Puppy with Home on a separate hard disk drive

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wellingburgher
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu 05 Jul 2012, 10:32

Puppy with Home on a separate hard disk drive

#1 Post by wellingburgher »

I've been using Ubuntu for a few years. It does everything for me and I've not learned a lot about Linux. I have an Asus eee 900 and want to install Puppy on it - nothing else, just Puppy. What I thought was a 20G drive turns out to be 2 drives, one almost 4G the other about 15G. It has 1G of RAM plus a 4G SD card.

It seems to me to be a good idea to install Puppy to the first, smaller, drive, with /home on the other drive - plenty of room for storage there with the SD card in reserve. I can then have /boot /root and /swap partitions on the other drive.

Does that seem to be a good idea to experienced users? And if so, how do I go about it? Should I use GParted to clean both drives? What partitions should I set up or will Puppy do that for me? Is it best to do a full install on one drive and then move /home to the other drive?

All advice gratefully received.

snayak
Posts: 422
Joined: Wed 14 Sep 2011, 05:49

#2 Post by snayak »

Hi wellingburgher,

The way we generally follow is "frugal install".

An excellent tutorial is here.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=37368

Get username and password here (Search for username in this page)
http://puppylinux.org/main/Puplet%20for ... atures.htm

Sincerely,
Srinivas Nayak
[Precise 571 on AMD Athlon XP 2000+ with 512MB RAM]
[Fatdog 720 on Intel Pentium B960 with 4GB RAM]

[url]http://srinivas-nayak.blogspot.com/[/url]

rokytnji
Posts: 2262
Joined: Tue 20 Jan 2009, 15:54

#3 Post by rokytnji »

All advice gratefully received.


I own the same 900 as you do. There is no /home in Puppy linux like there is in Ubuntu. Your 4gig drive is plenty gig enough for a frugal install as stated above in previous post. Just put the save file when asked to do so on the 16gig secondary SSD drive as ext2 file system and that is all you need to do. You can format the whole secondary 16gig ssd ast ext2 file system and besides keeping your personal save file there. You can make folders called music and movies or whatever and save extra stuff on the 16gig SSD drive and access it in Puppy also.

If me. I would install puppy to 4 gig ssd drive frugally (format drive as ext2 file system first). I would install grub4dos bootloader to mbr on 4gig ssd drive next.

I would then format 16gig ssd drive as follows. Ext2 file system and place my save files in there. Make some folders in it through rox file manager for stuff I wish to keep from online like .mp3 or whatever.
Then shutdown and point my personal save file to 16gig ext2 drive. Give it a size of 512MB initially. Let it make the save file and shutdown.

Edit:
As a side note. You can put the first save file on the 4gig ssd drive. It will fit just fine. Then after filling it up with changes. Copy it over to secondary 16gig ssd drive also and change the name just a little to make a backup that way.

Reboot. Connect wireless and make sure dhcp is saved for next reboot. Shutdown and restart again to see if my saved wireless connection takes.
From there. Install any packages you wish in puppy as everything goes into the save file on install.


I don't run Puppy internally on my 900 but I do run Puppeee 4.4 on external flash drive on it on a 4gig SD flash card. I keep backup personal save file in AntiX /home in a folder called /home/my user name/puppy/personal save file name. That way if the sd card personal save file becomes trashed. I can copy the other in the above location back into puppeee on sd card.

I also run other sd flash card Puppy Linux frugal installs like Diamond Puppy and MacPup.

Moving something like /home I have done in AntiX. It requires symlinking /home on secondary 16gigssd drive to /home on 4gig ssd drives /home folder and then editing /etc/fstab also to make the distro bootable after changing /home location.

But like I said. This does not need being done on a Puppy Linux frugal install.
Which in my personal opinion. Is the best way to install Puppy on a eeepc. Because if the personal save file becomes corrupted for what ever reason. You can make a backup and rename it something else and delete the corrupted one and use the backup to boot back into pristine condition.

I have mentioned ext2 file system because the eeepc 900 phison ssd drives don't like journaling file systems or lots and lots of writes. I don't run a /swap partition on my 900 for the same reasons. It wears out the phison drive prematurely.

I am sure other members here will weigh in and explain better how puppy works to you better than I can.

Good luck with it and happy trails, Rok.

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bigpup
Posts: 13886
Joined: Sun 11 Oct 2009, 18:15
Location: S.C. USA

#4 Post by bigpup »

This info may help you:
Various ways to install puppy
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=60302

Here is a Puppy specific Google search:
http://wellminded.com/puppy/pupsearch.html
The things they do not tell you, are usually the clue to solving the problem.
When I was a kid I wanted to be older.... This is not what I expected :shock:
YaPI(any iso installer)

wellingburgher
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu 05 Jul 2012, 10:32

Puppy with Home on a separate hard disk drive

#5 Post by wellingburgher »

So much help so quickly! Many thanks.

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