Have you used Deep Freeze ?

[Lakshmipathi]

I came across a tool called 'Deep Freeze' few days back?
What's this tool do?What it's features ?Do we have OSS alternative for it?
Such tools useful to Linux user?

If you got any idea ,Please share your thoughts

[GNU-Fan]

Hello,

it is amusing that you do not know what it does and yet are curious if there are OSS alternatives to it.

I am not aware of exact substitutes for it on GNU/Linux but if I had to provide a untampered boot image I would make two partitions.
One for the core system which is set read-only.
One for the user to save his files in. (home directory)
And finally a ram-disk for any data the core system may need to write temporarily.

[Lakshmipathi]

Hello,
it is amusing that you do not know what it does and yet are curious if there are OSS alternatives to it.

Yes that's my spirit ( In fact , i started to learn about windows and linux at the same time .... I don't know abt burning disk ..i tried k3b and learned abt nero --and there are many things which i learn/try/use it first on linux and then go for windows )

Is it like a backup tools or something like that .. can u explain it bit more ...

[GNU-Fan]

Is it like a backup tools or something like that .. can u explain it bit more...

As far as I see it, it backups the system and then makes sure the backup is booted from every time. Now if the user on the machine deletes an important file of the system and the machines chrashes, the computer is reset and it will boot again the "freezed" system.

So yes, it is kind of a backup tool that restores the backupped files automatically on each reboot.

[daffyduc]

We have it on a few machines at work. it basically loads a readonly version of the OS everytime you boot. it keeps the OS chages in memory or in a temp directory that is cleared every boot. its like starting from a hibernated session each time the pc boots. It really is a pretty cool piece of software.

as far as an OSS version I am not aware of any application that will do this for linux. slax and other distros that boot from thumb drives have this functionality. Slax it does not save any changes unless you manually save the state on shutdown.

you could allways use a live CD

[bigtomrodney]

slax and other distros that boot from thumb drives have this functionality. Slax it does not save any changes unless you manually save the state on shutdown.

you could allways use a live CD

Actually Slax 6.x automatically saves changes unless you choose "Always Fresh" from the boot menu. There have been a lot of big changes there recently, it's still my favourite live/USB distro by far.

[IsaacKuo]

I modified my initramfs scripts to do something which incidentally has a similar effect. My modified script copies the entire "/" partition into a tmpfs RAMdisk from a tarball image file. My purpose for this was for blindingly fast performance and also for computing silence (the hard drive is spun down after loading the OS into RAM).

As a side effect, any changes to the OS are wiped out upon shutdown. The computer reboots "fresh" every time. But that really wasn't my primary goal.

This method requires a decent amount of RAM, but it does offer incredible performance. A less RAM hogging alternative would be to mount the main OS partition as readonly, and then using UnionFS to merge it with a tmpfs ramdisk.

[Lakshmipathi]

I got this 'xguest' from fedora-devel-list
Fedora People