Hi Will,
thanks for joining the mailing list and for giving Sculpt a try!
I just want to add another few points in addition to Colin's hints.
- Is Wifi on the T430 supposed to work? I couldn't get it to do more
than scanning. There are some teensy tiny error messages in the logs, so if it helps I could get out my magnifier and share them, but if there's a known issue, I figured y'all would know that without the specific error message. The wired connection works, so I'm ok with that as a fallback (but it makes it less mobile).
The Wifi driver on the T430 is expected to work. I'm sometimes running the current version of Sculpt on a T430s.
To investigate the issue, you can browse the log much better in the inspect view [1] by opening /report/log in vim. This also gives to a way to save (and report) the log by copying it to disk.
[1] https://genode.org/documentation/articles/sculpt-22-10#Leitzentrale_subsyste...
- Persistence - what about persistence? I picked the ram-fs per the
getting started document, but I would like to save SOME stuff- say bookmarks and source code, how do I do that?
Have you already had a look at [2]? If the documentation leaves some of your questions unanswered, please tell us. So we can improve it.
[2] https://genode.org/documentation/articles/sculpt-22-10#Storage_device_access...
In short, instead of selecting the RAM file system for "Use", you need to "Use" an ext2 file system on a disk or partition of a USB, AHCI, or NVME device.
If you want to dedicate your T430 to Sculpt without dual booting another OS, the simplest way is to write the downloaded Sculpt disk image directly to the block device using 'dd' on a live Linux. So instead of writing the Sculpt base system to a USB stick, write it directly to disk. You should then be able to boot directly into Sculpt without messing with GRUB.
Once booted into the Sculpt system, follow the "Expand" step described in the link above to extend the Sculpt partition (partition 3) to the full disk size.
Later updates from one Sculpt version to the next can be done by updating the files (image.elf.gz and hypervisor) at the /boot directory of the Sculpt partition.
- I read that the genode folks use Sculpt as their daily drivers - so
I'm guessing they don't boot from USB, build their environment up from scratch, add in firefox, terminal, whatever and so on, every day, just to start doing other productive things. Is there somewhere where typical workflows are described?
In [3], you can find quite a few directions to explore.
[3] https://genode.org/documentation/articles/sculpt-22-10#Further_exploration
The first stepping stone is usually to set up a VM with a Linux guest in order to attain a known-good baseline of functionality. Setting up the guest-host integration (like shared folder, shared clipboard) allows for a pretty seamless integration of the guest OS and Genode. Once you feel comfortable with that, you can explore native Genode components (like moving your browsing habits to Genode's Falkon browser) step by step.
I hope you'll enjoy the ride!
Cheers Norman