Bruce B wrote:RetroTechGuy wrote:
I'm hoping that Barry will make this the
default, in the next official release (I don't want newbies to need to learn too much, too fast -- make it easy for them to "join the club"
)
Yes, there are good reasons a person would not want to run the operating system on a filesystem in need of repairs. Good reasons.
Indeed. Critical reasons! It's particularly bad practice to mount a damaged FS in read-write mode.
I personally had several pupsaves become corrupted to the point of being unusable. A colleague of mine has a similar problem, and he was rather disappointed in Puppy at that point (he also tinkers on a good deal of old equipment -- he's not a "newbie" when it comes to this).
Puppy looks really good, and works really well...and then it commits suicide, after a couple dozen reboots.
At least the M$ Windows OS's take several months, to several years, before committing suicide.
Let me say again, that I am a big fan of what Barry and others have done here! We just need a couple tweaks to make Puppy "ready for prime time".
On my frugal install, I patched the menu.lst to "pfix=fsck". On the live boot CD, it is more difficult (I did this also, but this may be beyond what a newbie could do). Prior to this CD patch, I had been typing "puppy pfix=fsck" on every single CD boot...very tedious.
If the point of Puppy is to make things hard for newbies, and discourage them from using Linux (after they lose all their data in their pupsave, which they yet haven't learned to back-up), then the status quo is the right method. Otherwise, a simple patch will help keep them out of trouble. (if I sound a little grumpy about it, I am... I like systems that "just work")
Nevertheless, I highly doubt what you are 'hoping' for will happen at the developer level (i.e. Barry) The reason why is he already did it and guess what? Lots of complaints because users were having to wait for the e2fsck to complete. (I think it was version 3.1)
OK, so we add it as a query, whose default answer is "yes", with a timeout (if you're not sitting there waiting, and only have 1 pupsave to load, it continues booting without waiting for your answer... fscking the pupsave in the process).
Let's be realistic here. Most pupsaves are small. In fact, I read somewhere that it wasn't recommended that you exceed 2GB for the OS (i.e. pupsave). Even a 2GB partition doesn't take very long to scan. And given the data integrity issue, it's worth the wait. Even with the fsck on my pupsave, the boot time is shorter than loading Windows 98 on my machines (I currently have 3 machines which regularly run in Puppy, and it's true on all 3).
Part of the problem here is that Puppy does not cleanly umount the pupsave (I found this in in several 4.x versions). This seems to be more common for pupsaves stored on the HDD, than on a USB flash (my HDD shutdown is very quick, and ALWAYS corrupted. My USB shutdown takes MUCH longer, and only occasionally shows corruption).
So the fsck is simply a bandaid for this larger issue (I might agree that fsck is somewhat unnecessary on
every boot, if the partition is cleanly umounted).
The "speed" complaint reminds me of a copy issue I had in an early version of Linux. The "cp" command was
really fast. Unfortunately, it didn't copy
correctly a substantial fraction of the time, so it was often faster to reboot into Windows98 and perform the copy, then reboot back to Linux (as I often stored files on a Fat32, so they were accessible to both OS). Otherwise, you had to copy the files, then perform a CRC on them, to make sure that they had copied uncorrupted...then recopy the corrupted files. Bad...bad...bad...
However, if you can, it's easy to modify initrd.gz to have this option and other options as you please.
Actually, you remaster the CD and follow Pizza's instructions:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 7&start=60
placing pfix=fsck on the isolinux.cfg
append line.
In a frugal install, you can add it on the kernel line, in menu.lst
BTW, I am now distributing my "fsck" modded CD to the folks that I give it to (i.e. the same as the original, with only this change).