to upgrade or not to upgrade my puppy...

[DeveloperX]

Hello again all. I've noticed that there is a new puppy around here.

I'm using an HDD installed Puppy 1.0.2 on a 120GB HDD with the following partition setup:

hda1 boot FAT32 5GB
hda2 SWAP 5GB
hda3 root 5GB
hda4 FAT32 85GB

I've heavily modified my puppy by compiling various sources I've come across on the net. I have added nearly 90 pieces of software, and heavily modified the menus and icons, etc.

I was wondering if there was a way to upgrade my puppy without losing all this hard work.
If not, then its not worth upgrading, cause this version does all I really need it to.

any input on the subject would be appreciated. thanks.

[GuestToo]

you can install the latest Puppy just by copying 3 files from the iso to your hard drive ... vmlinuz, image.gz, and usr_crams.fs ... add a couple of lines to grub's menu.lst and you can boot the new Puppy ... this will not affect or interfere with your older hard drive install ... if you want, you can uninstall Puppy by deleting the 3 files

i find it better to run Puppy this way ... i have never installed Puppy fully (option 2 ) to a partition ... there isn't much point, unless you need to easily modify the boot files

you can install Puppy 2 the same way, but the files have slightly different names ... in fact, you can install Puppy 1.0.8 and Puppy 2 alpha and the 3 versions will not interfere with each other

all i have to do to upgrade to the latest Puppy is copy 3 files from the iso to my hard drive ... and that's it, i am running the latest Puppy

actually, the easiest way to "install" Puppy is just to boot from the cd ... if you copy usr_cram.fs to your hard drive, Puppy will be 80% installed to the hard drive anyway

[DeveloperX]

you can install the latest Puppy just by copying 3 files from the iso to your hard drive ... vmlinuz, image.gz, and usr_crams.fs ... add a couple of lines to grub's menu.lst and you can boot the new Puppy ... this will not affect or interfere with your older hard drive install ...

Could you show me the lines for the grub configuration ?

Also, wouldn't the new puppy not have any of the modifications that I worked so hard on? So, I'd still need to redo all the changes to the new puppy...right?

awaiting a reply.
thanks.

[Pizzasgood]

Yeah, the new Puppy would be fresh. Puppy is capible of upgrading itself, but it will delete anything in /usr that isn't registered with pupget. It would probably be easier to just stick with the old one, at least until Puppy 2.0 comes out. Since 1.0.2 there haven't been many structural changes, but 2.0 will have many. I think Barry's making a script to import an old install into 2.0, and that may be capible of keeping your mods.

[GuestToo]

you can do a frugal install of Puppy 1.0.8 by copying the 3 files to the partition that your older version is installed on ... the 2 versions will be completely independent and will ignore each other ... the new version will be a clean and pristine brand new installation of Puppy 1.0.8 ... to your older version of Puppy, the newer Puppy will be nothing but 3 files and the pup001 file that will be created to hold your data ... to the new Puppy, the older Puppy partition will be available (read/write access) as /mnt/home/ but the configuration files won't be used ... of course, you can copy whatever you like from /mnt/home/ to /root (/root would be in the pup001 file)

the idea is, you can try out the newest version of Puppy very easily, just by copying 3 files ... then you will know what Puppy 1.0.8 is like, and you can decide whether to upgrade or not

you can install Puppy 2 alpha the same way ... it will not interfere with the other 2 versions of Puppy ... you would have 3 completely independent operating systems installed on 1 partition

a grub entry might look like this:

title = Puppy 108
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 PFILE=pup001-none-262144 PHOME=hda1
initrd /image.gz

"kernel ... PHOME=hda1" is all one line

this assumes your Puppy partition is /dev/hda1, that you copied the 3 files to the root of your file system ... / ... and that you want the pup001 file to be about 256 megs (remember you have access to the entire hda1 partition too)

a grub entry for Puppy 2 would be similar, but slightly different