Installing new software to hard drive from USB Drive?

[James Gryphon]

I managed to mess up my hard drive earlier, and am in the process of restoring all my stuff from backups, so I thought it might be a good idea to ask about this before I try to do the setup again.

I'm attracted to the idea of running Puppy off of a flash drive or DVD, which seems a big part of its appeal, and gets around some of the hassle with boot loaders and all of that (a big part of my most recent trouble). However, there are some Linux applications that very well might not fit in that amount of space. I'd like to have it set up so that I have 'base' software that I might use from anywhere installed on the portable drive, and anything 'extra' that I'm not likely to use away from my main machine installed on my main computer's hard drive.

I'm aware that you can set up SFS files on the hard drive with the applications you want... that said, it seems like out of the box all of Puppy's installers are designed with the assumption that you want whatever it is to be on the boot drive, or 'pupsave'. For a flash drive with limited writes, I'd really rather not have the default be for everything to go to that first. I'd prefer to install things to the hard drive by default, with the option of uploading things that I think I might want "on the go" to the 'core system' on the flash drive.

Do y'all have any advice on how something like this would be most easily set up?

[ITSMERSH]

You can boot from CD and/or usb flash drive AND loading the save file from a hard drive.

The related entry in boot menu is: pmedia=

Dependent on what is set here (atahd / usbhd / usbflash) the save file is searched either on all drives or just usb. You can use also: psubdir= to define a sub-directory where to place the save file.

Though I can't say for sure if that will have effect on the search for puppy sfs at boot. Just play a little until a more experienced expert will enter the scene to give some more information about the boot options in puppy.

[bigpup]

First writing to a USB flash drive has a max number of times limit, but it is very big with todays flash drives.
At 10,000 write cycles minimum.
Reading has no limit.

With todays USB flash drives. I do not think how often they get written to is a big problem.

When run from a USB flash drive. Puppy does have built-in processes to limit the amount of writing.

[HerrBert]

...you can set up SFS files on the hard drive with the applications you want... that said, it seems like out of the box all of Puppy's installers are designed with the assumption that you want whatever it is to be on the boot drive...

if you use sfs-files, you don't have to set up anything on your hard drive. just copy the sfs to hd. when loading an sfs from non-boot-drive, sfs_load asks to copy or move the sfs to your boot drive. if you choose "nocopy" it gets loaded anyway.

sfs load on_the_fly wouldn't list sfs's on other drives. to install those, you have to click the sfs on hd and choose to install.