Should Full HD install be faster than Frugal install?

[UKBill]

Hi,
I've been playing with a sort of frugal install and was now ready to make it a full HD install (I had the partitions ready from day one)

but I wonder if a full install would be (even theoretically) any faster and/or leave more memory available for the apps.

I mean, with a full one, would I avoid to load the complete .sfs contents to memory (assuming those are compressed and need to be loaded to access them) and load files only as needed?

(Hope I'm being clear enough )

Thanks in advance.

[muggins]

i've tried both frugal & traditional hard-disk install & on my 667Mhz,64M ram, 200M swap partition, can't discern any difference in speed at all. i agree with those that say that frugal is way easier to upgrade, however i've reverted to a trad install, as i'm sort of used to the trad file hierarchy.

and of course, if you've got some room, puppy's flexibility allows you to have both methods of install. providing you set up your boot record appropriately, that way you can have a litter of pups.

[MU]

I tried both on a machine with 704 MB Ram, and frugal was much faster (Pupp 106 or 7). With small Ram, there might be no advantage in speed.
For Puppy1 frugal definately is better, as Puppy1 was not designed for a hd-install, that was recommended to developpers only.
Puppy2 now has a full filesystem-support, so a full harddisk-installation should be ok, though some glitches were reported in the forum.
But these are not problems by concept as in Puppy1, and should be fixed soon.

Puppy1 currently still is my main developpersystem, as the compiler there works better (I could not compile mplayer in Puppy2 correctly).
In Puppy1, I use a 3 Gigabyte pup001, and mounted partitions to save more files like sources and games(Doom3).
So also with frugal, you have no space-problems.

Mark

[fitzhugh]

I've just partitioned my drive and am considering my options. What do you mean by frugal vs. full? do you mean still boot via cd as frugal?

I added a copy of pup_201 to my hd along side pup_save. It sped up booting immensly, but do I pay a price in post-booting performance? Is this what you mean by frugal vs full?

thanks
fitzhugh

[rarsa]

but I wonder if a full install would be (even theoretically) any faster and/or leave more memory available for the apps.

There is no definitive answer as it depends on your computer.

- If you have very low RAM (less than 64 MB) It should run better as a full install
- If you have low RAM (less than 128 MB) It depends on the processor and HDD. Full install will be marginaly faster loading but frugal would be faster executing in almost every case.
- If you have more than 128 MB then it's a no brainer. Frugal is faster and puppy uses so little memory that there is always enough for applications.

Plus frugal has some other advantages: Easier to backup, you can have multiple pup_save files, easier to upgrade, etc.

So my recomendation is, use frugal unless you really cannot because of very low memory.

[MU]

frugal is basically what you do.
You just don't boot from CD, but also copy vmlinuz and initrd.gz to the harddrive, and boot them with grub.
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.p ... ght=frugal , second message.

Like this you have a full Puppy on the harddisk, but it still uses the "CD-layout" (pup_save.3fs instead of an own partition).

Mark

[fitzhugh]

Thanks - that makes sense now. I'd skimmed that thread a while ago (the frugal one) but didn't pick up on the terminology. Sounds like the direction I wish to go.

If you don't mind, would you take a look at the post I just made regarding optimal partition configuration? http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?p=56086 I didn't think it belonged in this thread but it is related, and sounds like you have a grasp of the topic that I could really use some input from - both of you.

Mark - you seem to answer the majority of my questions. Wish I could just hire you as my online oracle

I do try to answer my own questions before asking, but I'm starting with very little knowledge. As in the case with partitions, I often can get just enough understanding to know approximately what questions to ask.

fitzhugh

[Kal]

Frugal install, Hard-Drive number #1 or Coexist are the same smell to me in operations! It is generally just the way they get installed at first.
With Puppy 2, the former advantages in a full or number #2 hard drive install are getting very small. The main things with the full hard-drive install is you get a good home for Grub, don't have to worry about running out of space on your personal storage (in less your running out of space on puppy's drive partition). There are workarounds for this in the Coexist too. In tests, I have both on my hard-drive, in bootup speeds the coexist install wins out, most of the time. I still like the full install, but I am being old fashion.
Kal

[raffy]

Mark - you seem to answer the majority of my questions. Wish I could just hire you as my online oracle

Hmm, Mark should be available, I guess Mark has also attached this Forum to his doorbell so it "dings" everytime there is a question here.

There was one time when my CD-ROM driver was actually moving data at the same speed as my hard drive, as I got no "high" from transferring usr_cram.fs (the pupxxx.fs of the 1.xx series) to the hard disk. (Yes, my hard disk is old.)

So if the amount of RAM is large enough (say 256 MB), the hard drive can really be done away with, especially in older computers. Note that the new low-power CPUs today (at 400 - 800 Mhz) are good candidates for this kind of setup.

[waweet]

Frugal install does erase the partition on which is installed?
I would like to install Puppy to my disk without erase the data on it (it is my home partition for Ubuntu)
thanks

[fitzhugh]

off thread - raffy, you mention low power cpu's... been wondering about those. Keep seeing mention of 400MHz-1GHz processors in new computers, especially for puppy and kin. When do those lose out? I've got a pIII 1GHz from '01 or so. Are these new chips actually able to do something more due to other changes, or is it just that now you really don't need the fastest/most expensive chip if running linux? Basically, what can I not do now that I could with a faster chip? It seems to scream now with puppy.

ok, back to installs: I've partitioned my drive so I have:

/dev/hda2 512 M linux swap
/dev/hda3 100 M boot (ext3)
/dev/hda1 4 G fat32 (original partition with windows ME and original puppy 2 install)
/dev/hda4 extended:
/dev/hda5 2 G fat32
/dev/hda6 2 G ext3
/dev/hda7 2 G ext2
/dev/hda8 4 G fat32

Grub on hda3 starts but can't boot linux, just windows. I always get an 'Error 15: file not found" message from grub.
In an attempt to see if it solved my problem I have copied initrd.gz, vmlinuz and pup_201.sfs to all of the above except the boot partition, which has vmlinuz and initrd.gz, actually I even added pup_201 there too, now that I recall. Any idea what it is missing? I'm actually aiming for what y'all describe here: a frugal install. It isn't very frugal with copies of initrd and vmlinuz everywhere, but I was just hoping that would solve the file not found problem and I'd then work backwords and fix it correctly. No luck.
Any thoughts as to what I'm missing or what file is not found?
Oh, a sample of my menu.lst is:
title Puppy Linux (on /dev/hda7)
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda7 ro vga=771

(I did note that it thinks hda7 is ext2, not ext3, , according to the grub message as it tries to boot there, but that is probably something else because the file not found error occurs with any of the linux paritions). - I also even tried

title Puppy on partition with windows (on /dev/hda1)
root (hda0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1
in case it liked that more, attempting to point to the original puppy in the original fat32 partition.

I just don't know what to try next since as far as I can tell it should have all the files it needs, not like there are many involved in booting puppy!
Thanks,
Fitzhugh

[MU]

you miss the (hdx,y) before the entries.

Here is mine:

Code: Select all

timeout 10
color black/cyan yellow/cyan
default 0

title Puppy Linux2
        rootnoverify (hd2,1)
        kernel (hd2,1)/puppylinux2/vmlinuz irqpoll usb-handoff root=/dev/ram0 PMEDIA=idehd
        initrd (hd2,1)/puppylinux2/initrd.gz

title Puppy Linux1.0.8
        rootnoverify (hd2,1)
        kernel (hd2,1)/puppylinux1.0.8/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 PFILE=pup003-none
        initrd (hd2,1)/puppylinux1.0.8/image.gz

title windows
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

For Puppy1, you also can add PHOME=hda1 to specify, where usr_cram.fs/pup001 is located.

Mark

[rarsa]

Wish I could just hire you as my online oracle

Mark has a Paypal account and I guess he wouldn't shy away from gainfull oportunities

[fitzhugh]

Talk about unfriendly error message, but it gets the point across almost as well as "You're screwed!" would!

I added the indication of which partition per Mark's post above and it solved that problem, thanks! Now, the next problem to arise:

[booting along just fine, has loaded pup_201 into ramdisk no problem, thanks to Mark's hint]....
Creating unionfs...
BusyBox v1.01 (2006 [....]) multi-call binary

Usage: init

Init is the parent of all processes.

kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: mountned filesystem with ordered data mode.
BFS: mounted root (ext3 filesystem) readonly
Trying to free ramdisk memory... failed
Freeing unused kernel memory: 168k freed
Warning: unable to open an initial console.
Kernel panic - not suncyng: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

.... and hang.
Searched online and found a bunch of posts elsewhere about this, but they all recommend just adding 'init=3' to tell the kernel what init level to run at, and that did nothing for this problem (added init=3 to end of kernel line in menu.1st, as seen in posts elsewhere).

Any ideas?


[argh! I hate living in crackville The crackwhore next door (no offense to any crackwhores on the list) is throwing things again. The walls are THIN and each time it sounds like someone pounding on the wall with a sledgehammer. So thin that used to have to listen to her lighter flick at 3am when she would get paranoid and move to the closet right on the other side of the wall to smoke her crack! Finally it dawned on me that if I could hear her that easily then she could here me as well, so I just called a friend who is always up at night and talked about how I could always hear when the nieghbor was smoking crack... about 2-3 minutes into the conversation I realized there was complete silence on the other side as she stopped and listened... used her paranoia against her No more flick flick flick flick SCRAPE goes the chair flick BANG she drops something flick THUNK she hits her head CREEEEEEAAAK she opens the closet door to peek out and make sure the anti-crackwhore boogiemen aren't about to snatch her away (I wish) SCREAAAAPE flick flick flick tap tap tap (cleaning pipe?) RATTLE RATTLE as the coathangers are slid aside (how I knew it was the closet over there).... she hasn't been back. Probably hides in the fridge instead!. Sorry, had to vent.

[marksouth2000]

Frugal install does erase the partition on which is installed?

Nope, that's the beauty of the method. Just copies a handful of files and you can boot from a floppy, so no need to hose the MBR either.

I would like to install Puppy to my disk without erase the data on it (it is my home partition for Ubuntu)
thanks

If I recall rightly, frugal install needs a FAT32 partition for the automated installer to do it, but you could still do it by hand (just copy the files) on an ext2 or ext3 partition.

[MU]

sorry fitz, have no idea to solve that
Mark

[fitzhugh]

Sorry, while I'd searched both here and elsewhere I had missed the answer here due to a typo, and the answers given in other forum archives did not help.

I followed the instructions from
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=9056 after doing another search with different (and correctly spelled) search terms.

I switched to

title Puppy 2.01 frugal (/dev/hda7)
rootnoverify(hd0,6)
kernel (hd0,6)/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0
initrd (hd0,6)/initrd.gz

from

title Puppy Linux (/dev/hda7)
root (hd0,6)
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda7
initrd (hd0,2)/boot/initrd.gz

and that solved it, though I don't yet know exactly why. My guess is there are two things:
switching from initrd (hd0,2) to initrd (hd0,6) let it find initrd, though this means it is looking on the actual linux partition and not in the boot partition as I thought I wanted it to (though as said earlier I'd stuck initrd.gz's and vmlinuz's all over the place just in case), and secondly switching from root=/dev/hda7 to root=/dev/ram0 cleared up the freeing up ramdisk memory failure. Not sure how I ended up with root=...hda7 instead of ram0.

Thank you though for following my posts

[MU]

hey fine, congratulations

[fitzhugh]

http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/gnu/grub/h ... b_toc.html

of course I find it after the fact...

fitzhugh

[fitzhugh]

I just realized that although I tell it to boot off of the new linux partition hda7 it is actually using the pup_save.sfs and devx_201.sfs off the original windows partition hda1. What is up with that? How do I get it to use different ones? I want to seperate it into multiple boots with truly seperate systems, including everything, except after I will configure it to point to the same documents folder, as well as share mp3s and such across the different boots.

Also noticed that in MUT it shows the swap partition as "Swap Off" in blue. Not surprising since I've done nothing to point to the new swap partition. Not sure how to do that yet either, but at least that I know how to begin seeking an answer for, unlike the first problem I mention in this specific post.

Now I'm getting more confused. I know in amonth this will all seem simple but for now it is a bit much to absorb all at once.