USB booting :: new to DSL and saving preferences



Hi everyone, I just got DSL for my USB stick today and I've been trying it out. Long story short I love it. I've been wanting to try out Linux for a quite a while and as of now I'm more than impressed. I'm especially liking the idea of having my linux computer (for all intents and purposes) on my USB drive.

moving along, I'm very new to Linux so I'm not exactly catching on to everything quite yet...can you guys please help me with some stuff-

1) saving workspace setup/preferences: specifically how can i set DSL to boot with the same BG/Style/ and Resolution each time? also my saving my preferences for having a USB mouse with a scroll wheel.
2) Firefox: I've used firefox in the past and now I love it all over again. but how do i save my bookmarks/extensions/preferences
3)MyDSL: when I download a new theme or app how can i save it and have it there each time I load DSL
4) finally, is there anyway to setup DSL to beable to access my hard drive? All i have now is a windows partition (ie; just a C:\ drive) but i'm more than willing to allocate some space for a linux partition i could access for running games and storing music.

please remember i'm brand new to linux so the more detailed the answer, the better.
thanks ahead of time! i look forward to becoming an expert linux user :D
I'll preface this by saying I'm certainly not a dsl expert, but have gone through a fairly sharp learning curve getting to grips with it to the point where I now use dsl as my main os so I've come across a few of these points along the way.

1) I got my dsl usb via downloading the cd iso, burning the cd and then booting from that and using the "install to usb pendrive" option, so assuming its the same it has a backup/restore device setup on the boot config - in my case its sda2 which is the second partition on the usb drive - with sda1 being the one where the actual system files are loaded from.  Those 2 partitions were created when I used the install routine.  When the system is closed down it copies and compresses the files referenced in the /home/dsl/filetool.lst file to a file called backup.tar.gz which is copies to the backup device.  You can also access it via menu>system>backup/restore.  When the system boots it looks for the backup.tar.gz file on the device and restores the files.

By default it backs up the files in /home/dsl and some selected files from the /opt directory.

2) Linked in with the above, firefox settings inc the bookmarks are in the /home/dsl/mozilla directory and should be backed up/restored with the above.

3) the system will automatically load in any .dsl files in the / directory of the backup device.  by default these files are copied into the /tmp directory when you use the MyDSL method - so just copy them out of there and onto the backup device to load at restart.  If you want to have the option then you could always create a directory called "optional" and move them into that and then to load them you can use emelfm, select them and click the "mydsl" button manually.  What I personally do is to use the dsl website and save then via firefox into the optional directory.

4) I use emelfm - all your connected storage devices should show in the /mnt directory - /mnt/hda1 should be the first partition on the harddrive which is likely your windows partition.  just click the righthand mouse button on the hda1 and click on mount and you can then access the harddrive via /mnt/hda1 although if its NTFS you can only access it read only.

What I did with my hd to give me more options for the future was to repartition the windows system which I did by firstly defragmenting it in windows and then downloading system rescue iso from http://www.sysresccd.org/ and burning a cd and using qtparted from that to resize the existing windows partition to make space for linux and a swap partition.

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After using it from usb pendrives for a while and determning that this is the main os I intend to use, the setup I went for was to buy a usb external hard drive and get dsl on to it the same as with usb pen install and having the second partition on the drive as my main data/dsl file store (I set this to mount on startup to save having to do it manually each time).  I did that for the extra storage capacity, portability and also because of concerns having read about the limitations on read/writes to flash devices that may become an issue over time for me.  I setup some scripts to let me backup, compress and encrypt the data files onto a pendrive that has dsl setup on it so I have a more portable version of my main data if needs be.

the frugal method that is used with the usb installs - load in the main setup the overwrite it with files loaded after - really is an excellent way to have an os imo, you can play with things and if it all goes pear shaped just turn off the pc and reboot back into the last working setup.
wow thanks for the help, apparently i need to do what you did which is burn the ISO and then actually install. the way I went about it was to just decompress a zip file to my USB drive. I'll try out this method hopefully soon!

please feel free to offer any more assistance :)
great! i've been able to install from CD and now my preferences save nicely. one last question- now that ive installed from cd i don't see the option to boot embedded in a windows environment...can i still do this?

original here.