You can run DSL in many ways, even a frugal install on a hard drive, the answer depends on other factors, like using the 'toram' option or even if you have specified the mydsl=xxyyy option. All of these will effect the operation. A normal frugal boot means that /cdrom is mounted write enabled for root. You should be able to copy your extensions from /tmp to /cdrom as root. In fact the filemanger launched upon exit detects this default situation and displays /tmp on the left and /cdrom on the right. That is very simple.
Now, if you have specified a mydsl=xxyyy then the right side will default to your specified location.
If you have booted with the 'toram' option, and no mydsl=xxyyy was specified then there is no default that I could have preloaded on the right side of the filemanager. You will have to mount the drive partition and navigate to it. I suspect that this very situation is what you are doing. Instead of mounting and navigating to a real pyhsical hard partition to make your directory, you are making it off of / which is on the ramdisk. So upon reboot it is gone. When using 'toram' you need to uderstand that you are running in ramdisk. You need to mount and navigate to a persistent store in order to have your extensions persist.Success. Thank-you both very much and Roberts for that very good explanation.
That is exactly what I was doing and what was wrong, booting toram with no mydsl location specified and trying to write to ramdisk.
Suddenly the light goes on
I think I am correct in realising that toram is not the way that I want to boot DSL, because I will want to save abiword documents to hda2 and it will mean having to mount and navigate to a permanent storage location every time.
Can I just ignore the error codes during boot, or will they affect things if I don't do as it say and run e2fsck, (whatever that is) ?
Thanks.I'd recommend running e2fsck on a regular schedule if it is not being done automatically. A good schedule might be about once a month, and once again if your system crashes or if you do a hard shutdown or reboot.
One way you can run toram and not have to mount your partition is to include a uci or unc extension in with those that are auto-loaded. Since these extension types are mounted, the partition cannot be umounted until the extension is umounted.
Another option is to use a persistent home (boot option home=xxxx). Note: the last I knew this was not possible on the KNOPPIX partition unless you also use toram.
Still another option is to include the command "mount /dev/hda2" in /opt/bootlocal.sh and use backup/restore to keep it persistent. This would mount the partition automatically so you don't have to do it yourself.
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The plan is to have Puppy, DSL and win98 on the 3 partitions so I want to keep everything DSL within hda2. At the minute I have Puppy on hda1, DSL on hda 2, nothing on hda3 and hda4 Linux swap.
You may have a priblem getting win98 to install on hda3 unless you use some boot loader which tricks windozs into thinking it's hda1. Because windoze wants and will not settle for less than hda1.Where do I find e2fsck? Have I missed it - I looked in the menus and in Mydsl system ? Can I easily set e2fsck to automatically run on, say, once every 50 shutdowns ?
Right now I'm getting to know DSL on my own machine, but I hope to be able to offer it to people who are upgrading their PC and thinking of spending £500. I would be able to say "Here is a solution for nothing where you no longer have to worry about viruses and patches"
They will probably be non-technical people who just want it to work and the only extra required will be the inclusing of Abiword (and easy saving of Abiword documents) and their printer, dial modem or ethernet set up.
Is the only real advantage of 'toram' in this situation speed? It is likely they may be 64MB RAM or less, in which case toram isn't an option anyway.
I'm hoping to be able to remaster my own DSL CD (after some more forum research) to include Abiword, so that it is included in the setup. Is this an easy task or is it quite hard? Obviously I can fall back on the 'mydsl' option for Abiword if I fail.
Thanks Musrat, I'll put win98 on hda1 instead and Puppy on hda2 and DSL on hda3.Next Page...
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