decisions coming up

I have no idea how overlays work. My suggestion would be to somehow preserve /home, such that when a new rawhide .img (i.e., build) gets installed, the previous content of /home is not affected. [For instance, if the user has put a symbolic link into some directory in /home -- that link is still there even when the content of '/' gets changed by the process of installing the new rawhide version.] How big ? The answer depends upon where/how Activities are placed. If I can figure out how to do it, I would put all my Activities on my SD card (*not* affected by rawhide .img installs), and only have symbolic links in /home to where the activity stuff actually resides. [That is, /home could be 10MB or so.] In the current rawhide-xo builds, activity stuff is in /usr/share/sugar (i.e., it *is* affected by rawhide .img installs). If this situation continues, again only symbolic links need to be in /home, which can be quite small. But if Activities themselves were to be placed in /home, then one might have to set aside some 500MB to hold them. I'm a great believer in swap files. [On my "production" XO (on which I've run 100%-CPU-using background computations) I have an external hard disk with the XO's swap file on it.] But I don't see any reason for the very people who _supply_ the XO to be the ones to supply software which wears out the NAND. My recommendation is to document/make_easy for people to add cheap non-built-in storage to function as a swap file. [I'm particularly thinking of an SD card being used for the XO's swap file.] Speaking for myself, I have no interest in "preserving" one system on NAND while "plugging in" a second ("live") system via some other device. [I 'copy-nand' the rawhide-xo .img into NAND, and only then run it.] I have gone out of my way to purchase several XOs, so I can afford to have two XOs for 8.2.1, one XO for rawhide, etc. Could somebody please tell me how the bootable.gz gets used ? Does it get loaded into a running workstation, so as to set up a "virtual system" for the purpose of doing testing of rawhide ? Thanks, mikus