Re: [Tails-dev] next big features: status update

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Autore: intrigeri
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To: The Tails public development discussion list
Oggetto: Re: [Tails-dev] next big features: status update
Hi,

thank you for testing! See replies bellow.

anonym wrote (06 Mar 2012 11:15:06 GMT) :
> 02/29/2012 07:15 PM, intrigeri:
>>
>> The general testing process would be:
>>
>> 1. use the USB installer to install Tails on a USB stick
>> 2. boot the newly installed Tails
>> 3. use tails-persistence-setup to bootstrap a persistence container


> This step failed once for me with an udisks error stating something
> like "daemon is inhibited".


The exact error message would be useful.

> I'm pretty sure it was because I had set a sudo password in
> tails-greeter,


Can you please try to confirm this with reproducible experiments?

Else, I've my doubts wrt. this correlation. "daemon is inhibited"
looks like a DBus / UDisks error, while anything related with sudo
would be a PolicyKit error. My first guess would be that you catched
a bug, unrelated to PolicyKit and sudo, and I want to hunt it.

> and if so all we need is an appropriate sudoers.d
> file for tails-persistence-setup.


What additional credential would you like to give to whom?

>>   4. "configure which bits are persistent" is not implemented yet,
>>      so create a live.persist file in the TailsData filesystem:
>>      https://tails.boum.org/todo/persistence/#index7h3
>>   5. reboot
>>   6. enable persistence in tails-greeter
>>   7. enjoy


> Other than that it seems to work just fine. Oh, I enjoyed it! :)


Great! :)

> I have a few comments:


> * We're currently quite wasteful when allocating space to the Tails
> partition. On a 1.88 GiB USB stick a whooping 1.46 GiB was allocated
> for Tails, leaving only 424 MiB for TailsData. The Tails installation
> I used was just 767 MiB, leaving 732 MiB unused. That seems a bit
> excessive or do we anticipate wheezy to be that much of a monster?


We decided to give the system partition 1.5GiB like this:

Tails ISO = 1GB
+ 3 * incremental upgrades (60MB) = 180MB
=> let's say 1.5GB

As soon as we want to install multiple kernels, and support *many*
languages more actively, e.g. by stopping running localepurge at build
time, installing all iceweasel l10n packages, and perhaps installing
some more fonts, we'll probably reach 1GB. I anticipate Wheezy to add
something in the 100-200MB range to the ISO size. The size of
incremental updates will probably grow accordingly. So frankly, as of
today, I would probably propose to give 2 GB to the system partition,
instead of 1.5 GB.

So I don't think it is reasonable to expect a 2 GB USB stick to
support Tails + persistence.

> I'm not sure what the right approach would be here. It would be
> sweet to have a slider which goes from $TAILS_ISO_SIZE to
> min($SIZE_OF_USB_DRIVE,
> $LARGEST_TAILS_ISO_SIZE_WE_WANT_TO_SUPPORT) which determines the
> size of the Tails partition. Depending on where the slider is some
> label would show warnings like:


>   - "This is likely too little space for being able to upgrade Tails in
>     the future" and
>   - "This will just leave only $LOW_NUMBER MB of space for persistence"


> when appropriate.


I disagree it would be sweet. I think it would be a mess UI-wise:
I think this would clutter the GUI and add more complexity to the UI
by asking users questions they will have a hard time answering, add
more complexity to our documentation because a more complex UI needs
much more complex documentation. Given these disadvantages, and the
limited benefit (better supporting 2 GB media), I'm not in favour of
adding such widgets at all.

And anyway, I don't think anyone wants to add any additional feature
to our liveusb-creator codebase; remember we want to rebase our work
on top of another codebase at some point.

> * I think we should activate the --log-file option for both the list
> and activate calls of live-persist. This will make it a lot easier to
> debug certain errors when we're testing this, and if support to
> include them is added to whisperback, also good when it's released
> into the wild.


Great idea! Added to my local copy of todo/persistence.

Cheers,
--
intrigeri
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