How to create a USB flash software repository?
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From: Kevin Nathan on 20 Jan 2010 23:35 On Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:16:16 +0100 houghi <houghi(a)houghi.org.invalid> wrote: >Flamewars are silly. Especially as everybody knows that vim is much >better then Emacs. ;-) > Both of which are just bloated fluff! Real Linux geeks use 'ed'... :-) -- Kevin Nathan (Arizona, USA) Linux Potpourri and a.o.l.s. FAQ -- (temporarily offline) Open standards. Open source. Open minds. The command line is the front line. Linux 2.6.31.8-0.1-default 21:34pm up 3 days 14:36, 17 users, load average: 0.61, 0.32, 0.15
From: script||die on 21 Jan 2010 02:03 On 01/20/2010 07:07 PM, houghi wrote: > So please explain why you need updates for offline systems (exept for > the extremely seldom situation where prgrams crash because of whatever > reason) > >> Obliquely related, I'm trying something new now, a kinda traveling home >> folder full of preconfigured files but otherwise really minimal that >> once placed just before yast creates that user result in most of the >> look & feel I want without having to go through the ritual everywhere. >> I'll see how this turns out then rethink as necessary. > > Look at /etc/skel/* > Ther you can place anything that every new user will get in its $HOME > (or is it $(HOME) ) It's several different scenarios and I'm trying to simplify (standardize) as much as I can for 30-35 people in all spread out in several locations. I never counted them yet. As for the offline, one place has a policy of all installs and updates to be done offline and only after everything is set, tested and archived is the system releasable for service. I've got used to it and it's not that much of a problem. It's the one place next to my own where one machine has /home on a separate partition. I try to run a procedure that suits the most restrictive situation and make it THE way to go. Online upgrades or installs are out of the question except to DL my hardcopy traveling repo, I'd NEVER finish otherwise. Right now what I do is prepare for an install with a clean partition into which I copy the entire old /home and /root folders. That's proven sofar to be not a bad method except when kde4 comes around, and of the so called upgrade installs I haven't seen a single one that's bulletproof. What would really be of help is an installation that keeps all of the installer's tools or wherewithall. I could make just one and use dd to spread it to every machine where on every boot it would adjust to the cpu etc in use. Something like live but on disk. The other goodie would be user folders with relative paths (~/) used. I could replicate those and then copy in the old internet wares with personal contents.
From: David Bolt on 21 Jan 2010 02:26 On Thursday 21 Jan 2010 00:16, while playing with a tin of spray paint, houghi painted this mural: > script||die wrote: >> With a usb.hd adapter and a nice 32gb usb stick I'm now in a position to >> greatly reduce the ritual-load. Just did one where I plugged in the usb, >> mounted it under the last local repo mountpoint and did the update. Went >> real easy. I'll be standardizing this method for myself in the weeks >> ahead. > > See what commands you type doing this. Put them in a file. Add > #!/biin/bash to the first line and PRESTO, your stuff is automated. ;-) Don't forget to add some error-checking so it bales out at the first problem. >> You gotta admit it had some good features, It was alright. I still preferred GEM, and not the cut-down version that ended up running on top of DOS, to Workbench. >> mine didn't even have an HD >> so it was pretty silent for one thing. Mine was as well, until I succumbed and bought a HD for it. My first was a EZ-135 removable drive,after which I chained several more drives, including a 4x SCSI CD. I think I actually ended up with a full the SCSI bus, or just one free ID, and around 2.5GB of storage. And this on a machine that couldn't take more than 4MB of memory. > My entry was the C64. I even had a floppy, a matrix AND a daisywheel > printer. My first was a ZX-81, although that was technically my fathers and was supposed to be for all us kids. In the end, I was the only one that used it. My real first, the one that was mine alone, was a Forth based Jupiter Ace. I had that until my younger brother decided it would be a good idea to pull out the RAM pack while it was turned on. After that, I had a gap of a year or two before getting hold of a few other 8-bit systems and then finally going through the ST series starting with a 520STFM, couple of 520STEs that were upgraded to the maximum 4MB, and finally a Falcon. Also added a few Acorn machines, the A3010, A4000 and a RISCPC. >> Who's got time for flamewars? I'm just catching up on what I can and am >> outta here. > > Flamewars are silly. Especially as everybody knows that vim is much > better then Emacs. ;-) Emacs isn't an editor. It's an OS that just happens to have an editor built in :) Regards, David Bolt -- Team Acorn: www.distributed.net OGR-NG @ ~100Mnodes RC5-72 @ ~1Mkeys/s openSUSE 11.0 32b | | | openSUSE 11.3M0 32b openSUSE 11.0 64b | openSUSE 11.1 64b | openSUSE 11.2 64b | TOS 4.02 | openSUSE 11.1 PPC | RISC OS 4.02 | RISC OS 3.11
From: J. van der Waa on 21 Jan 2010 02:35 Stephen Horne wrote: > Thanks everyone - particular for the rsync, zypper etc tips. > Before you start upgrading your old laptop consider the following: I had a very nice Compaq Armada 6500 laptop running 10.3 fine, but upgrading it to a newer version of Open Suse, it turned out that the latest developments were a little bit too much for the poor thing (especially KDE 4). Since it was really only a spare pc (still with a serial port, handy for communicating with my Garmin GPS), I finally did the best thing I could do: I pulled out the old windows restore CD (W95 :-) ), restored the whole bunch to its original state and went to the recently opened Correct Computer Museam in Rotterdam. The laptop is now on display with the small additional text "the very last original Compaq laptop before they were taken over by HP". It is happily standing together with the Toshiba Equium 2000 desktop (which even couldn't run properly Damn Small Linux or Puppy linux any more because of lack of memory). I think it was a very sensible move, which also pleased my wife (one old pc less in the house). For those living in Holland (or if you are visiting our country): it is a very nice museum. It started as a radio museum, but recenlty that have added a television and computer section. More info can be found on http://www.correct.nl/agendapunt.php?DIRECTORY=museum&PAGE=0&DIVISIE= (sorry, but all i Dutch). Joost
From: David Bolt on 21 Jan 2010 04:49
On Wednesday 20 Jan 2010 20:39, while playing with a tin of spray paint, Stephen Horne painted this mural: > On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:46:47 +0000, David Bolt > <blacklist-me(a)davjam.org> wrote: > >>From my point of view, there's a heck of a difference. Apart from >>anything else, I'm still not convinced about the long term reliability >>of memory based devices. Then again, I've not used any memory devices >>heavily for long enough to make any of them fail. > > Hard disks fail. Personally, I've managed to only have one fail myself > in quite a few years - and that one was brand new. I've had several fail over the years, and have most of the magnets from inside them to prove it :) Usually, I find that it's the higher capacity drives that were bought not too long after they were released that fail quicker than the older drives. I still have one system using its original *16 year old 80MB* drive that has had absolutely zero issues. > Until recently, I > haven't kept my machines more than 2 or 3 years before replacing them, > but that's a thing of the past now. I tend to hoard parts and, once I have enough to build a "new" machine with them, I do so. That's one of the reasons I'm surrounded by 7 other PCs, as well as the various other non-PC systems. > My father just had two hard drives fail in the same machine within two > months. The only problem with that is that he still "can't understand" > backups. I know people like that. Luckily, I've only ever had to do data recovery from one of them, and that was before the drive completely failed. >> I tend to use a >>memory card or two for a few years, then upgrade them to cards of two >>to four times the size. As for USB keys, the only reason I have any >>other than the first 512MB one I bought is because someone else got me >>them as gifts. I rarely use them and, if I didn't have them, wouldn't >>really miss them. > > I used a 1GB stick for maybe 4 years for my main local subversion > repository. It's a very convenient way of keeping all your own files > in sync on several machines, with a lot of additional benefits - > though no good for large collections of photos or videos, of course. That would be my main issue. I have about 50GB of photos and only another 20GB of videos that I've taken over the years. Having said that, I still have to transfer several of my home movie tapes to disc and then onto DVD. > At the moment, all my local repositories are on a 250GB laptop-sized > external hard drive, but that just isn't as convenient. I'll probably > move them to a 4GB stick some time soon. You might want more than a 4GB stick. My own mirrors are too big for a 160GB drive, so would need a 250GB drive, if I was to keep them on the one drive. If I cut it back to just a single 11.2 release, I could get it down to just 17-18GB, but that wouldn't be much use as I have more than just 11.2 running. > Oh - and for anyone who's interested, you can keep a subversion > repository on an NTFS partition (FAT is best avoided) and share it > between Windows and Linux. You may need to install and play with > ntfs-config though - my guess is that this is necessary if you > upgraded from OpenSUSE 11.1 to 11.2 rather than doing a clean > re-install. Without it, NTFS partitions are always mounted as > read-only. Manual mounting with ntfs-3g has worked for several releases. I know it works with 10.3, although can't say if it did with 10.2 or earlier. I could always dig out the installation media to find out which one was the first to contain it. > Despite very regular use, the only problem I've ever had with a memory > stick is that the 16GB stick I chose badly, and paid too much for, is > very slow. It's the writes that are, supposedly, the issue. Reading them over and over is fine. And there's an interesting thought. If a USB stick is has file system that supports separate access time time-stamps, do they get mounted with noatime or not? If they do, reading the files won't update the access time. If they don't, each time a file is read, there's going to be a write as well. I think I'll have to dig out one of my USB keys, put and ext2/3 file system on it and do some checking. > The only storage medium that has proved seriously unreliable over the > last 10 years is optical disks. You didn't use floppies very much then? I still have 3.5" DD floppies that are readable even after 20 years. I have also binned HD floppies that weren't readable after 20 minutes. As for CDs and DVDs, I've had mixed results. Some brands/dyes[0] have lasted better than others. I have 10yo CDs that are readable, as well as 7yo DVDs. I also have binned CDs and DVDs that became unreadable after only a few years. > Since you can now buy 3.5in internal > hard drives for not much more per GB that DVD-Rs, The last DVD+Rs I bought were Verbatim branded and, with postage, cost me £22 for 100. They work out to be about £0.05 per GiB. The unbranded DVD-Rs I bought at the same time cost me another £11 for 100, and they work out to be £0.025 per GiB. My last hard drive was a 1TB device (931.5GiB) and cost me £66.23, and so worked out to be £0.071 per GiB. So, at the moment, even the expensive DVD+Rs are about 30% cheaper per GiB, and the unbranded ones are 65% cheaper. Of course, the hard drives have the advantage that they can store a lot more on the single device, and so take up less room when your transferring more than 10GB, but they also have the disadvantage that they're in need of more care when being transported, especially to protect against shocks. > and certainly less > per GB that DVD-RWs, That I will agree with. I paid £14.01 for 20 DVD+RWs, which works out to be about £0.15 per GiB, or roughly twice that of the 1TB drive. > the answer is to probably think of a docking > station as the drive and the internal hard drives as the media. I've looked at that idea and may even get one in the future. > Now all we need is storage cases for hard drives. What did I do with > all those VHS cases, I wonder... :-) [0] The ones I use at the moment are either DVD-Rs with the media ID TYG02/3, or DVD+Rs with the media ID YUDEN000/T03. I also have several DVD+RWs with the media ID RICOHJPN/W21 which have also shown themselves to be reliable. Regards, David Bolt -- Team Acorn: www.distributed.net OGR-NG @ ~100Mnodes RC5-72 @ ~1Mkeys/s openSUSE 11.0 32b | | | openSUSE 11.3M0 32b openSUSE 11.0 64b | openSUSE 11.1 64b | openSUSE 11.2 64b | TOS 4.02 | openSUSE 11.1 PPC | RISC OS 4.02 | RISC OS 3.11 |