LivePC Engine User Guide - Bare Metal

Using the LivePC Engine

• The LivePC Engine Task Bar
• Managing my disk use
• Updating software
• Rebooting
• Shutting down
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The LivePC Engine Task Bar

The LivePC Engine™ is an operating system that provides the menu of LivePCs™, stores the personal files that LivePCs use, and controls the virtual machine technology that runs LivePCs. The following is the LivePC Engine Task menu:

Managing My Disk Use

Most of the disk space on the LivePC Engine is consumed by a large cache area on your disk. 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 LivePC 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 LivePC Engine Tasks.

In the example above, the LivePC named 'Damn Small LivePC' is taking up some disk space because it is in a suspended state. Click on the name of this LivePC and you will get the following confirmation dialog box. If you click OK in this dialog box, all the changes to this LivePC will be reverted and disk space will be freed up.

If you are a publisher, the 'LivePC Upload Packages' section in the LivePC Creator Guide shows the size of uploaded packages which are still using up disk space in your LivePC Engine. In the example above, the LivePC named 'Damn Small LivePC' was previously uploaded and the upload package is now taking up some disk space. Click on the name of this LivePC and you will get the following confirmation dialog box. If you click OK in this dialog box, the packaged changes for upload will be deleted and disk space will be freed up.

When your LivePC 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 on this dialog box will take you to the above 'Manage Disk Use' user interface.

When you run and shutdown a LivePC, your most recent system changes are kept in a special area of the disk. You can see how much space these recent system changes are using by clicking on 'Manage my disk use...' and looking in the 'Latest LivePC Changes' box. Clicking on an item in this box will give you the option to delete those recent system changes. This is equivalent to clicking on 'Revert' under LivePC Tasks.

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. The only way to reliably delete all of your local LivePC changes is to 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, or so you can upload the LivePC to multiple servers. You can see how much space these packages use in the 'LivePC Upload Packages' box of 'Manage my disk use...'. Clicking on an item in this box will give you the option to delete those package files.

The last big user of disk space is your personal files, which the LivePC Engine keeps track of separately from your LivePC system changes. 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.

Updating Software

The LivePC Engine is designed to automatically update itself. Once a day it will check back with moka5 to see if there is a new LivePC Engine release. If a new release is found, the LivePC Engine will automatically retrieve it, being careful to only use your network connection when it is not being actively used by a LivePC or other use.

Rebooting

To activate a new LivePC Engine release, you must reboot the LivePC Engine by clicking on the 'Reboot' commands in the left side of the LivePC Engine interface.

Shutting Down

To shut down the LivePC Engine, select 'Shut down' from the LivePC Engine interface.