Safe switching computer?

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Stevo
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Re: Safe switching computer?

#11 Post by Stevo »

If you do want the proprietary Nvidia drivers, maybe it would be less of a headache just to make another USB stick with those installed and the xorg.conf file, and save the stock MX one for all the other computers.

arken
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Joined: Mon Apr 30, 2018 6:57 pm

Re: Safe switching computer?

#12 Post by arken »

dolphin_oracle wrote:
arken wrote:Can you answer the first question of my last post? ("let's say I use MX17 as portable and persistent on an USB flash drive, if I don't install the nvidia driver I'll be able to use the stick on any other of my computers safely?" )

I really need to make sure (and I'm a linux newbie).

Also can I ask if you'll consider 'fixing' the nvidia/portability issue in any distant future? (I don't mind if the answer is no, it's just to know how often I'll check for this particular update)

Thanks in advance.
sorry, yes if you don't install nvidia you should be fine.

Here's the main issue with the xorg.conf file. If you are using persistence, its going to stick around. If your nvidia hardware is one of the ones that requires an xorg.conf file to be present, what should we do? Remove it or keep it? Unfortunately, keeping it means that other drivers won't load, and removing it means the nvidia driver won't work (and neither will the nouvaeu open source driver, because its blacklisted when one of the nvidia-drivers is installed).

There is a mechanism in place that might work, but we have it disabled at the moment, for reasons I don't quite remember, but probably because nvidia-driver is a spaghetti factory of conflicting drivers. We can set up things to save the /etc/X11/xorg.conf on a machine by machine basis. I just don't remember at the moment how to tell the machine to do that, but I'll check tonight. Even then you might get conflicts if you try to use the usb on machines that use different nvidia-drivers, because you can't have more than 1 installed at a time, and there are 3 different ones (nvidia-driver, plus 2 different nvidia-legacy-driver packages).
Seems like a nightmare. Wouldn't it be possible to generate different hardware profiles and be able to select them on the boot screen for cases like this?
Stevo wrote:If you do want the proprietary Nvidia drivers, maybe it would be less of a headache just to make another USB stick with those installed and the xorg.conf file, and save the stock MX one for all the other computers.
I think it would be too much hassle for me and kind of defeat the purpose. I'll be fine with a portable USB install without a nvidia driver for now, I'll tinker on opengl/vulkan only when I'm on my main PC.

Thanks for the quick answers and for your time.

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dolphin_oracle
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Re: Safe switching computer?

#13 Post by dolphin_oracle »

on the live-usb, under

/live/boot-dev/antiX/state

there are machine state files. You can define files to save on a machine by machine basis. right now /etc/X11/xorg.conf is NOT saved, because its handled by the persistence system.

You could edit that file to save those xorg.conf files, and then edit /usr/local/share/excludes/persist-save-excludes.list to ADD the xorg.conf to the excludes list. that way only the machine state files would be saving the xorg.conf.

If you decide to try it, it will probbably be easier to set those up BEFORE installing nvidia drivers. That way the xorg.conf will only be saved on the machine that needs it and won't end up in the persistence file.
http://www.youtube.com/runwiththedolphin
lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 - MX-23
FYI: mx "test" repo is not the same thing as debian testing repo.

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fehlix
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Re: Safe switching computer?

#14 Post by fehlix »

dolphin_oracle wrote: ... /live/boot-dev/antiX/state
... /usr/local/share/excludes/persist-save-excludes.list
@dolphin_oracle Wow that is smart!!! indeed! Cool stuff. I did always wonder what I can do with that states files!

Thanks for that!
Gigabyte Z77M-D3H, Intel Xeon E3-1240 V2 (Quad core), 32GB RAM,
GeForce GTX 770, Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB, Seagate Barracuda 4TB

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dolphin_oracle
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Re: Safe switching computer?

#15 Post by dolphin_oracle »

fehlix wrote:
dolphin_oracle wrote: ... /live/boot-dev/antiX/state
... /usr/local/share/excludes/persist-save-excludes.list
@dolphin_oracle Wow that is smart!!! indeed! Cool stuff. I did always wonder what I can do with that states files!

Thanks for that!
I hope it works out OK. the system is flexible, but users are always coming up with new use cases! anticapitalista and BitJam (the antix devs that created the live system of which I'm but a humble yet enthusiastic user) built it to be flexible, and flexibility sometimes brings complexity.

this is why we love the antiX live-USB system. Its the most flexible live system around. Or as we like to say over in antiX land... The most extensive live-usb on the planet!
http://www.youtube.com/runwiththedolphin
lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 - MX-23
FYI: mx "test" repo is not the same thing as debian testing repo.

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