A sanity check for 'persistent store' on Knoppix from Flash

[utu]

I finally clobbered my SD Chip again, third time. .xsession-errors had nothing to do with it. I was attempting to bring in Chromium with Synaptic. Apparently over-wrote some of the system. Synaptic complained there's not enough room and quit. System in ram was obviously crippled, not responsive to command line commands. I yanked the SD Chip to avoid over-writing, but on next boot the system was obviously flawed, however minimally so. Lost some items on menu at lower left, otherwise able to post and surf, etc. Compiz still going strong. I had three ideas that have _all_ turned out not to be so. 1. I thought perhaps .xsession-errors might be eating up precious memory and causing an occasional crash; 2. I thought a crude way to avoid having to reconstitute knoppix would be to avoid an over-write on normal knoppix shut-down by yanking the SD chip; and 3. I thought some clever test might suffice to automate the intentions of thought 2. Back to the drawing board. Working within 2Gb with 250M set aside for persistent store is hazardous, given the root privilege that is ever-present in Knoppix. I'm sure Synaptic is not the only way to crash, just the latest one I've found. I still don't have an idea what I might have saved and how I might have reconstituted the system short of a full rewrite from the CD, and whether this might be preferable.

[kl522]

I'm sure Synaptic is not the only way to crash, just the latest one I've found.

From what you have described, it's obvious that this is just a disk full problem. It's not a nasty low lever driver bug, corruption or something like that. As with all disk full, it's hard to guarantee any write or saving will be at a consistent or atomic state. But if you use synaptic, it has certain degree of protection against package inconsistencies. There is not too much you can expect out of this, except just to allow more space for it.

What could constitute an issue to KNOPPIX is that, when KNOPPIX is designed to work with low capacity flash, disk full happens a lot more frequently; and when it happens, it should not put itself in a state where you can't boot anymore. A total failure to boot to me is kind of unacceptable, for something which is designed to work on flash.

Nevertheless what I have written prior to this ( #2, #4 ) are still applicable, if only one is interested to have protection over such behaviour. Recovery without wiping out everything is certainly possible, and that has been covered in some other threads.

Cheers