system isn't run remotely. it is as stable as your cd drive. the webspace that is alloted, is for user config files. IE Desktop settings, and some small files you wanted to save. IE a document or spreadsheet. Speed shouldn't be much of a problem, since the servers are on a rack, that by next week should be going from 5Mb to 10Mb, and up to 100Mb by the end of the month if things really start to pick up. We have 2 servers. one only being an entire mirror of the other, and both servers already have RAID 5 setups. I am a little bit of a overkill kind of guy anyway. I am sure one server with raid 5 is enough, but we figure if we have 2 we not only did it right, but we would have almost no downtime, as we would just switch ip's, to limit downtime to minutes ifnot seconds.

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Ah, you misunderstand me. I am not questioning your service reliability but the mode it is operating in. If I actively use this remote FS(as just another mount point), the communication channel would be the weak point, if it breaks, the open files would be gone. This is in sharp contrast with VNC/Rdesktop where I just reconnect and all my work would still be there.

I would only use this kind of setup as "rsync" backup but that requires user intervention anyway. Another possibility would be a NBD device and turns it into a remote RAID device. The performance would suffer though.

Then there is a the security concern for corporate users.

Once again, these are just issues pop up in my mind, not bashing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by garyng

Quote:

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Originally Posted by conrad10781

Wow, gary, that hurts!. but to get to that point. since the WHOLE operating system isn't run remotely. it is as stable as your cd drive. the webspace that is alloted, is for user config files. IE Desktop settings, and some small files you wanted to save. IE a document or spreadsheet. Speed shouldn't be much of a problem, since the servers are on a rack, that by next week should be going from 5Mb to 10Mb, and up to 100Mb by the end of the month if things really start to pick up. We have 2 servers. one only being an entire mirror of the other, and both servers already have RAID 5 setups. I am a little bit of a overkill kind of guy anyway. I am sure one server with raid 5 is enough, but we figure if we have 2 we not only did it right, but we would have almost no downtime, as we would just switch ip's, to limit downtime to minutes ifnot seconds.

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Ah, you misunderstand me. I am not questioning your service reliability but the mode it is operating in. If I actively use this remote FS(as just another mount point), the communication channel would be the weak point, if it breaks, the open files would be gone. This is in sharp contrast with VNC/Rdesktop where I just reconnect and all my work would still be there.

I would only use this kind of setup as "rsync" backup but that requires user intervention anyway. Another possibility would be a NBD device and turns it into a remote RAID device. The performance would suffer though.

Then there is a the security concern for corporate users.

Once again, these are just issues pop up in my mind, not bashing.

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Actually its more of the same since we are using heavily modified samba shares and not a ftp filing system. if you logout and bring your cd elsewhere, if you had xmms running with a shout cast stream, and a word document up. when you brought it to your say friends house, and turned it on, all would be sitting there, just like when you left. so your relying more on the computer you aer on not crashing, just like if you always vnc/radmin'd over, you are relying on that machine to not crash. and in the same if you closed vnc and opened it elsewhere, bam, up just the same as when you left it.

local cache on usb stick?

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Originally Posted by Ghandalfar

local cache on usb stick?

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You can still mount a usb stick like you can in knoppix. Your home directory is actually off site. if you want to use a USB stick as well, that is indeed possible.

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Originally Posted by conrad10781

Actually its more of the same since we are using heavily modified samba shares and not a ftp filing system. if you logout and bring your cd elsewhere, if you had xmms running with a shout cast stream, and a word document up. when you brought it to your say friends house, and turned it on, all would be sitting there, just like when you left. so your relying more on the computer you aer on not crashing, just like if you always vnc/radmin'd over, you are relying on that machine to not crash. and in the same if you closed vnc and opened it elsewhere, bam, up just the same as when you left it.

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No way. If it is a FS, it suffers the open file problem. If I lose the connection, or the machine is switched off suddenly, I lose all my work. Whereas for VNC/Rdesktop, I only lose the session(and gained back when I reconnect, even from another place). Of course, I still relies on the server machine not crashing but being a server, it is more likely to be not crashing or reboot all the time. There is just too much unknown variable involved in a remote FS situation. Since you use samba, it is a TCP connection which even just a change in IP address at the client side(DHCP lease up, that is not uncommon) can break the link. NFS at least can withstand this kind of issue but has its own share of problems. Remote FS is simply not practical for prolong usage except for a controlled environment(LAN, corporate lease line etc.)

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