In case it is useful for anyone. Salix 14.0 Live XFCE beta1

[djemos]

About the installer. For those want to install to hard disk and use a separate partition for /home i correct a bug in the installer.
So before do this download installer from here
and from live environment reinstall it. Then run the installer and proceed to installation.

[mimosa]

@djemos
The stick boots without persistence, but there is still no fstab. During boot, there is a message about this, where it says remounting root filesystem rw mount salt on /, something like that, then it says there is no / in fstab or mtab.

The iso md5sum is correct and I followed the steps as described in the post where I posted the md5sum. That is, I loop mounted the iso and place the contents on the stick with rsync, then I replaced initrd.xz with your new version, then ran install-on-usb.sh.

I will have another go and report back.

What is the correct md5sum of the initrd download? Sorry if this is posted above ...

[djemos]

@mimosa
writing this from live usb stick

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one[~]$ cat /etc/fstab 
one[~]$ 

there is no entries in /etc/fstab

Look on /etc/mtab

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one[~]$ cat /etc/mtab 
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs rw 0 0
/dev/sda1 /media/SYSTEM fuseblk rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,noatime,allow_other,blksize=4096,default_permissions 0 0
/dev/sda2 /media/sda2-ata-ST9320325AS_6VD5 fuseblk rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,noatime,allow_other,blksize=4096,default_permissions 0 0
/dev/sda3 /media/HP_TOOLS vfat rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,noatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,uid=1000,gid=100,utf8 0 0
/dev/sda5 /media/sda5-ata-ST9320325AS_6VD5 ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime 0 0
/dev/sda6 /media/sda6-ata-ST9320325AS_6VD5 ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime 0 0
/dev/sda8 /media/sda8-ata-ST9320325AS_6VD5 ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime 0 0
/dev/sda9 /media/sda9-ata-ST9320325AS_6VD5 ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime 0 0

output of blkid

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root[one]# blkid 
/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs" 
/dev/loop1: TYPE="squashfs" 
/dev/loop2: TYPE="squashfs" 
/dev/loop3: TYPE="squashfs" 
/dev/loop4: TYPE="squashfs" 
/dev/loop5: TYPE="squashfs" 
/dev/sda1: LABEL="SYSTEM" UUID="D01C6A6A1C6A4C12" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sda2: UUID="C20AB5580AB54A65" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sda3: LABEL="HP_TOOLS" UUID="E436-FA33" TYPE="vfat" 
/dev/sda5: UUID="8186eb92-e0ed-44e3-84a8-6528312545df" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sda6: UUID="1612abfb-8fc3-4284-99f8-2a5cd38ba920" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sda7: UUID="ec2d69c7-4379-419f-8f0f-c2ad09cfc059" TYPE="swap" 
/dev/sda8: UUID="7890d096-3e87-4ec1-b07c-9d171217331f" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sda9: UUID="352a08b8-fe0a-42e1-87ff-37d7c7501cc4" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sdb1: UUID="CCEC-773D" TYPE="vfat"

[mimosa]

djemos, are you saying that is how it is meant to be? And what output do you get from df?

Anyway, I will try again.

[djemos]

I have mounted all filesystems first

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one[~]$ df -ah
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
proc               0     0     0    - /proc
sysfs              0     0     0    - /sys
/dev/sda1       199M   29M  171M  15% /media/SYSTEM
/dev/sda2       121G  118G  3,6G  98% /media/sda2-ata-ST9320325AS_6VD5
/dev/sda3       100M   14M   86M  14% /media/HP_TOOLS
/dev/sda5        19G  9,3G  8,0G  54% /media/sda5-ata-ST9320325AS_6VD5
/dev/sda6        68G   63G  1,5G  98% /media/sda6-ata-ST9320325AS_6VD5
/dev/sda8        64G   59G  2,1G  97% /media/sda8-ata-ST9320325AS_6VD5
/dev/sda9        20G   17G  1,9G  90% /media/sda9-ata-ST9320325AS_6VD5

Umount all

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one[~]$ df -ah
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
proc               0     0     0    - /proc
sysfs              0     0     0    - /sys

[mimosa]

FWIW:

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root[one]# cat /etc/fstab
root[one]# blkid
/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs" 
/dev/loop1: TYPE="squashfs" 
/dev/loop2: TYPE="squashfs" 
/dev/loop3: TYPE="squashfs" 
/dev/loop4: TYPE="squashfs" 
/dev/loop5: TYPE="squashfs" 
/dev/sda1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL="DellUtility" UUID="5450-4444" TYPE="vfat" 
/dev/sda2: LABEL="RECOVERY" UUID="6E96E93696E90007" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sda3: LABEL="OS" UUID="321CEC3F1CEBFC2B" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sdb1: UUID="5FD0-4C2E" TYPE="vfat" 
root[one]# cat /etc/mtab
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs rw 0 0
gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/one/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,user=one 0 0
root[one]# df -ah
Filesystem        Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
proc                 0     0     0    - /proc
sysfs                0     0     0    - /sys
gvfs-fuse-daemon  0.0K  0.0K  0.0K    - /home/one/.gvfs

[djemos]

mount filesystems first

without mount anything

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cat /etc/mtab 
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs rw 0 0

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one[~]$ df -ah
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
proc               0     0     0    - /proc
sysfs              0     0     0    - /sys

about this is because you run salix live
gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/one/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,user=one 0 0
I run openboxlive and i dont have gvfs there. so it is ok.

1. Now reboot and boot from hard disk
after booting plug in the usb-stick and mount it.

2. download one of these initrd files (i486 or x86_64) and copy them to /media/5FD0-4C2E/boot/ (be sure to check mount point if you run salix it will be mounted to /run/media/... so replace /media with yours )
become root

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su

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cp initrd.xz  /media/5FD0-4C2E/boot/

3.

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cd  /media//5FD0-4C2E/salixlive/persistence/

4. make the persistence file. In fat filesystem persistence file size have to be less than 4096 (file size < 4096)
make a 500MB file.

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dd if=/dev/zero of=salixlive.save bs=1M count=500

5. format to xfs

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mkfs.xfs -f salixlive.save

6. umount USB stick and reboot

[mimosa]

I installed a few small apps and rebooted. All still there. I installed multimedia codecs and vlc - all appeared fine though I didn't reboot or even play anything. Then I installed ghc (also a big package) and the installation hangs, nothing works any more.

Could be:

1) a fault with the ghc package

2) ghc + vlc is too much for Live's "working" memory (it's not the size of persistence, I made 2.5GB)

I suppose the next test is to make a new empty persistent file, and try just vlc plus codecs. Then another blank persistent file, try just ghc.

EDIT

In fact, it is fine. The installation is successful if left well alone. But just installing qt, for instance, causes the system to freeze for forty minutes.

On reboot, saving the persistent file doesn't cause an appreciable delay.

I am now trying installing ghc again - the system is frozen and it is impossible to run any other applications. When the same thing happened with qt before, I was eventually able to open another xterm instance in screen, and then htop. Memory usage is low (with nearly 4GB to spare).

Could it be something to do with having no swap partition on the host machine's HD?

[djemos]

I have made a 2GB persistence and installed k3b, vlc, qt, mozilla, supertux, supertux2 and it was full. Having a 4GB persistence it was enough to install libreoffice too.
When installing a lot of files there are times system is slow but never freeze. This is ok since write to persistence. I have 2GB of memory in a core duo system.
After installing my programs system runs very fast.
You can activate swap. I have done this even it is not used since memory is 2GB.
It is very good to have persistence. It is good to compile programms also.

[mimosa]

So basically, everything is actually ok (whatever went wrong before) and having swap would speed up persistence?

I suppose normally, when I have used Live, there has been swap (or I have created it). Not here ... but there is 4GB RAM.

EDIT

I left the machine on overnight installing ghc - it was completely unresponsive. This morning it had finished and things like moving around in screen worked, but I tried opening midori and gslapt, and the system appeared to freeze again. I suspect they would have opened eventually if I waited. On reboot, the system responds at normal speed. During shutdown, there was a pause of about thirty seconds while "unmounting swap".

So it seems in such a situation, having ample RAM (4GB) is no help. htop told me about 250 MB was in use during the installation of vlc, and I think most of that was from a browser that was open with a tab or two..

One little thing - SHut down from the logout menu seems to do the same as Log out. You get to a login screen. It is possible to shut down from there.