topic title: Antix 16.2 USB Persistence Fails To Create rootfs and homefs
Posts: 26
calinb
Joined: 27 Jun 2017
#31
BitJam wrote:We have a couple of forums for that sort of thing:
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and
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come to mind.
I just replied to a kafeneio post and I think I'll duplicate some of my introduction her in"welcome-to-antiX." I think I'll be here (using antiX) for awhile so I must put down some roots. Thanks!
BitJam wrote:Gentoo on the other hand was really easy. They gave me clear instructions for doing everything from the command line including compiling a kernel.
Yes. Isn't Gentoo fantastic that way! Gentoo is a distro that really DOES require instructions (or a"manual"). Its goals are contrary to a"turn-key" distro model. I wish I had enough cheap Internet bits at my disposal here in the country to run it again. Honestly, I need the GNU/Linux refresher course it would provide to me. Okay...now I'll get somewhat back on topic for my final comment and then move this personal stuff over to the other forums.
BitJam wrote: The live system is still clunky from cd or usb-1.x but it really flies with usb-3.0. I once did a frugal install to an internal ssd that booted to bash in about 5 seconds and got to X-windows in less than 10 seconds (something like that).
My USB stick boot is fast and I'm not at all impatient with it using my netbook's USB 2 interface, and even an antiX CD boots much faster than an Ubuntu live CD. I'm so impressed, I think I'll even try a live minimal antiX boot over USB 1.1 on my old PII Presario laptop. If it works well enough to run shorewall firewall, I'll really be in love with antiX! Shorewall has everything I've ever needed in a firewall (iptables frontend and manager).
Posts: 1,308
BitJam
Joined: 31 Aug 2009
#32
I got involved with antiX and Mepis because (Gentoo-based) SysRescueCD went through a rough patch. The console framebuffer was broken so if X wasn't working, you only had a 80x25 screen which was very cramped. My thinking was that a RescueCD/USB should be able to handle the console well. AntiX had a framebuffer console and booted very fast. I tried fixing SysRescueCD but that was not much fun. I think that experience led me in the direction of trying to make it as easy as possible for people to customize our system however they want.

I was still spoiled by the Gentoo-way so I wanted zsh and I wanted console decorations. My desire for being able to add zsh to antiX is what started me down the path of the live system with persistence and remastering. Oh yes, the existing live system back then had a lot of problems which I eventually fixed over the years. Perhaps out of inertia, I'm still working on improving the console-only experience in antiX. Almost all of my programs work in the console and many of my programs work in both the console and in X-windows.

You'd think that with all the advances in the kernel and other things, building a reliable live system would be a piece of cake by now. Unfortunately, upstream keeps throwing us curveballs. Their basic assumption seems to be that people on older systems should add hardware specific boot parameters to get their machines to boot at all so that things are slightly more convenient on the newer machines. But forcing people to manually add boot parameters is the opposite of what we're trying to do. We trying to get the system to boot into a reasonable configuration OOTB with zero or minimal intervention by the user. So we are often going through back-flips and contortions to counteract these"improvements" and modernizations flowing down from upstream so people can boot into X on older hardware. At the same time we want to work well on newer hardware. In antiX-17 I've finally been able to get the consoles to work reasonably well OOTB on a wide range of hardware without any manual adjustments by the user.
Posts: 148
figosdev
Joined: 29 Jun 2017
#33
the goals of antix seem entirely reasonable. if i had to maintain it (well beyond my own skills) the main intended difference would be a small one:

the libre kernel/libre version of antix doesnt have x. i get it, build your own and snapshot. but if it were mine, it would be upside down-- the libre version would be the priority, there would be a libre version with x and icewm, and any version with non-free codecs or kernel blobs would be the side thing. (for fans of antix i suppose its good that im not in charge then. not that id be up to it anyway.)

my own thing starts with a distro that has x as well as the standard debian/devuan kernel. i can install x from a debian-based system that doesnt have it. i have yet to brave making mkfigos do that. i have never needed it to, but if refracta stopped being refracta and i went to antix instead, thats what i would probably have to do-- get mkfigos to add all thats needed for x. that would certainly be an adventure. i am truly impressed with antix, and the best distros i know right now are refracta, devuan live and antix. ive already spent more time with antix than devuan live.
Posts: 26
calinb
Joined: 27 Jun 2017
#34
BitJam wrote:Perhaps out of inertia, I'm still working on improving the console-only experience in antiX. Almost all of my programs work in the console and many of my programs work in both the console and in X-windows.
Your efforts and contributions are significant! I've always had the impression that persistence and live-boot features are a tricky undertaking, but didn't know why there are so many challenges. Thanks for taking the time to share a bit from behind the scenes with me.
BitJam wrote:Unfortunately, upstream keeps throwing us curveballs.
Live systems have real value--much more so than many other features that differentiate distros from one another. For example, I tried Peppermint. It touts web ap integration with ICE as its special feature. I wasn't even looking for such a thing but tried it anyway and confirmed my preconceived suspicions to be true; using a conventionally configured browser and bookmarks worked better for me than launching the ICE-configured dedicated web ap browser windows!

On the other hand, understanding the live features of antiX gives me new ideas about how to leverage its capabilities. For example, I'd like to boot my old PII laptop from its CD drive (the only boot device provided, other than the hard disk) and access homefs and rootfs on its NTFS hard disk drive. I'll use it to run shorewall firewall. The only reason that I keep this old machine is to run dat2file under XP, which I use to extract video files from my old mode2 CDXA CDs ("XCDs"). dat2file is not longer supported on Linux or Windows and the Windows version is the only one I can get to run anymore. It doesn't seem to run under WINE either. I haven't even been able to find the complete source code online for the old XCD tools Linux and Windows projects.

Do I need new initrd files (other than the 2b files you provided) to run antiX base or core from a CD and access the persistence files on my old machine's NTFS hard drive?

Thanks!
Posts: 1,308
BitJam
Joined: 31 Aug 2009
#35
calinb wrote:I'd like to boot my old PII laptop from its CD drive (the only boot device provided, other than the hard disk) and access homefs and rootfs on its NTFS hard disk drive. I'll use it to run shorewall firewall.
For performance, I'd suggest doing a frugal install to the NTFS partition if you have the space (basically enough space to hold the iso file). If you have the RAM available (you probably don't) then the toram option will make it even faster. OTOH, if you are running out of ram then you can get some savings by using static root persistence at the cost of lower performance.

We offer to do the frugal install automatically for you on the first frugal boot. It will boot right into the frugal system after copying the files over. No need to reboot. This must be the fastest full-featured Linux install possible. On a modern system, it takes less than 30 seconds from initial boot to be running on the newly installed system. It will take much longer on your system (assuming antiX even works on it).

On subsequent boots, if you select frugal from the F5 menu then the boot will start with us getting the kernel and the initrd from the CD but then we will get the linuxfs file and the persistence files from the hard drive. They are stored in a directory named something like /antiX-Frugal-$KERNEL_NAME/ so you can have multiple frugal installs on the same partition and they won't conflict. You are restricted to only one frugal install per distro + kernel but that has never been a cause for complaint (so far). to some extent our live boot system is keyed off of the name of the directory that contains the linuxfs file. We call this the"boot directory" and you can set it with the cheat"bdir=xxx".

This makes it easy to have multiple MX and antiX systems on the same live-usb. Just put all of the files for each system in its own boot directory and pass us the name of that directory as a boot parameter. Example:

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LABEL antiX-16.2
    MENU LABEL antiX-16.2_x64-full (11 July 2017)
    KERNEL /antiX-16.2/vmlinuz
    APPEND quiet bdir=antiX-16.2 splash=v disable=lx
    INITRD /antiX-16.2/initrd.gz
Then each distro can have its own saved state, its own persistence and remastering and so on. The ~/Live-usb-storage/ directories will be shared between distros (based on username) but I see that as a feature, not a bug.

Here is a tip. If you figure out what boot parameters you want as the default for your live-cd, you could edit the file /boot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg to add them to the default entry (or add another entry as a default) before making the cd. This way you won't have to remember what boot parameters you want to use (although taping a piece of paper to the machine works well too).
Do I need new initrd files (other than the 2b files you provided) to run antiX base or core from a CD and access the persistence files on my old machine's NTFS hard drive?
The same initrd will work for all of them. The live initrd does not change with flavour (full, base, core), but it does change with 32-bit versus 64-bit.
Posts: 26
calinb
Joined: 27 Jun 2017
#36
BitJam wrote:For performance, I'd suggest doing a frugal install to the NTFS partition if you have the space (basically enough space to hold the iso file). If you have the RAM available (you probably don't) then the toram option will make it even faster. OTOH, if you are running out of ram then you can get some savings by using static root persistence at the cost of lower performance.

We offer to do the frugal install automatically for you on the first frugal boot. It will boot right into the frugal system after copying the files over. No need to reboot. This must be the fastest full-featured Linux install possible. On a modern system, it takes less than 30 seconds from initial boot to be running on the newly installed system. It will take much longer on your system (assuming antiX even works on it).

On subsequent boots, if you select frugal from the F5 menu then the boot will start with us getting the kernel and the initrd from the CD but then we will get the linuxfs file and the persistence files from the hard drive.

<snip>
I booted antiX-base system from CD on my old PII and it worked. I was worried that the core-libre version would not have the wifi adapter drivers I need. I'll need both my Netgear WAB501 and Intel Pro 100 Cardbus cards to function in order to use this old machine as a shorewall firewall (WAN side is wifi to my smartphone hotspot and local side goes to a 10/100 switch).

X didn't boot but I don't need X to run shorewall. I tried to logon as root, as prompted, to use the cli installer, but maybe I wasn't quick enough. (I wasn't closely monitoring the very slow CD boot process on this old machine). I just got a blank screen and no other consoles after X loaded. ctl-alt-bksp didn't kill X either so I guess the system was down. I added"3" to the option line for the next boot and it worked (or maybe I was just quicker to logon as root when given the opportunity, which kept it in run level 3). The NTFS hard disk partition mounts and cli-installer launches but I'll be away from home for about a week and will have to play with this after I return (get the network started and connected to my smartphone). Then I'll try a frugal install but initial indications are that it should work. Thanks!
Posts: 26
calinb
Joined: 27 Jun 2017
#37
calinb wrote:
BitJam wrote:For performance, I'd suggest doing a frugal install to the NTFS partition if you have the space (basically enough space to hold the iso file). If you have the RAM available (you probably don't) then the toram option will make it even faster. OTOH, if you are running out of ram then you can get some savings by using static root persistence at the cost of lower performance.

We offer to do the frugal install automatically for you on the first frugal boot. It will boot right into the frugal system after copying the files over. No need to reboot. This must be the fastest full-featured Linux install possible. On a modern system, it takes less than 30 seconds from initial boot to be running on the newly installed system. It will take much longer on your system (assuming antiX even works on it).

On subsequent boots, if you select frugal from the F5 menu then the boot will start with us getting the kernel and the initrd from the CD but then we will get the linuxfs file and the persistence files from the hard drive.

<snip>
I booted antiX-base system from CD on my old PII and it worked. I was worried that the core-libre version would not have the wifi adapter drivers I need. I'll need both my Netgear WAB501 and Intel Pro 100 Cardbus cards to function in order to use this old machine as a shorewall firewall (WAN side is wifi to my smartphone hotspot and local side goes to a 10/100 switch).

X didn't boot but I don't need X to run shorewall. I tried to logon as root, as prompted, to use the cli installer, but maybe I wasn't quick enough. (I wasn't closely monitoring the very slow CD boot process on this old machine). I just got a blank screen and no other consoles after X loaded. ctl-alt-bksp didn't kill X either so I guess the system was down. I added"3" to the option line for the next boot and it worked (or maybe I was just quicker to logon as root when given the opportunity, which kept it in run level 3). The NTFS hard disk partition mounted and cli-installer launched but I terminated the installer. I'll be away from home for about a week and will have to play with this after I return (get the network started and connected to my smartphone). Then I'll try a frugal install but initial indications are that it should work. Thanks!
Posts: 1,308
BitJam
Joined: 31 Aug 2009
#38
calinb wrote:I booted antiX-base system from CD on my old PII and it worked.
Wow! I'm impressed! Glad to hear it.
X didn't boot [...]
No surprise.
I added"3" to the option line for the next boot and it worked.
Yes, that should work (unless something is broken). No need to race to login. I usually boot to runlevel 3. If I want to start X I run"telinit 5". I suggest using the cheats:

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fdb+ 3
If it says"fdb+" is unrecognised then use"db+" instead. This will automatically log you in as root on vt2 -- vt4. The fdb+ version will also switch you to vt2 ("f" for fast) and it won't pause when the system shuts down (unless it is a live-cd/dvd). In addition you get a fancy Bash prompt which you can customize. Use"prompt-usage" for info. In antiX-17 we also tie the page-up and page-down keys in Bash to history search (by uncommenting the history-search lines in /etc/inputrc).
Then I'll try a frugal install but initial indications are that it should work. Thanks!
Excellent!

The frugal system should be faster than an installed system unless you add a lot of stuff to the file system and start running low on RAM. Only accessing the compressed linuxfs file enhances performance by reducing seek times. If you can get a network connection with antiX-core, you should be able to add the wireless drivers you need and then remaster. You could also purge the stuff you don't need. I recommend using gzip compression for the new linuxfs file. It will be about 20% bigger but it should be a little faster. OTOH, I imagine antiX-base will be fine and the performance optimization of starting with base may not be noticeable.

Too many notes:

The compressed linux kernel loads faster than the uncompressed linux kernel because decompression is fast and can keep pace with reading data from the disk. There is a limit to this though. We use gzip compression for the initrd, but use xz for the linuxfs. You can notice notice the extra delay when decompressing an xz initrd versus a gzip initrd. The space savings for using xz on the initrd are small (20% x 4Meg = 800K). OTOH, we get significant space savings using xz for the linuxfs. It is slower than using gzip but the space savings are worth it, roughly 20%. We try to take this into account when estimating sizes before we rebuild the linuxfs file in live-remaster.

On Gentoo for many years I used xfs with the smallest block size possible for /usr/portage/ and got much better performance which I believe was due to reduced seek times. Seek times are orders of magnitude longer than most other time scales that affect performance. They have not changed drastically in the last 30 years, going down only a factor of 3 or 4. OTOH the performance of CPUs has been totally transformed in that timespan. A lot of this was due to the introduction of SSE instructions (which is the difference between Pentium-II and Pentium-III). The MFLOPS of laptop I bought 10 years ago were better than the MFLOPS of
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I worked on 20 years ago.

Many years ago I built some servers for the university where I was teaching. They got me a fancy system with 4 disks configured as RAID"so it would be really fast". I took apart the RAID and used the disks individually to boost performance. For example, I gave /var its own disk to reduce the seeks between writing log files and doing other things. If you listen closely, you can hear the difference.
Posts: 26
calinb
Joined: 27 Jun 2017
#39
BitJam wrote: On Gentoo for many years I used xfs with the smallest block size possible for /usr/portage/ and got much better performance which I believe was due to reduced seek times. Seek times are orders of magnitude longer than most other time scales that affect performance.
I did the same with XFS on Gentoo! I was into video and had a Gentoo video server in my basement. We video addicts knew about the benefits of small block size. It had mythtv installed and a couple of ATSC capture cards for simultaneous over the air (OTA) digital TV capture and another one for K band satellite. I also had a hacked C band digital decoder box hooked up to the Gentoo server via firewire (and later USB). I was happy to pay for my 4DTV subs for the decoder box, but wanted to serve the HD content from my Gentoo video server. Fun stuff, but I don't have time for it these days with too many other interests.
Posts: 4
jono
Joined: 06 Jun 2012
#40
BitJam wrote: I tracked the problem down to a mismatch in libraries in the initrd versus the main file system.  I fixed this mismatch which solved the segfault problem.

You can fix an existing antiX-16.2_386 live-usb by downloading the file initrd-16.2.gz from
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and then using it to replace the file /antiX/initrd.gz on the live-usb.  You can also replace /antiX/initrd.gz.md5 with initrd-16.2.gz.md5 from the Dropbox folder.
I tried that several times with the 2b-versions of the files by renaming them after having deleted the original files. That didn't work for me: I got always kernel panics.

Questions:

- If I update the kernel with live-kernel-updater to one of Stevo's Liquorix-kernels from the opensuse repository, will the generated initrd be automatically fixed by such an update?

- Would a dist-upgrade starting from 16.1 avoid the initrd-bug?

Some background:

a friend of mine is a musician and she wants to produce music using her old Acer netbook from 2009. So I would like to install on it some kxstudio packages using a Antix-frugal installation.

I tried that on Antix 17. But  the kxstudio-meta-audio package cannot be installed on 17. The additional packages for stretch were installed though.

Any advice highly appreciated.
Posts: 156
caprea
Joined: 08 Jan 2014
#41

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Posts: 4
jono
Joined: 06 Jun 2012
#42
caprea wrote:
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Can you explain what you mean? Should I Post in the new forum?
Posts: 1,445
skidoo
Joined: 09 Feb 2012
#43
Yes, go to
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and post there.