The intent of this system is to reduce excessive writing to the flash drive and prevent it from wearing out prematurely. But it also results in some annoying pauses, especially when you want to shut down.
Now that flash drives are cheaper and have wear-leveling technology, it may be simpler to run your USB install in regular PUPMODE=12. Be aware that the following procedure is somewhat experimental. YMMV.
1. Build a Puppy flash drive as usual, create a savefile and confirm that it is working correctly.
2. Boot off your hard drive and install the editinit-1.0.pet attached below. It adds a script to /root/my-applications/bin.
3. Mount your flash drive. Copy the file initrd.gz to a temporary location in your Linux filesystem, like /tmp. You cannot change the file while it is on a FAT32 drive!
4. Go to /tmp and open a terminal window. Run the command:
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editinit
5. This loads the initrd.gz file into a text editor. Cursor down to around Line 800. In new Puppies like Slacko, go to Line 900. You are looking for a blank line after an esac statement. The exact location varies with the Puppy version.
6. After the esac statement, insert the line
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PUPMODE=12
8. Copy this new initrd.gz file back onto the flash drive. You might want to first rename the old version to initrd.gz.old.
9. Boot off the flash drive. It may take a reboot to get everything working correctly, but you should now be running in PUPMODE=12 with a much faster shutdown.
Warning: At the end of a session, be sure to leave the flash drive plugged in until it has quit flashing and all activity is completed.