puddlemoon wrote: Mon Oct 26, 2020 3:36 pm
@rufwoof lol. I do aspire to your minimalism but... bit by bit
Laptop : 5.2MB vmlinuz with integral initrd that boots to framebuffer cli, vnc'd through a ssh tunnel (with compression activated) into my desktop system, that's connected to the TV for its display, that is running Fatdog desktop/gui. In which qemu run to load up experimental slacko, in which I've set the theme to 'original puppy'.
That's the larger part of the view (visible desktop icons), Fatdog panel at the top of screen, experimental slacko's panel at the bottom of screen

- ft-es-vnc.jpg (92.14 KiB) Viewed 30240 times
Of course, flip to fatdog's desktop 2 and that's the fatdog's icons/desktop (or just minimise the qemu window).
vnc is set to multi, so I can also vnc into that using my android phone at the same time and have the same view/control running simultaneously on the phone, laptop and TV.
That's kvm qemu, so the speeds are only marginally less than if experimental slacko had been directly booted.
Code: Select all
qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -cdrom fossapup64-9.5.iso
My minimalism isn't less functional, just less in way of modules/firmware that otherwise get loaded, but aren't used (of which there are shed-loads). But the trade off is that its machine specific (my laptop) rather than being 'portable'. Another benefit is that it boots really quick, and if the desktop (server) is already up and running then vnc pretty much has the 'desktop' system available soon after having booted the laptop (vnc drops into the desktop as it was when last left).
I just boot the iso of choice in qemu directly, so no saves. It's relatively trivial however to create/include a virtual HDD in a qemu session, so I could create a 512MB vHDD or whatever and once the qemu had booted the iso, use gparted to format that vHDD and use it as a 'save partition' (or store save folders within that partition).
My desktop system is light on ram (2GB), with more it could comfortably run say both Puppy and Windows qemu sessions at the same time. But I haven't run Windows for years now, have had no need to do so.
Oh, and if the laptop is stolen - meh! Nothing on it. Similar if the usb the laptop is booted from - as its primarily just the 5MB vmlinuz. That said I do install and play with things also on the laptop - so subjective.