(Automated Trans-Migration Algorithm)
Ninan Sajeeth Philip
Have you ever wished that your laptop be lighter and smaller but at the same time had a screen as big as 20 inches and a keyboard as convenient as that of a desktop? If your answer is yes, read on... this document is just for you.
Slax is a very powerful open source live CD distribution based on Slackware linux. Like many other live CDs, it allows you to work in the full fledged Linux environment without having to install any software on your machine. An obvious limitation with live CD distribution is that it has a read-only file system and as a user, you will not be able to modify the contents of the distribution on the fly. However, as long as the distribution contains only the OS and the application programs that you want to run on your data, this would not be a problem. The real limitation exists in the storage of the data – the data that is to be processed and the data that has been produced by the computation. You can think of saving it to a pendrive, but this is a big constrain when the data size grows higher and becomes comparable to the limiting size of your pendrive. As for example, in my case, my data is about 45Gb and the highest pendrive capacity available to me is only 8Gb.
Even if you do not want to work with large data, you would still want to reconfigure your desktop to your comfort or want to add new programs. Slax has a solution for this and it allows you to save your configuration to any writable partition in your system. It also allows you to load program modules on the fly so as to extend the functionality of your system as per requirement. It is possible to extend these features to build a highly efficient computing system on a pendrive which is the subject of this document.
By just copying the atma.mo module into the base directory of the slax distribution on a pendrive, you can trans-migrate the soul of your computer anywhere you go! Unbelievable? I no longer carry my “heavy” laptop with me; instead I transcend any machine at my reach into my laptop by embodying the soul (atma in Sanskrit) of my laptop from a pendrive – without installing any software on the local machine or leaving any trace of my work on it when I leave! I check my e-mail, read news papers, talk to my research collaborators across the globe using skype, update my To-Do lists and appointments, prepare and show my power point presentations, write research papers in latex, make page and poster layouts in scribus, do all accounting in Kmoney, listen to cool music from dozens of radio stations on the web, take on the fly appointments and reminders and year planning and lot of computations in R and scilab with large data – all from my pendrive and without carrying my laptop! Even after installing necessary software to do all this on a 1Gb pendrive, I am left with about 200Mb of space to store my results!. The data is saved in a highly compressed format that this space is sufficient to save about 1Gb of normal text data, which is larger than the normal workspace I require for my kind of applications in one day.
The story does not end here. The method provides a very efficient way to backup my data. I used to backup all the data in my laptop on a regular basis for fear of hardware failure. Although this theoretically assures that all my data would be safe, in practice has caused me many miserable days trying to figure out which is where in the huge collection of backups. In the new setup, when I shutdown my machine, only those things that have changed after the previous shutdown are saved into the file system, making my backups small and at the same time traceable along the time line. I have no risk of overwriting my old data with new files! This negates the old saying that “You can never go back in time and make a fresh beginning” and ensures that “You can always go back down the time line and rework on your beginning so as to improve your present the way you always wanted to!” Users are allowed to run the atma sos script that saves working data in the middle of sessions and avoid the risk of an unsolicited power failure before they shutdown the machine. This may be done by typing sos and pressing the enter key on any terminal window.
The third advantage is that you can add and delete users, specify their rights etc as if you are working on a full fledge Linux distribution. Since Slax allows you to do it all without installing anything to the hard drive, the common complaint that Linux is difficult to be installed becomes an age old story. While the system allows you to be configured as a server or workstation on the fly by just clicking on the respective icons, it also is capable of generating as many clone versions of itself (on any media) through a single command inbuilt in the slack distribution! This makes it an ideal system for distribution, especially with dynamic electronic content. I find a great application for this among the student community who may not be able to afford a laptop but can easily procure a pendrive at a cost of less than $10 and yet have all the features of a personal system wherever they go! One can simply delete the backup file or move it to some other directory and the distribution you give off will be exactly like a fresh install with all the software and system features. Life can't be simpler than this!!
The possibility of the transcendental existence of the soul of a machine on the pendrive has revolutionized my life. I no longer have the kangaroo pouch on my back that cause me to lean forward as if I was under stress. I walk around with a spinning pendrive on my forefinger and a soft music on my lips! I am a cool guy!!
Thank you all who have built the Linux OS and worked to make it what it is today. I humbly and respectfully offer this new code and technology for any one who wish to change their computational life ! “Take it for free because we believe in your potential” – which is what GNU public license means.