About USB flash drives and the rma/pup100 issues.

[Generic No-One]

I have a old laptop without a hard drive and with 256 megs of ram, so by the information belkow, I should use a 128 meg flash drive, but I checked and determined that I could get a gig of flash for less than a 128 meg flash drive.

"Just to give an idea of what is "enough" RAM, a PC with 256M RAM matches well with a 128M Flash drive. The pup100 file will be about 60M, and there's enough RAM for everything to load into ramdisk. On the otherhand, a 256M Flash drive would have a 180M pup100 file which would be too big."

So my question is, can I tell puppy to use a smaller pup100 file?

And would it retain the setting?

Thank you Barry, and everyone else here.

[ntrel]

So my question is, can I tell puppy to use a smaller pup100 file?

And would it retain the setting?

Yes, you can set the size of the pup001 file using the PFILE=pup001-none-SIZE_KB setting on boot, with SIZE_KB the size in number of KB.
See http://www.goosee.com/puppy/config-puppy.htm for info on this and the syslinux.cfg file that contains the boot settings.

I have a old laptop without a hard drive and with 256 megs of ram

So do I, mine only boots from cd|floppy. If you have this problem you can use a floppy to chainload the usb drive though, either boot2pup.img or WAKEPUP:
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/flash-puppy.htm
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/boot2pup.htm

N.B. The WAKEPUP bootdisk I tried doesn't check C: for the usb drive, (which on my laptop is the default drive letter for usb as there's no HD) but it can be modified to do so - find these lines and change the "D E F" to "C D E F" in autoexec.bat:
:try_usb
echo Checking any USB drive for signature file PUPXUSB...
for %%x in ( D E F )

Also try booting from CD to check the laptop boots with Puppy (some laptops can be awkward).

[Generic No-One]

Thanks for the reply.

I found the setting upon trying it with a 128 pen drive I bought, now that I know, I really wish I had bought the 1 gig drive instead, because then I could easily install Wine and a billion other things.

My laptop will not boot from the USB drive, but will boot just fine with the cd and the settings from the USB drive.

Sadly, years of using winblows has made me avoid reading relevent documentation because I expect it to be dumbed down and easily summed up as "if it's broke, reinstall".

Puppy is great, but for most of us, it would be basically useless without these forums.

Now I just need to figure out why nethack will not load, and how to set Firefox 1.07 as the default browser, but those are for different threads.

I'm sure Barry and a few others are getting big-heads about thier contributions, but I can see why, and I'll have to find a way to contribute as well.

Thanks everyone.