USB booting :: writing to disk



Quote
persistant homedirs in the form of a backup.tgz

These are not the same thing. Persistent home directory is a mounted persistent store in the form of a supported writable filesystem, nothing to do with the backup.tar.gz which is the default.

Using the boot option of home=hda2 upon first use will setup a home directory on the specified device. Subsquent use will mount your home directory on device hda2 Any supported writable filesystem partition may be specified. This is typically used when the boot options are easily accesed as in a frugal or pendrive install.
Quote (roberts @ Aug. 11 2007,01:13)
Quote
persistant homedirs in the form of a backup.tgz

These are not the same thing. Persistent home directory is a mounted persistent store in the form of a supported writable filesystem, nothing to do with the backup.tar.gz which is the default.

Using the boot option of home=hda2 upon first use will setup a home directory on the specified device. Subsquent use will mount your home directory on device hda2 Any supported writable filesystem partition may be specified. This is typically used when the boot options are easily accesed as in a frugal or pendrive install.

The bit that has put me off that approach is the necessity to having to type in a boot option each time. is there no way to store boot options to make them persistant too?
Quote
is there no way to store boot options to make them persistant too?


You can either:

a) Store the boot options in your boot manager (grub, etc). At this moment I don't know how to do that exactly but it shouldn't be too difficult to find out the right file to edit.

b) Relink the directories from the flashdrive at boot.
The wiki has a section called "Start Programs At Boot" that points you to some relevant scripts. Others can be found in this page: http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/DSL_Boot_Process

The backup functionality is used as a mean to make those scripts persistant and thereby, make the whole system persistant.

Hope this helps.
Quote
The bit that has put me off that approach is the necessity to having to type in a boot option each time. is there no way to store boot options to make them persistant too?

It is really a simple matter to edit the boot loader append section depending on whether you are using grub, lilo, syslinux, isolinux,extlinux, loadlin, linld, etc, or even the boot floppy and of course the media involved. If only a CDROM then use mkmydsl to simply generate a new cd image to burn.

However, note that creating a regular directories on a usb device will quickly wear out the flash device just as doing a traditional hard drive install would.

The default approach that DSL uses, only write once per session (backup) is still the most flash friendly.

Quote (roberts @ Aug. 11 2007,09:33)
[quote]

The default approach that DSL uses, only write once per session (backup) is still the most flash friendly.

Do you know of any efforts which are geared for those of us, me for instance, who has a microdrive, or maybe even those who are not too worried about the lifetime of their flash?
Next Page...
original here.