Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

cthisbear · Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 2943 Location: Sydney Australia

nooby:

Sometimes when I see your posts I go ...AAAhhhh!

But mate I completely agree with you on

"Yes but let us not get bogged down on such issues. "

and all of that post.

""""""""""

and
" He even writes that his program works best in windows and
he is a linux developer.

I mean come on! "

//////

Also >>> looseSCREWorTWO

"
Because Steve White and Nooby are right:

this needs to be really, really, easy FOR THE AVERAGE USER,
otherwise Puppy will be left behind. CDs are "old technology". Netbooks don't even have a DVD drive.
Everyone's using USB Sticks. "

//////

I shall watch this with interest.

See you nooby...>> keep going at this.

Regards .... Chris.

Aitch · Joined: 04 Apr 2007 Posts: 6825 Location: Chatham, Kent, UK

rcrsn51 · Posted: Mon 19 Apr 2010, 07:29 Post subject:

If it was as easy as writing a script, don't you think that the mainstream distros would have already done it? Maybe there's a reason why they are starting to include Unetbootin for Linux in their repos.

cthisbear · Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 2943 Location: Sydney Australia

rcrsn51:

You give terrific help on this forum.

Not pointing my six shooter at you mate.

Cheers...Chris.

nooby · Joined: 29 Jun 2008 Posts: 9393 Location: SwedenEurope

ICPUG · Joined: 24 Jul 2005 Posts: 1278 Location: UK

This is a very interesting thread for a number of reasons.

It is clear that nooby is not so newbie now and raises a very interesting idea.

I have always shied away from booting from usb because, apart from from Eee PC 701 I did not have a computer that booted from USB and usage of a floppy for wake up pup was out as other computers did not have a floppy drive either!

I don't agree that CD/DVD are dead. How else does one view movies on a PC? They don't come on USB sticks yet. One of the drawbacks of the Eee PC and netbooks.

However, CD could be read only when I first wrote Lin'N'Win so I could not rely on burning Live CDs. Lin'N'Win also was geared to getting Windows users to look at Linux so it used Windows tools in the method. It would not work if started from a pure Linux machine although I am sure it could be written that way. In fact if I searched hard enough I would probably find somewhere on this forum a method to frugal install on a Linux powered machine and all it would need would be to make sure you didn't need a Live CD first to copy the files from.

Booting from an ISO would be very nice - although personally I don't think it is too hard to copy three files and boot from them! I feel that if this is too hard then maybe you are not going to like Linux and you should stick with with an OS that does not allow you to make choices! That being said Seeker did produce a Windows .exe file to automate the Lin'N'Win process, so lazy Windows users have been catered for - at least for puppy 4.3.1 with which it worked.

I also have a penchant for doing things manually because there is the opportunity to learn things that are lost when you just click a button and go. Slightly better with a script because you can at least read the script if you so inclined.

Now to come back to ISO booting. rcrsn51 mentions that grub2 can do it. I know that grub4dos can do it as well. rcrsn51 also points out that the OS needs to have an option to boot that way (from ISO). So the $64,000 question is 'Does Puppy have the capability to boot from ISO and if not what needs to be done to it?'

Anybody have an answer?

looseSCREWorTWO · Posted: Tue 20 Apr 2010, 08:51 Post subject:

Apologies in advance for this dumb newbie suggestion.

Swap Files/Partitions take a piece of real Hard Drive and turn it into virtual RAM. Is it possible to reverse this process?

In other words, could a "virtual" Linux partition be created in RAM, then the Puppy ISO is unzipped there and the PC booted from it ?

rcrsn51 · Posted: Tue 20 Apr 2010, 09:30 Post subject:

nooby · Joined: 29 Jun 2008 Posts: 9393 Location: SwedenEurope

rcrsn51 · Posted: Tue 20 Apr 2010, 10:23 Post subject:

@ICPUG

Maybe what's needed is a "pmedia=iso" boot option. It would be analogous to the "pmedia=usbflash" option which tells Puppy to look for its sfs file on a USB device.

Instead, Puppy would scan the hard drive partitions for its ISO file, mount it and load the sfs file into memory.

rxr · Joined: 05 Jun 2009 Posts: 5

Nooby said:
- - - - - - - - -

nooby · Joined: 29 Jun 2008 Posts: 9393 Location: SwedenEurope

RXR we have to keep this short to not derail the thread. Smile

So what is the solution.

1. To acknowledge that we are different and demand that the devs makes Linux version that even we can master. Smile

2. Go on as before pretending all of us are clever enough to compile out own OS and no need to have "Out of the Box" OS that just works.

Okay maybe we should not talk about it at all. We take away the illusion that makes everybody hopeful they sooner or later can create the distro of their own choice.

It is fun to have computer dreams. I used to test out Forth words just for the fun of it. I did actually made one word do something without crashing but that was after much trial and error. Poor CEO who employed me I would be their ruin fast indeed.

looseSCREWorTWO · Posted: Wed 21 Apr 2010, 00:17 Post subject:

Nooby wrote:

disciple · Posted: Wed 21 Apr 2010, 03:31 Post subject:

ICPUG · Joined: 24 Jul 2005 Posts: 1278 Location: UK

Nooby

My comment re copying 3 files and booting from them being easy was not directed at you.

In fact your inability to know that clicking an iso (under Puppy) would give access to it is, in my opinion, a different problem - lack of documentation. I hope the 'copying 3 files approach' is well documented (in Lin'N'Win but also elsewhere)and thus does not fall into the same category of problem.

What concerns me is if copying 3 files and booting from them is considered hard then how are the problems that users are going to encounter when running Puppy going to be viewed? Things like ROX doesn't look like Windows Explorer - it not being obvious how desktop icons are created, the linux file structure, etc. A little bit of effort is going to be required to understand the concepts different from Windows and if users want to be spared that effort they might as well go back to Windows.

What we must not do is make the effort too hard and this is where the lack of documentation or its easy accessibility comes in. It's the same criticism as voiced at our supposed small repository. There is a lot of information out there in forum posts and wikis but it is not structured in a way to be easily found.

Just one comment on your realisation that we are not all created equal. I agree. I cannot draw for toffee and never will. On the other hand I consider myself more adept than some others at ... Unfortunately, at least here in the UK, to suggest one is better at something than another gets one accused of elitism.

Now, back to iso boot.

rcrsn51 suggests an interesting idea with the pmedia=iso option, but disciple highlights the exact problem. One has to boot the kernel and initrd.gz before the pmedia can be read!

Knoppix follows this approach with a fromiso boot parameter. However, you still need the external kernel file and initrd.gz equivalent (minirt) to get it going. Consequently, we are back to copying 3 files again! Somehow we need to get access to these items from the iso (without extracting the iso) to make it really simple. Another problem, with Knoppix at least, is that the minirt in Knoppix could not be used if one booted Knoppix from an NTFS partition. It has to be modified. I don't think Puppy has this problem but I wonder if the booting from USB is a similar problem on machines which cannot boot from USB via the BIOS. Somehow the USB drive has to be recognised BEFORE the puppy boot process starts!