Moka5 Engine User Guide - BareMetal

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Using the Moka5 Engine

The Moka5 Engine task bar
Wired network connection
Wireless network connection
Manage disk usage
Update the Moka5 Engine
Reboot the Moka5 Engine
Shutdown the Moka5 Engine and computer
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The Moka5 Engine™ displays your LivePCs™, stores your personal files, and controls the virtual machine technology that runs LivePCs. In using the Moka5 Engine you can control your wired or wireless network connection, manage your accessible disk usage, view your Engine version information, and reboot or shutdown the Engine. The following is the Moka5 Engine Task menu:

Wired network connection

In most cases your LivePCs will automatically use your your wired DHCP home or office network connection. If the Moka5 Engine does not automatically connect you can do the following:

Click on 'Configure Network' on the left panel of the Moka5 Engine under Moka5 Engine™ Tasks.
The following window will open indicating you are not connected to a network:

Plug (or re-plug) your network cable into your network connection, and you should see an animated icon while your network connection is established.
The icon will be replaced by a network status symbol once connected.

Wireless network connection

Currently the Moka5 Engine has limited wireless network connection support. Wireless support is chipset dependent:

Supported: Most computers running on the Atheros or Centrino chipset. WEP and WPA encryption are also supported.
Currently unsupported: Computers not running on the Atheros or Centrino chipset including the popular Broadcom chipset. We are working to expand our hardware coverage.

To configure wireless networking:

Click on 'Configure Network' on the left panel of the Moka5 Engine under Moka5 Engine™ Tasks.

The following window will open indicating you are not wirelessly connected:

Left-click on the window and the list of available wireless network will be displayed. If you do not see a list like the one below your wireless network adapter is not currently supported by the Moka5 Engine.

Left-click on the name of the wireless network you wish to join or choose 'Connect to Other Wireless Network...'. Supply the network name (if connecting to another network), the authentication method and the password for the network you are joining and click on 'Login'.

An animated icon will appear while connecting to the network.

The icon will be replaced by a network status symbol once connected.

To check your connection you can click on 'Configure Network' and then left click in the 'NetworkManager' window. All available networks will be listed. The live connection is marked with a black dot to the left of the name.

NOTE: If your hardware is not supported you can send detailed information about your machine configuration to [email protected] to encourage more rapid development support.

Manage disk usage

Most of the disk space on the Moka5 Engine is consumed by a large cache area. This cache area is used to store pieces of the LivePCs that you subscribe to. As you use more LivePCs, this cache area will grow to use as much as 75% of your disk. If you remove a LivePC, the cache area will NOT shrink, but those parts of the cache area may be used by other LivePCs. There is currently no support for resizing the cache area.

The Moka5 Engine also stores some other data outside of the cache area. You can control this disk usage through the 'Manage my disk use' command under Moka5 Engine Tasks.

It will open a window showing your controllable disk usage:

Your LivePC changes will be listed along with any LivePCs you have packaged and uploaded. LivePCs that have been suspended rather than shutdown will be listed. The Damn Small LivePC has been both uploaded and left in a suspended state. You can revert the LivePC by clicking on its name under 'Latest LivePC Changes'. If you click 'OK' in the confirmation dialog box, all the changes to the LivePC will be reverted, and its disk space will be freed up. This is equivalent to clicking 'Revert' in the 'LivePC Tasks' box.

Note that this will not delete ALL of the changes you've made to a LivePC if you have enabled the 'keep local changes' functionality. It will only delete the changes you made in your last LivePC session. To reliably delete all of your local LivePC changes you will first need to disable 'Keep local changes'. You can also use the 'Remove the LivePC' command. However, please note that removing a LivePC will also remove all the personal data files associated with it.

When you upload a LivePC, a special set of package files are created and stored on your disk. These package files are kept so that you may retry an upload later if your first attempt fails. Keeping them also allows you to upload the LivePC to multiple servers. The 'LivePC Upload Packages box on the 'Manage Disk Use' page shows the size of any uploaded packages which are still using up disk space on your computer. In the example above, the LivePC named 'Damn Small LivePC' was previously uploaded and the upload package is now taking up some disk space. If you click on the name of this LivePC, you will get the following confirmation dialog box. By clicking 'OK' in the dialog box, the package is deleted, and its disk space is freed up.

When the Moka5 Engine is about to run out of disk space, the following dialog box will frequently pop up to remind you to manage your disk use. Clicking on 'OK' in this dialog box will take you to the above 'Manage Disk Use' page.

The last big user of disk space is your personal files, which the Moka5 Engine stores separately from the changes you make to the LivePC. There is currently no interface to see how much disk space your personal files are using. However, the personal files associated with a particular LivePC will be deleted if you remove that LivePC.

Update the Moka5 Engine

The Moka5 Engine is designed to automatically update itself. Once a day it will check the Moka5 site to see if there is a new Moka5 Engine release available. If a new release is found, the Moka5 Engine will automatically retrieve it.

To activate a new Moka5 Engine release, you must reboot the Moka5 Engine. You can do this by clicking on the 'Reboot' command on the left side of the Moka5 Engine interface.

Reboot the Moka5 Engine

To reboot the Moka5 Engine, click on the 'Reboot' command on the left side of the Moka5 Engine interface. If you are running on a dual boot machine you will see the options to 'Reboot to Moka5 Engine' or 'Reboot to Windows'. If you are running off a removable storage device you will only see an option to 'Reboot'.

Shut Down the Moka5 Engine and computer

To shut down the Moka5 Engine and the computer, select 'Shutdown' from the Moka5 Engine interface.