Although I haven't used Ubuntu much in the past few months, while I've been on a spree of trying out every Linux distro out there, I was just reading a few of the newest posts on Pendrivelinux.com. If you noticed, I just put an icon up to the right linking to the great website. Still, I had to wonder, why not dynamic?
Ubuntu is great for getting people into using Linux. If it weren't for Ubuntu, I'm sure I would have been almost as frustrated as when I used Vista and deleted my Linux partition instead of my Windows one. In that case, I would still be dealing with ridiculous file transfer times to my flash drive.
Still, to get to my point, Ubuntu has taken a great step forward with the release of 8.10 due to its program for installing to a flash drive persistently. Yet, while simpler, it does not do it as well as Sabayon. Sabayon has XsistenCe instead of Casper. XsistenCe allows users to have a loop file to persistently save their changes onto, and this file is always about the right size to fit the files. (Mine, for example, only wastes 5MB of space.) In Ubuntu, however, the file stays one size and therefore causes the installation of the flash drive to take a much longer time than it needs to and it wastes exorbitant amounts space on the flash drive.
Futher, this is the same technology used by Puppy for years! Surely we've made it past this time. Linux-on-USB technology has been so rapidly increasing lately, all distros should try to use the best tech, because it is out there!
This is why I propose creating scripts for a new type of persistence based on Xsistence called Vigilance.
Vigilance will, just like XsistenCe, search for a flash drive/partition with a blank file with a certain name, possibly vigilance.ext2, much like GRUB's find command. Then it will use dd and mkfs to create a loop file to store the contents of /home onto upon shutdown, since the OS will be using either UnionFS or AUFS. Since this file will most likely only be a few MBs if it just holds settings, simple commands to read the size of /home will help the scripts make a new loop file each time the minimum necessary size to hold the contents. Then upon booting, the contents can be copied to the ramdisk or mounted as a /home partition.
If anyone has any ideas on how to go about making these scripts, tell me. I am trying to discern the contents of initrd files. Elive has in its eli script a setting for booting from different loop files such as iso's and even directories. I plan on basing my scripts off of these, but there might be a better way. I am in the midst of learning to script myself. Luckily I have books at home on more than 15 languages.
As a disclaimer, I have not actually tried out Ubuntu's flash installer yet. I'll tell you how it goes when I do.
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