all-in-ram performnce: savefile & libreoffce sfs in ram too?

[Les Kerf]

I have also been running Puppy on multi-session DVD-RW for several months, largely due to Flash's influence. I have been keeping two copies of each Puppy, marked "A" and "B", and alternate them back and forth about once every week or two, re-burning to keep the saved sessions down to a minimum. Important stuff is saved elsewhere, and lately I haven't been saving very many sessions.

I like the fact that Puppy runs entirely in ram when booted this way, and nothing is likely to corrupt my system.
Les

[greengeek]

I might mention that the data layer of a DVD is sandwiched in the middle of the disk, well protected by a thick layer of polycarbonate plastic on both sides. The data layer of a CD is on its top side, protected only by a thin coat of basically paint.

Interesting comparison. thanks for the info. Never realised there was a difference. Now I feel insecure about my CDs

[Flash]

That's why you're not supposed to write on a CD with a ball point pen. It's ok on a DVD though.

[dabruro]

How Puppy works:
http://puppylinux.com/development/howpuppyworks.html

Thanks, bigpup. I'd already read that page but it didn't seem to answer my questions.

I guess this is now a feature request -- I would like a way to load everything into RAM (when there's plenty) including the save file (and maybe any additional sfs files too), even when the save file and the sfs files are on a hard drive.

Last night I did my first remaster, onto a cd (i wanted dvd but only had dvd+r which it said it couldn't burn directly as opposed to dvd-r).

I copied *everything* from under /root into the main sfs, with my personal files, simply because i wanted it all to preload into ram. i didn't want to make something to distribute.

It worked well. After i copied the main sfs to my hard drive, it appears that it still loads all 350MB of it into RAM at boot, which is what i wanted. It's *fast* -- LibreOffice, now entirely in the main sfs in ram, loads in a couple of seconds. The *slowest* thing is several seconds to load firefox because my profile is on the hard drive outside the sfs.

It loads LibreOffice even faster than my Windows 7 machine, even though the Windows machine has much faster hardware. Puppy is on an hp pavillion desktop from about 2005 with a 2-core athlon and 2GB RAM. Windows 7 is 64-bit edition on a nice 2010 or 2011 model year thinkpad w520 with 4 cores & 8GB RAM.

[rcrsn51]

@dabruro: Congratulations! Remastering can be a challenge for some users.

@Flash: How do sfs files work in multisession? Must you extract them into your filesystem or can they be mounted from the DVD on-the-fly?

[Flash]

I don't know. I have to confess that I've never used one.
I'd be happy to try one out. Is there a list of the .sfs files that are available for, say, Racy Puppy 5.3? That's the multisession Puppy I'm using at the moment.

I guess I'd initially simply burn the smallest .sfs file that looks useful to me onto the multisession DVD with Pburn, then mount the DVD and try to use it from there.