EasyOS now has a save-file

A solid bit of coding yesterday, and EasyOS is converted to have a "save-file" instead of a "save-folder". Running it right now.

I posted about this yesterday:

https://bkhome.org/news/202105/preliminary-thoughts-about-save-file-in-easyos.html

I have only edited two scripts, in the initrd: /init and /sbin/fscheck

Booting from USB-stick, WKG_DEV (in my case) is "sdb2", and WKG_DIR is "easyos". The init script creates a sparse file, /mnt/sbd2/easyos/easysave.ext4, with ext4 filesystem in it, slightly less size than the amount of free space in sdb2 -- but being a sparse file, it only takes up a tiny fraction of that, due to whatever files are in it.

The init script then mounts /mnt/sbd2/easyos/easysave.ext4 on /mnt/sbd2/easyos, and everything proceeds as normal. /mnt/sbd2/easyos will look just as it did before, with the folders 'containers', 'home', 'releases', '.session' and 'sfs' in it.

To users, it will seem like nothing has changed. However, as /mnt/sbd2/easyos is a mounted ext4 filesystem, sdb2 no longer has to have a Linux filesystem. sdb2 could have an NTFS filesystem.

This is why I have done it. Now, a frugal install on a Windows machine becomes considerably easier. Now, you can just create a folder in the Windows NTFS partition, named, say, "easyos", then a couple of sub-folders, say, "boot" and "working". Into "boot", copy 'vmlinuz', 'initrd' and 'easy.sfs'.

Normally, you would have booted EasyOS from a USB-stick, so you can click on 'initrd' to set it's 'BOOT_SPECS' file contents, but I will think about that, for case of doing an install when running Windows or some other Linux. The 'initrd' does support having an external 'BOOT_SPECS' file, will think about that.

The Windows machine will need a boot manager to support booting OS's other than Windows. ReFind, GRUB, or whatever.

Note, this save-file will only be created for a new installation. If you already have the save-folder installation, that will be retained.

EDIT:
Some discussion is happening here:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=3023  

Tags: easy