Underdog: Unleash the Power

[jrb]

Recently I tried playing with Underdog, a feature that Barry resurrected from the 2 series. I matched Slacko-5502 with Slackware-14 and Precise-571 with Ubuntu-Precise. After hours of trial and error I got both to work, Slacko actually was pretty easy, and then realized there was nothing I really wanted from Slackware or Ubuntu. Puppy already has everything I need.

Upon reflection however I realized that what I had setup was a way to run Puppy with all the apps I could dream of from a read only partition with minimal memory use, WoW! So here’s how I did it:

WARNING!!! WARNING!!! WARNING!!! - If you haven’t used Gparted before be EXTREMELY careful and make sure you understand what you are doing before attempting setting up new partitions. You can lose EVERYTHING if you do it wrong. If you are going to do this on a drive containing Windows 7 or 8, you should use the builtin Windows partition resizing tool. Even then if you have hidden partitions as part of your Manufacturers Windows emergency reinstall you will probably lose that feature.

I booted Puppy (any recent will do) from a flashdrive and used Gparted (system menu) to resize the existing partition (sda1) on my harddrive to give me 14 GB (14386MB) of unallocated space after sda1. Then I added a new 4GB ext2 partition (sda2) at the front of the unallocated space and filled the rest with a 10GB swap partition (sda3). I could have gotten by with just a 2GB ext2 but what the hell.

Next I did a frugal install of Slacko-5502 to sda1. Setup->Puppy Universal Installer->Internal (IDE or SATA) hard drive.

Then I ran Grub4dos (system menu) which setup my bootloader on sda1. I edited the menu.lst to add on “underdog=sda2

[jrb]

hold

[jrb]

hold

[jrb]

what does it do

Ha, Ha, guess I need to sharpen up my descriptive skills.

Put simply, it is another way to install the Puppy operating system on your computer. It has the advantage of allowing a really large Puppy system with lots of Apps, using little memory and being in an uncorruptible, read only, environment.

[Pelo]

Full install ! Underdog seems for just having a glance at a distro, like a virtual machine. NO ?

[8-bit]

What is the uuid line in your menu.lst entry for?
Also, I was thinking of an underdog Puppy for use with very limited memory machines.
As a for instance, I have and old Compaq laptop that sports 150 megs of ram.
And it seems unfair that one can install and run Win XP on it abet slow with that amount of ram and Puppy when tried with a swap partition keeps messing things up loosing desktop icons and even applications on the same laptop.
This was with a frugal install.
I had not tried a full install on it though.

[jrb]

Full install ! Underdog seems for just having a glance at a distro, like a virtual machine. NO ?

An exciting alternative to the squashfs extensions is to use an existing installed Linux distro as the bottom layer:

What the above diagram is intended to convey is that the bottom layer is a partition, not the "underdog.lnx" file itself. File underdog.lnx is just a text file, containing the name of a partition, for example "hda1".
At bootup Puppy will read underdog.lnx and will mount the partition as the bottom layer. If that partition happens to have a Linux distro installed in it, then the entire distro filesystem will "show through" on the top layer of Puppy's unionfs.

Barry intended for underdog to take advantage of an existing linux full installation so that you could use the apps it contained. What occurred to me is that I could use the partition mounted by Underdog to contain all my Puppy files, except for initrd.gz and vmlinuz. The partition is mounted read only which is what I have always strived for since it cannot be corrupted (screwed up) like a full install.

[jrb]

What is the uuid line in your menu.lst entry for?
Also, I was thinking of an underdog Puppy for use with very limited memory machines.
As a for instance, I have and old Compaq laptop that sports 150 megs of ram.
And it seems unfair that one can install and run Win XP on it abet slow with that amount of ram and Puppy when tried with a swap partition keeps messing things up loosing desktop icons and even applications on the same laptop.
This was with a frugal install.
I had not tried a full install on it though.

The uuid just tells the bootloader which partition the folder containing the Puppy files is on. The uuid line is created automatically by the latest versions of Grub4dos. The older ones used to use "Find" and the bootloader would examine all partitions.

Unfortunately I can only get my oldest machine down to 512MB of ram since that's the smallest ram chip I have. (I did a major housecleaning a while ago and sent a bunch of old stuff to the recycler, hopefully it all found new homes.) I have tried this setup on that machine and it works very well. As I mentioned in my first post I have a 4GB partition containing 1.5GB of uncompressed Puppy files and it works very well on this old P4.

By the Way, I have simply copied this install on to 4 different machines, 2 desktops and 2 netbooks and it works equally well on all, faster on the faster machines of course.

[mikeb]

So its readonly as far as access from inside puppy is concerned.... I assume direct access...eg through its mount point would still be read write.
How are you savng ?..a save file?

This reminds me of an option I added to puppy some years ago...basically the save file gets used as a full system install image.... it runs like a full install ie low ram usage and does not have any unionfs overhead/quirks but can stll be installed frugally to such as windows partitions.

Mike

[starhawk]

mikeb, I'd be interested to hear the particulars of your savefile trick... PM me if you would, I'd rather not hijack the thread.

[mikeb]

mikeb, I'd be interested to hear the particulars of your savefile trick... PM me if you would, I'd rather not hijack the thread.

ok will do....not on puppy at the moment so will be a bit later on.
I posted under the 'ways of reducing ram usage' theme plus a general interest in naughty ways of using puppy

mike

[starhawk]

Take as long as you need, mikeb, I'll be here

[jrb]

So its readonly as far as access from inside puppy is concerned.... I assume direct access...eg through its mount point would still be read write.
How are you savng ?..a save file?

Actually it is mounted at /initrd/pup_ro4 and is totally read-only, no access allowed. To make changes I boot into another Puppy. I just finished throwing together a special fast booting version of racy-5.3-BABYbarebones for just that purpose.

As for saving, you could use a save file just as in a normal install. Personally any changes I want I do by editing puppy_xxx.sfs or in this case by editing my underdog partition.

This reminds me of an option I added to puppy some years ago...basically the save file gets used as a full system install image.... it runs like a full install ie low ram usage and does not have any unionfs overhead/quirks but can stll be installed frugally to such as windows partitions.

I tried that too, placing the whole puppy_xxx.sfs contents into a savefile and then using an empty puppy_xxx.sfs. My problem with savefiles is that they inevitably get corrupted or I screw them up by adding something stupid.

[mikeb]

Hmm yes...not a fan of saves myself though ext2 was the default at the time I added ext3 and reiserfs which seemed more robust.

Perhaps a save partition would complete the ensemble though its getting a bit like a full install in that case.

Apart from less ram usage there will be less overhead loading uncompressed system files most noticeable in comparison to a machine where the sfs does not load to ram.

For testing with low ram I usually use qemu.... it can use flash sticks and real drives as images too though avoid using your normal system!

mike..

[musher0]

Hi, jrb.

I mentioned your initiative here:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... ost#733105

as it might present a solution to grouping all necessary big programming-
language files in one place -- instead of creating large sfs's (the subject of
that thread).

Some tangent questions:
* does this Puppy with itself as an "underdog" boot reasonably fast ?

* you mentioned the "bare-bones" Puppy, with a lesser version. Can it
use the newer Puppy version as an underdog? Or must it remain a
"service vehicle"?

* in the case of an older Puppy with a newer Puppy as an underdog, how
do the glibc versions play out? I mean: would the newer glibc version on
the newer Puppy still be active (override the older glibc)? Otherwise,
some programs in the underdog will not work, right?

* can the entire process you describe be created | installed | carried out
from an ISO CD? Is that how you installed it on your other machines?

"Bonne continuation !"

musher0

[Pelo]

sfs load on the fly : i am used to load 'old puppies' on the fly of newest one. It is based on underdog processus, in my opinion.
But i unload them before shutdown, frightened to break anything
With Puppy, rather than thinking about what should work or not, i decided to do it
with 4gb ram, it's easy, and it works perfectly.