User Feedback :: Why do I still do regular HD installs of DSL?
bookmark
HD Install allows me to quickly test and make changes. When I trash my install I just reinstall (I know that is the windows way but...) with my data on /home. The reason I like DSL in the first place is it's ability to be fast and low resource intensive. I plan to use DSL as an app server and on some old laptops as X clients. These laptops don't have USB or CDROMs so HD is about the only alternative they have. Besides, this frees up resources for other things. Once done I hope ot have a server with DVD, TV tuner, Jukebox, etc... that can be used from so older hardware. Hard drives may be slow but they are faster than most older CDROMs and since I don't have the resources to run a mainstream distribution (now that I have tried DSL that wouldn't happen anyway, I have Ubunto installed and I have only used it lately to rescue my corruption of DSL during kdm/xdm testing, which I could have done from the live boot) it makes more sense to use the HD install for me.
I did a full install because I couldn't get things like Java to work with the CD version. As far as frugal I just didn't want to mess with having to back things up. This machine has a 20GB HD so since this is it's only OS I simply alotted 1GB to a swap file and the rest is storage. That gives me plenty of space for music and video since I use my laptop on the go all of the time.
It's a P3 850 /w 128MB RAM so it can't really handle Windows XP very well. Since I basically use it for entertainment and some network analysys, via Nessus, I saw no reason to have to mess with using the CD all of the time or having to worry about backing things up.
WHY DSL OVER RED HAT, KNOPPIX, OR OTHER LINUX DISTROS?
I wanted something that isn't time consuming to reinstall if I mess it up and with the ease of use of Knoppix.
(Yeah, I'm a LiveCD Junkie! I use Knoppix STD on an almost daily basis for Windows data recovery.)
I do a sort of frugal install, except I boot off a freedos partition using loadlin.
I don't have any spare partitions left so the knoppix image is put on either the
win95 partition or winxp partition, this is because wherever the knoppix image goes, you won't be able to see it after you enter DSL. Using freedos (or dos) you can tweak the boot up options to your hearts desire.
Frugal kind of confuses me... How do you store the mydsl programs that get installed? When I reboot, they disappear.
I specified the appropriate partition with home= and opt= and I used the same partition for mydsl. I'm missing something... Otherwise, all other settings are saved.
Next Page...
original here.