Kids, Shutdown and Raspbian

[kyounger]

So, several of the nano-ninjas I help are running into problems with "just unplug the pi" for a reboot; regrettably as we know this tends to create filesystem corruption on the standard SD card and then the required fsck and so on from another machine which isn't a Pi. I understand the unix purist in me says, well, teach the little devils to use "shutdown -h now"; but I feel many computers should have a lot more, just-unplug-it reliability; perhaps there is another solution?

So my question to the Raspbian Gods is: Can we plan some jiggery to the standard image that maybe allows Raspbian to have two (or more) partitions; one partition that is a small root filesystem resides on and is mounted read-only and can be used to fsck the second, much larger read/write partition (when it's detected to be corrupted on boot) where all the normal operations and minecraft and scratch and python and home directories and so on and so forth reside?

So in another life, I used lots of early Suns and NeXTs and they had this problem (for other reasons) when the box had a single drive and suffered from busted filesystems now and again, and the solution was to partition the disk with a read-only root that was small, a reasonable swap partition and then something like /usr was in the largest partition of the disk. I know we can leave this as an "exercise for the reader", but I think if we can head this one off at the pass, well, I suspect many of our kids would experience a much better deal....

[malakai]

Sadly they have to lean the proper ways. But there are options for switches it does raise the cost a bit but more tools. Both switches were successful on kickstarter one US and one UK. Cost is not a lot but can be an issue for budgets

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/131 ... spberry-pi

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pis ... aspberry-p

I think both have online shops by now as well.

[RichardBronosky]

Other options may be:

• Boot of a thumbdrive which may be more stable.
• Join the "read-only root fs club"

[rurwin]

The eeePC originally shipped with exactly this configuration. It was a Union Filesystem (aufs). Basically, the standard filesystem was mounted read-only, and another blank filesystem was mounted over the top of it. All writes went into the blank filesystem, but reads always read the most recent copy in whichever filesystem that was. You could change anything you liked, but if you screwed up all you had to do was hold down a key on boot and the writable filesystem was blanked, getting you back to "factory" state.

Fixing changes to the permanent filesystem required geeky remounting of the filesystem read-write. And in the current case it still might be insufficient -- any write to the SD can corrupt the whole thing, so the union filesystem would have to be on a USB stick.