Thank you - I appreciate that but I think I'm looking for something else: the right way to back up the system state. I 'manually' installed Xfbdev, wpa_supplicant and wpa_gui and all their dep's from the command line with tce-load. When I have done that previously they were not re-loaded automatically during boot even after using backup from the log-out prompt. Even after manually installing all the dep's many of them were downloaded and installed by the app manager when I used it to install Firefox indicating to me that, even then, the system (or app manager) didn't see them as installed. Do I need to put all the tcz's in /optional and set up the onboot list for Xfbdev and the wpa app's and the dep's myself and if so what is the correct format for onboot.lst? Is it necessary to have wpa_supplicant running as a deamon all the time for my atheros based wireless card to work or is it just needed to get the initial configuration which is then stored somewhere in the file system to be used by the kernel? And, ever time I have booted up tc it keeps hanging on the 'creating Xauthority file' line at which time I press ctrl-c to get a command prompt, load Xfbdev, run xsetup.sh and then startx to get a gui. Is that a permission problem? Should all files and folders be tc:staff? Is the Xauthority file that tc is trying to create in memory or on /hdax/tc?