Customized and always ToRam possible?

[Member p-smith]

Hello.

I discovered AntiX recently and so far I was able to boot it from USB, no problems, use the toram option from boot menu, no problem so far.

Later I wanted to try persistency, so booted from USB to RAM and used the installer to wipe the USB and install AntiX onto it. Now I can use the same USB no matter on which PC, have all the same programs ready to go and the files on a separate FAT32 partition if I want to copy something when on a Windows PC, awesome so far.

Now I’ve got a couple of PCs but without harddisk’s so my idea is to have them without keyboard/mouse/monitor, plug the USB into the first one, turn on, wait a few minutes until AntiX loads from USB to RAM, then unplug the USB and go on with the second PC, and so on. Then they would all start the same system, auto/no login, automatically start a software that lets them communicate with my server who then distributes computation tasks to them.

I already thought using debian/ubuntu and let them do PXE network boot from the server, but that never worked or I was doing something wrong.

So question is:
is it possible to have a customized AntiX system that automatically boots into RAM, and if so: how?

[Forum Admin dolphin_oracle]

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the standard live-USB can toram, as you’ve discovered. the live system also supports persistence, although that can take a lot of ram.

If I understand correctly, you could customize a single usb with persistence with whatever apps you need, then remaster that system using the remaster tools in antiX to compress the persitence file information back into the linuxfs squash file. then “toram” will load all your customizations in the most effcient way possible.

toram does not work on an “installed” system, just the live-USB.

I have many videos about live-USB life on my youtube channel, youtube.com/runwiththedolphin. the antiX 17 and MX 17 videos on liveUSB are pretty interchangeable.

[Member p-smith]

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Yeah, toram with no installed system is what I want. But why can’t we do what OS vendors do?

People can boot OS from an ISO on the filesystem,
people can boot entire Windows from a vmdk file,
people can bundle OS and software to docker containers and spawn them endlessly,
people can build live systems that come with preinstalled software like AntiX does.

How could I? And if it’s complex and takes time I’ll go that way but I don’t know it yet.

Is it maybe possible to at least inject one little bash script into a live USB toram system that then gets executed after startup?
I mean a live USB of Ubuntu is able to display a ‘try out or install’ window after live boot toram, so must be possible. What am I missing?

[Anonymous]

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“What am I missing?”

https://antixlinux.com/the-most-extensive-live-usb-on-the-planet

http://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/docs-antiX-17/FAQ/remaster.html

https://mxlinux.org/search/node/remaster

[Forum Admin dolphin_oracle]

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making a live-usb with persistence is easy. here’s a video walking through the process, as well as some more in-depth explantion of how the system works. The gui-tool in use has been updated since the video was made, but all the options are still present.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq0mRZh2hiY

remastering a live-usb is also easy. here’s another video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpI_a4xPKdM

as to launching scripts…of course its possible. What the script does and when you want the script to execute are important factors in setting things like that up.

[Member p-smith]

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Thanks 736b69646f6f,
I know now that I missed two things:
1. don’t forget to press F8 xD
2. understand ‘remastering’ correctly

dolphin_oracle, yeah, saw these vids before but never watched to the end.
I always tried ‘persistent’ and it said it couldn’t find a persit partition, so I used installer on desktop from a ‘live toram’, yeah actually wiped the USB and installed a system and been stuck in that idea, it was persistent in terms of being installed, but that couldn’t do a ‘toram’ for any PC, stupid me.

Thanks to both of you I now correctly used that live usb gui maker thing and got it working on first attempt, actually writing this text from that system. ^^

Btw. thanks about the hint with the script, I already know it has to launch somehow after network start.

Edit: I now set up autologin and put (to test it) firefox into ~/.icewm/startup and it just worked instantly.

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