Re: Multi Profile Setup
Rainer Dorsch wrote: Hello, I am wondering if anybody has experimented with a setup for an N770/N800 which allows several people to share such a device, i.e. using multiple accounts on an N770/N800 and depending on who is using the device, login as the appropriate user and everything is setup correctly (email accounts, rss feeds, etc.). I think this was already asked some time ago (maybe even by you?) One very simple solution is to boot from several partitions on mmc, each person having its own system. This wastes space so if it is a problem, one can perhaps share clean system from one partition and overlay it with another one via unionfs http://www.filesystems.org/project-unionfs.html Another issue is rebooting (it does too much and can help to kill your display with 770), this can be solved by modifying startup/shutdown sequence to not to reboot completely (i.e. go to bootloader and load linux kernel again) but to stop everything, go back to initfs and start again with different rootfs. Proper multi-user system like on linux desktop might work too but I would expect various problems with some user settings being system-wide etc so separate rootfs seems to me like better solution, each user can have its own set of installed applications. I was already thinking about tweaking initfs and rootfs boot scripts to restart system without going through bootloader and kernel again but so far had no spare time for this. Adding unionfs to initfs and bootmenu options is next step. This could be useful also for developers, one could add another unionfs layer over rootfs, test some dangerous stuff and then remove the layer and go back to previous system. Frantisek ___ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
Re: Multi Profile Setup
Another issue is rebooting (it does too much and can help to kill your display with 770), this can be solved by modifying startup/shutdown sequence to not to reboot completely (i.e. go to bootloader and load linux kernel again) but to stop everything, go back to initfs and start again with different rootfs. Does it already have some of this functionality? I've noticed that neither reboot nor poweroff using the menu on the device is a truly clean reboot/shutdown. For example, on poweroff, if the device is on the charger, it doesn't even kill all processes. If I have music playing, it keeps on playing after 'poweroff'! And reboot appears to not be a hard reset as some state appears to be saved. I assume it's going to a different runlevel but I don't know exactly what it's doing. Does anyone know what the different init runlevels are used for? On first boot up, it appears to use runlevel 2, but after a 'poweroff' with charger and 'poweron' again, it doesn't go back to runlevel 2. I was already thinking about tweaking initfs and rootfs boot scripts to restart system without going through bootloader and kernel again but so far had no spare time for this. Adding unionfs to initfs and bootmenu options is next step. This could be useful also for developers, one could add another unionfs layer over rootfs, test some dangerous stuff and then remove the layer and go back to previous system. It certainly would be useful to be able to run, for example, both bora and chinook on a N800 for development purposes and easily switch between the two. ___ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
