thelinuxlink.net

I don't know if such a system is already being (or has been) developed... but here's what I was thinking:

Let's say you have a distro that you install on your home or office PC. It's your typical Linux distro except for two things...

First of all, it's a "single user" distro, meaning you don't need to sign in to use it, it simply logs you in as a default user during boot up.

Second, it doesn't have a resident /home partition. In fact, the /home partition exists on a removable USB thumb drive.

The concept behind this set-up is that, no matter what PC you sit down to use at the office or at home, your files and desktop configuration are with you at all times. Nothing "personal" is stored on the resident PC. All that is on the resident PC would be the Linux OS and some standard apps and desktop/window manager files.

If you had a Debian based system, you could even implement the use of Klik. This way, you could also store some of your favorite applications on your USB drive and run them on which ever PC you'd be using at the time.

Log off and unplug the USB drive, and someone else could sit down right after you have have their desktop and files, just like that.

It was just an idea I had, while I was working on someone else's computer today. I thought, wouldn't it be nice to just be able to plug in my USB drive and have my desktop and files appear right in front of me.

Any distro in existence that has such a set up?

Yeah is called Mandriva Move.


Basically is a LiveCD whch means is a single user, and it includes a thumbdrive which becomes your data partition. So you can save your work.

It was a nice idea but really didnt pick up, since well they came up with the whole solution under Mandriva Globtrotter which is a portable HD which makes the whole distro mobile and writable.

what judland describes sounds an awful lot like a thin client or a web-based OS. Ie, same home directory where ever you go, and no account management on your own machine.

Judland wrote:First of all, it's a "single user" distro, meaning you don't need to sign in to use it, it simply logs you in as a default user during boot up.

Most of the desktop distros like SUSE and Mandriva already do that.

Tsuroerusu wrote:Most of the desktop distros like SUSE and Mandriva already do that.

Yes, I'm aware of that.

thetza wrote:what judland describes sounds an awful lot like a thin client or a web-based OS. Ie, same home directory where ever you go, and no account management on your own machine.

Yes, a similar idea but NOT web based and nothing so complicated to set up for the home user. I was thinking of something that would easily install, like the average distro.

Jza wrote:Yeah is called Mandriva Move.

Sort of, but I thought of not having to carry around a CD as well. I was thinking more of a distro you'd install on your PC (which would contain all of the "guts") just have a mobile /home partition. Also, I don't think Mandrake Move supported Klik extensions.

Ah, I was just brainstorming anyway.... maybe I'll just fiddle around with the idea on my own and see how far I can get.

What would really be nice is if I could set up two PCs like this so I could work at home and at the office with all of my desktop settings, files, e-mails, etc. with me and not have to carry anything more than my USB drive. It would also allow me to do this without having to go through IT (to set something up like a thin client).

Thanks for the feedback, though.

I thought puppylinux could do this, and that DSL was working towards it. It's a great idea, and if you can't do it now, I'm betting that with a few weekends and some time with morphix you could get it working yourself.

Snarkout wrote:I thought puppylinux could do this, and that DSL was working towards it. It's a great idea, and if you can't do it now, I'm betting that with a few weekends and some time with morphix you could get it working yourself.

Thanks, Snarkout. I'll look into PuppyLinux and see what I can find out.

Judland wrote: Let's say you have a distro that you install on your home or office PC. It's your typical Linux distro except for two things...

First of all, it's a "single user" distro, meaning you don't need to sign in to use it, it simply logs you in as a default user during boot up.

Second, it doesn't have a resident /home partition. In fact, the /home partition exists on a removable USB thumb drive.

Any distro in existence that has such a set up?

I would also suggest any of the LiveCD's which allow persistant home on a thumb drive, but you said that you would not want to carry a CD too. This would leave the thumb drive distros like DSL and Puppy, but there you need a reboot, and a computer that will boot off of USB devices.

Just a thought, but couldn't you edit your mount settings in any distro so that the home directory is mapped to sda1. Then when the computer boots up it will look for home on the thumb drive, and you would have all of your settings when you loged in. Once again the disadvantage would be a reboot. There is an experimental device called Black Dog or something like that which is a USB device that takes over the computer when plugged in, so that it becomes a portable computer that fits in the plam of your hand. All you need is a USB port. However, it looks like right now it doesn't have a lot of programs written for it. I looked at it a long time ago, and decided that it was too young, and a LiveCD would do the same thing for me. Here is an article about it:
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8562564746.html

mowestusa

mowestusa wrote: Just a thought, but couldn't you edit your mount settings in any distro so that the home directory is mapped to sda1. Then when the computer boots up it will look for home on the thumb drive, and you would have all of your settings when you loged in.

In a nutshell, that's the idea exactly. The wrinkle I'd like to figure out is how to tell Linux, at boot time, to mount the /home partition from sda UNLESS there is no sda available, then mount a default /home from hda.

This way - keep in mind I'm just "blue sky" thinking here - if you don't have a formatted USB device (like if you're a new user to the system), Linux will load up a default /home partition for you. Then, once you're up and running, you could click on an icon (or something) that formats and configures a new USB device for you to use.

Or perhaps you forgot your USB drive at home. At least with a default /home directory, you could still use the system.

Another idea would be to impliment some sort of encryption of the /home directory (like what they're doing in the latest version of Arch). But now this is far beyond my understanding and skills. But, hey, I can still daydream.

This is not the first time I hear a crazy idea like that Actually this one one of the very first ideas when I got into linux. When I pick up my first linux journal, with a cover of the traditionally 'ultimate linux pc' of that year.

The article talked about having a CVS server of the /home app. Now THAT was crazy, imagine having a version of everyoone of your files as a cvs brach, and having to commit all your documents and what not.

Also every new computer might take up to 30 min to dowload the whole /home folder..

Now I dunno if by home he mean his data or just the .folders (setting files) but it did sounded like an awful lot of work.

Another thing that you might want to have is a cosmopod account or a nomacine account where all you need is a NX client. And all your desktop apps reside on the web. So you go with the NX client on your USB plug it and install it and run your cosmopod desktop.

Also I think there is a a java applet version of the nx client so you can skip forward the instalation.

Interesting. Thanks Jza.

Sometimes crazy ideas do spawn innovative products. I guess it's better than simply settling for what you're given.

Or perhaps you forgot your USB drive at home. At least with a default /home directory, you could still use the system.

I think it is very doable - you would just install you favorite distro and create and initial default user and make that user's home directory in a different location or you could make the user's home directory with the usb drive in a different location.

the problem I see is with automatic logging in - you would stil have to login and have a script setup to see if the user's home directory exists and if not use the default users.
I guess eventually you would get to an automatic login but that would take some testing.

funny I was talking about this with another admin and how sun's sunray terminal server was really good technology and how some hospitals use it.

I think your plan would be better though because it would utilize the hardware that is so powerful today (like amd64 etc) and would not put a load on the network or have a big gigantic server serving thin clients. I was also thinking schools would really want to utilize something like this too and give the students a new excuse for no homework - the dog swallowed my usb drive.

Just having a persistant /home across the LAN can be accomplished with LDAP. No need to carry a USB key, just log in.

I'm having a hard time with the single user/no login concept, though. You want an office PC that will automatically log you in as you, but you still want a persistant /home directory? Sounds like a security problem.

There's no reason an office PC couldn't be set to look for a USB key and log you in if it exists. You could even have a private key on the USB key and log in securely without a password. It would require a bit of hacking, but it could be done. The home LAN could automatically look for the USB key, and sync any changed files to hour home /home on the LDAP server.

jsusanka wrote:I was also thinking schools would really want to utilize something like this too and give the students a new excuse for no homework - the dog swallowed my usb drive.

I'm sure this excuse would be used as much as possible.

I'm having a hard time with the single user/no login concept, though. You want an office PC that will automatically log you in as you, but you still want a persistant /home directory? Sounds like a security problem.

Could be. Again... just ideas.

In an office environment, however, if all of your personal / office network account settings are with you (on your USB drive), and someone sat down at a PC and simply booted up, I'm sure one could set the system up to still require the user to provide passwords to access any network facilities. Like, if you tried to access a certain project directory, you'd still need to provide a password to gain access.

Again, this isn't in my field of expertise, but it sounds logical/do-able.

Well, last night after work, I started doing some research on the Web about this idea and I've been learning a lot. In fact, putting a distro like this together doesn't seem to be a difficult thing to do. It may even be something I could do myself .

I've got a few ideas now on how I could do it. I think I'll spend a little bit of time on it this weekend. I drew up a rough plan for the next few steps forward. Let's see how far I get.