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FAQ

What is the difference between ATmission and all the other Live CD's?

Most, if not all, Linux Live CD's are based on the Knoppix method. A ramdisk contains the writeable parts of the system, the rest is read-only and runs off the CD. This means that at 'toast time', the decision is made which parts of the system must be modifiable, and which parts will be read-only. This results in an inflexible end-product generated by a complex process.

ATmission uses the cowloop driver (http://cowloop.atconsultancy.nl) to create the impression of a 'writeable' CD. An out-of-the-box Linux installation runs almost without modification from the Live CD. You can 'modify' any file on the CD. This is unique for a Live CD.

Can I preserve my changes?

Yes you can, but you will have to set up a saved.cow file to store your changes on harddisk or USB stick. See the page on preserving data.

On which distribution is ATmission based?

ATmission is an almost unmodified Fedora-Core 4 distribution. Because of license restrictions, the Fedora-Core artwork (logo's etc.) has been removed and replaced by ATMission artwork.

What is the root password?

All passwords on the Live CD are 'atdemo'. After boot you are directly logged in as the user 'atdemo' without a password. If you log out, you have to log in again with that password. For security reasons, you should change the passwords of root and atdemo.

I am getting IO Errors after using the CD for a while.

Your cowsave file is full. The file may be located in memory or in the saved.cow file you supplied. The cowloop driver saves modified disk blocks to this file, and will eventually fill up the entire file. When that happens, you will get IO Errors, and cannot continue.

There is no relation between the amount of free disk (CD) space, and the amount of free space on your cowsave file. E.g. if you delete files from the CD, the free disk space will increase, but because you modified some disk blocks, the cowsave file will grow.

To see how much space is used and left, you can use the following procedure.

cd /initrd/cow
du -ks cowfile (shows the size actually used)
df -k . (shows the space left)

If you are not using a saved.cow file, this procedure is not very useful. The cowfile is located on a ramdisk, which increases in size as the cowfile grows. Eventually you will run out of memory.

The program cowwatch can be used to monitor the cowfile. When a threshold-value is specified cowwatch blocks until the specified value is exceeded. (See: man cowwatch).

It won't boot!

Possibly the kernel on the CD contains 'features' incompatible with your machine. You might try the boot parameters below:

Option	Description
noscsi	Don't try to load SCSI kernel modules at boot time. Some modules are known to hang the system.
nocowsave	Don't search for a saved.cow file on your harddisk or USB memory stick.
acpi=off	Don't use ACPI.
nousb	Dont use USB.
pnpbios=off	No Plug and Play bios.
vga=NNN	With NNN you can specify a VESA video mode. The default=791 (1024x768, 16bits). Other values are e.g.: 792 (1024x768, 24bits), 788 (800x600, 16 bits)

I downloaded a new ATmission Live CD, and now I get lots of IO errors.

You problably have an old saved.cow file hanging around, which is picked up by the new release. Since the saved.cow file contains modified disk (CD) blocks, you can not use your saved.cow file with different ATmission releases.

How do I get my data of the saved.cow file to another ATmission release.

You will have to make a backup, and restore it on the new release with a fresh (empty) saved.cow file. You can easily back up all the files you modified with the following command

	mount /dev/XXXXXXXXX /mnt
	cd /
	find . -xdev -newer /tmp/creation-time | tar -czf /mnt/backup.tar.gz --files-from=-

You should replace /dev/XXXXXXXXX with a valid writeable filesystem.

The default language is English, can I use ATmission in other languages?

Yes, you can. For example: Dutch

Using Cowloop to create filesystem snapshots, and rollback more instances?

Cowloop can be used to create filesystem snapshots. Cowloop can even be used to create a snapshot of a snapshot, which results in the possibility to rollback filesystems. This example demonstrates how to create a snapshot of a filesystem, a snapshot of a snapshot, and how to rollback.

Can I install ATmission to harddisk?

As of ATmission 2.0-01 it is possible to copy the "ROOTFS"-file to harddisk.
ATmission recognises the ROOTFS file on FAT-, NTFS-, ext2- and ext3-partitions.
You can "drag and drop" the file from CD to harddisk or;

In Windows, open a dos-box and type:

copy D:\ROOTFS C:\

In Linux, open a terminal and type:

cp /cdrom/ROOTFS /

You still have to boot from the ATmission CD-rom, but after the system has booted the CD-rom is no longer used.

The ISO image is too big for a 700MB CD.... Do I need to burn it on a DVD?

To burn ATmission on a CD-rom you have to use the overburning feature of your cdrecorder. If you use cdrecord to burn ATmission on a CD-rom use the -raw and -overburn flags.