How to have no Save file on frugal HD install? [Postponed]

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nooby
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How to have no Save file on frugal HD install? [Postponed]

#1 Post by nooby »

Edit. I am not sure what to do. I am back using a savefile
instead of setting it up manuall each time. 22 click each time
is just too much. So now I test to do very frequent updates
of the backup of the savefile so it can be repaired easily
if something happens.

older text

I am a noob so I fail to do remaster.
I have now tested so many times
to just accept the limitations and it is okay.

I moved the .mozilla to mnt.sda1 or mnt/home and that
way I can use Slacko with Firefox and that allow me to
drage the .mozilla back and drop a relative link to it
adn that way I get both bookmarks and utf8 and all the
extensions and such going again. Super very good solution.
Sad it took me so long time to figure out this one.:)

old text
To do remasters each time one make a minor change seems over kill.
I used the link google search in my signature for to find threads about it
but those I've found was way over my noob understanding.

Remaster vs sfs vs savefile; how best to reduce Puppy?
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=62683

How to convert a savefile to sfs?
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=84359

Empowering the Zdrv
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=80766

SFS-Exec by seaside
WARNING! DO NOT USE WITH A PUPSAVE FILE.
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=64587

knowing how verbose i tend to be I rather start a new thread
instead of filling these other threads with my endless questions on details
that I fail to get.

My current solution still use a save file and for to not fill it up
I have moved .mozilla to mnt/home and then symlinked back
and done same with other such files that fill very fast.
that did help a bit but the save file still fills up with things
I have no ideas where they come from so I would prefer to boot
without a save-file.

So hope many of you share how you do this and on a noob level
so I get how to duplicate it.

At the moment I use Lupu 528-005 with Firefox browser

(Edit
seaside gave this example in the linked thread above
Here's how I do it.

* Boot, customize, adding preferences pet's, etc..
save to small pup-save file. Then boot with PFIX=ram,
mount the pup_save file and make and save it
(dir2sfs) as an SFS file.

Then rename the file to the matching Zpxxxxx.sfs name,
depending on what pup version.

Rename or delete the former pup_save so puppy doesn't
try to load it. Now when you next boot, the zpxxxxx.sfs file
will automatically load with your preferences and additions
Edit need to add this one too
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 428#510428
He describe in bold there how to do it .I've done it once but now
fail to get how one do it.

I have followed that advice once and then forgot
how one do it and now reading it again I get very
unsure what it really means. Can somebody explain? )

If you like what seaside has suggested also take a look at
SFStray
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=69227

and SFSdirload-standalone-0.3

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=74471
Last edited by nooby on Sun 03 Mar 2013, 22:04, edited 2 times in total.
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User avatar
Flash
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#2 Post by Flash »

Why not run Puppy from a multisession CD or DVD? That would easily do what you want.

nooby
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#3 Post by nooby »

Flash I worked at a Radio Repair Shop when I where
teen for two years and that gave me the experience
that mechanical things like DVD drives have a tendency
to fail sooner or later. and I am a fanatic anti noise weirdo.

I hate the sound of the whirr of the DVD spinning up to speed
and then going down and then searching and so on. I hate it :)

And none of my three netbooks have a drive.
them are two small to have such drives in them.
Okay I have a Packard Bell that have a drive
but that one have only 500MB RAM And no HD
to talk about so the compromise would be to use USB
instead. and pretend the USB to be a DVD do you remeber
how one set up such things to mimic a DVD multisession?

(What I remember from using DVD some years ago is that
I did not like the DVD. So if you know how to do same with USB?
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nooby
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#4 Post by nooby »

Wants more suggestions on this one :)
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Karl Godt
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#5 Post by Karl Godt »

nooby wrote:Wants more suggestions on this one :)
1 . > Live with the problems :P
2 . > Hack the code and submit patches :D
«Give me GUI or Death» -- I give you [[Xx]term[inal]] [[Cc]on[s][ole]] .
Macpup user since 2010 on full installations.
People who want problems with Puppy boot frugal :P

nooby
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#6 Post by nooby »

I am testing now Puppy without savefile to find out how it feels :)

I open a Geany file with a HTML files and add bookmarks manually
Maybe an alternative would be to instead save all bookmarks
and export to a html file each day one shut down and then merge these
into a huge file that way one get all the bookmarks with writign them down
manually.

I get Swedish åäö keyboard layout by opening Terminal and do setxkbmap se

what I miss is the addon in Firefox for downloading youtube files?
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nooby
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#7 Post by nooby »

I am almost there. I am testing which Puppy version
that is easiest to use without save file and for the moment
Slacko 5.4 seems to be a winner but that could change tomorrow :)

I will also try to compare Slacko with other Linuxes to see
how them compare to be used always freshly booted the
cool thing about Puppy is that one can do frugal boot
on NTFS partitions and very few of the others linux do.

Knoppix can and Porteus and Slitaz? but none else?
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tallboy
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#8 Post by tallboy »

I totally agree with Flash on going multisession, his recommendation a long time ago, is actually the reason I never use anything else! For a long time, I have used machines with max 512Mb RRAM, very often only 256Mb. When running live, the whole puppy is loaded into RAM and run from there with no delay. The machines usually have a HD with a swap artition for some other big Linux, and that partition will automatically be used by puppy when necessary. I believe there is some similar soulution when using a Windoze HD. I also regularly run without a HD, no problem! I usually run a remastered puppy. Having done it a few times, the whole remastering process is fairly quick. But the alternatives presented in the links nooby provides, are very interesting.
nooby wrote:I hate the sound of the whirr of the DVD spinning up to speed and then going down and then searching and so on. I hate it
Yeah, I can relate to that. In the bios on the Compaq mainboard I run right now, there is a 'performance' and 'quiet' setting for the CD/DVD, you could check if your bios have the possibility to toggle that setting. Besides, my puppy loads in less than a minute, I can live with that short burst of sound. Alternatively, fit your machine with a stone-age CD player, they have no speed, so they are very quiet! Afterwards, there is no need to keep the disk in the CD player/writer, until you eventually want to save some files at shutdown.
If you use a multisession DVD, the save can alternatively be done to a separate session that doesn't load at bootup, and consquently don't add to the puppy's size. It can be accessed by mounting it, whenever needed.

There are many posts in the forum related to trouble with the save-file, but not many - if any at all - related to multsession problems.

tallboy
True freedom is a live Puppy on a multisession CD/DVD.

starhawk
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#9 Post by starhawk »

nooby, I just posted my first HowTo -- inspired somewhat by this thread. It's a (mostly) simple alternative to hard drives and CDs, and it doesn't make noise.

It's also pretty inexpensive if you know where to get the parts.

Look here --> http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=84649

The HowTo is pretty long, BUT the actual process is simple -- it took me four or five times longer to write it up than to do it one-handed while taking photos! (It actually takes 15-20 minutes to do, maybe a little longer if you want to go slow.)

nooby
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#10 Post by nooby »

Thanks to both of you.
TallBoy Yes I have tested the CD/DVD route
many times startingwith Puppy 3.x and 4,0 and many others.

Starhawk ah I should read first and comment later.
will be interesting. I am using frugal on HD with no save file now
and I learned from Beem and another guy how to move .mozilla
over to the /mnt7home and then to relative symlink back to the
root

And that works very well. i get all the bookmarks and the passwords
intact. I should do some back up of that important .mozilla in case it
get corrupted in future.

I use Slacko 5.4 because it has a rather recent FF and
it is easy to set up while Lupu require me to download FF

Even the youtuve getflash and noscript and such extensions just works.

Swedish keyboard and local time are fast to set up.
So it looks very good so far. I will soon be able to write [Solved]
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nooby
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#11 Post by nooby »

starhawk interesting to read your description there.

I have 3 netbooks these have very small "caddies"
Not sure at all if they have same mechanical size
as the one for a real laptop.
then I have 1 bigger Laptop that may be as your Dell
mine is a Packard Bell Easy Note 6 something.
Unfortunate too little ram.

I am bad at reading texts so I don't want to mess up
your thread with my naive questions.

Do you mean that each time you want to change CF card
you have to take out the Caddy and take out the CF card
and put in another.

Crazy question. Why not just use a USB flash that already
is laying around instead of buying an adapter for CF card
and the CF card that are more expensive and may go out
of production soon? Them not used anymore? Just guessing?
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starhawk
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#12 Post by starhawk »

CF cards will be around for a while ;)

There's a new version of CF --it's called CFast-- that I know very little about... but the two are not compatible. CFast is a SATA version of CF. (That will make more sense in a few paragraphs ;) )

CF cards are expensive because they are getting a little "old in the tooth" -- they are (compared to eg SD cards and the like) rather large and clumsy. They also tend to be slightly slower (because of the IDE bit) than an SD card or similar (that's my understanding, at least -- I've not tested it outright).

Yes, you have to remove the CF card to put it in another computer, but the idea is that you have a silent, solid state "hard drive" in your computer. Like an SSD but much cheaper. I'd be willing to bet that you don't take the hard drive out of any of your netbooks when you want to boot a different machine! ;) This is more a semi-permanent install sort of thing.

Also, something that the thread doesn't go into much detail about -- right now there are a few different ways of connecting hard drives to computers.

IDE is what the thread requires as it is. IDE-to-CF adapters are very simple things, because the protocol (the way the computer speaks to the drive) is the same -- it's just the pinout (arrangement of the wires) that's different.

SATA is a newer form of IDE that uses fewer wires because it's serial (one wire per signal, with several bits per wire) rather than parallel (one bit per each wire, down several wires). It's also a lot faster. Very new computers use SATA extensively.

SCSI is antique but still around, and there's a new version of it called SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). Most computers don't use SCSI or SAS at this time.

There *are* adapters that let you plug an (IDE) CF card into a SATA drive, but those have to translate protocol as well as pinout. I don't trust them to be even close to perfect, which they have to be to not lock up your computer. If you have a SATA hard drive in your system, chances are what you want is a SATA-to-CFast adapter and a CFast card.

Also... just to confuse you further :P (OK, not really) there's one other very weird interface called mSATA (mobile SATA). It uses the form factor (shape, size, connector, etc.) of PCI Express Mini Card, like the newer WiFi cards do. These SSDs, rarely more than 16gb capacity and insanely expensive in ANY size, basically cannot be upgraded with CF or CFast cards, for a couple of reasons -- (1) there's no real good way right now to turn an mSATA port into a standard SATA port, and (2) even if there was, there isn't really space left over for the CFast adapter you'd need, let alone the card... besides, it's already an SSD so there's not much need. Just store everything on a flash drive or external HDD and be careful around doorframes ;)

nooby
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#13 Post by nooby »

Thanks starhawk

Enough of my testing. I think it is as good as it can be.
I would prefer to do a remaster or something but I fail to get how to
so I will try to adopt the zdrive way of seaside instead so will read through that thread again to get how one do that .
I this thread as solved
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