Persistence

[Member chrishall57]

Morning all!

Got some issues around persistence on the live usb.

Everything installed OK, got connman working thanks to Xecure’s excellent video and walk through.

However, aside from the wifi every other customisation I make is being forgotten between reboots, not between sessions though.

Time and Date – set through the control centre. Not kept.

Keyboard layout – set through the control centre. Not kept.

Printing – start cups by command line and add network printer via localhost:631. Not kept.

Additional software – Thunderbird, Claws added via Software Installer. Not kept.

Is there an idiots guide for live usb persistence anywhere?

Thanks.

[Member ModdIt]

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Hi chrishall,
as you are making important changes and presumably updates I would recommend the first job to do be a
live remaster. Persistence is fine but will slow boot and shutdown considerably. So much so that I rarely
bother with it,
I save work to a second stick. When you remaster you must set type Personal to keep all changes.
Remaster tool is in the antiX menu.

Regarding guides, may be worthwhile taking a look at youtube videos for antiX MX. Tools are pretty much same,
ste actual setup for persistence can be done either at boot by chosing custom or again using the persistence setup
tool from antiX menu..
When you boot a customized stick use the first menu entry or you will always be doing a new setup.

[Member chrishall57]

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Thanks Moddit.

I’ve looked at video by runwiththedolphin, seems comprehensive.

Issue I have is that my USB is only 2Gb so Remaster fails on that. I have a second USB plugged in which I can use but there’s no option in Remaster to select a different destination.

Any ideas on how to progress?

[Member chrishall57]

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Thinking about it I’ll just get a bigger usb stick!

Sorted.

[Member ModdIt]

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my USB is only 2Gb,
that is very tight memory wise, even for antiX. It will run but no room for remaster after updates
which can be quite a lot of data for the system to move around.

I have often hit issues with a 16GB stick and highly customized system, usualy after some weeks,
sweet spot seems like 32 GB or more when possible, fortunately these days pretty affordable for most people.

Been running testing for last couple of months live only, once I started regularly remastering installing
just felt too bothersome. Boots and runs plenty fast enough for me.

Well worth checking any new stick, plenty of fakes around, even from amazon. reliability wise I have
good experience with intenso alu line, the silver ones. Some really cheap sticks sort of work, but
failing in very weird ways. Often partial.

There is a post in the depths of the forum on using F3, a tool set for testing and fixing some USB
stick issues. Highly recommended. Found fake micro SD card too.

You can clone a customized system to another stick, I have done that with dd many times.
As remastering does not replace the entire image aiming at another target stick can not work.

[Anonymous]

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Persistence is fine but will slow boot and shutdown considerably.
So much so that I rarely bother with it

The quoted anecdote begs a “YMMV ~~ your mileage may vary” disclaimer.
One significant variable will be whether your system is reading/writing a persistence savefile residing on USB2, vs USB3.

Delay at shutdown varies accoridng to the amount of data (MB) data being written to persistence savefile. The amount can be reduced/minimized by electing use of “semi-automatic” mode and performing periodic manual “persist-save” operations during a live session.

How to quantify “will slow… considerably”?
When loading a 1.2GB linuxfs (toram), plus 700MB rootfs persistence file from USB3 pendrive, I’ve learned to expect startup will (on my daily driver) take about 1min 40sec to reach the login manager screen. For someone who reboots, on average, about every 15 days… 1:40s doesn’t feel very “considerable”.

I have a second USB plugged in which I can use

Any ideas how to progress?

1) Avoid using a < 4GB pendrive as a boot device.

2) Read the provided docs. Confusingly many options are available, so be prepared to re-read several times in order to grasp the nuances of the interrelated details.

http://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/docs-antiX-19/FAQ/frugal.html

The major benefit is you get to take advantage of the speed and size of an internal drive, up to literally ten times faster! If you are starting out with a usb-3 live-usb in a usb-3 port then the speedup will be less dramatic

.

http://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/docs-antiX-19/FAQ/persistence.html

have your persistence file(s) on a separate device to the one you boot from, you must specify your persistence device. You can use the following: * pdev=sda1 ie persist device * plab=antiX-Persist ie label of the device where persistence files are kept * puuid=xxxxxxx ie the uuid of the device.

.

http://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/docs-antiX-19/FAQ/boot-params.html

Just like the boot device can be specified generally with the from= option and more specifically with options like bdev= the same choices are available for specifying the persistence device.

On a LiveUSB or a frugal install, the default persistence device is the boot device which is what you would expect. Normally the persistence files will sit alongside the linuxfs file that we are booting from.

On a LiveCD the default persistence device is whatever device has the disk label antiX-Persist. If you specify a persistence device with one of the three options below then the defaults are ignored.

pdev=<dev> The name of the persistence device. For example: pdev=sdb2.

plab=<label> The partition label of the persistence device.

puuid=<uuid> The UUID of the persistence device.

[Member chrishall57]

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Thanks all for the help and links. May revisit this topic when I get a bigger USB stick.

[Moderator christophe]

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Something else to consider: static persistence. I think everyone should try it at least once in their life. 😉

I (most of the time) end up using static persistence. I guess because I rarely have tons of ram, and I don’t want to use my ram as storage.
I generally run antiX as frugal, so it’s typically faster than usb. It feels like a normal install to me.

(But to tell you a secret, I find that antiX with static persistence from usb2 is still pretty darn fast.)

Like I said: at least try it. “Fast” is subjective; maybe it’s fast enough…

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by christophe.

confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019

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