Save more programs than MB size of RAM possible?

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Save more programs than MB size of RAM possible?
started by: Heart

Posted by Heart on July 05 2006,10:24

Hi,

I have only 180 MB ram and I need more MB for all installed software I daily use so I need a way to generally have my applications running after boot... Is there some way in DSL like in puppylinux where you can have a "personal pup-file" saved on the hd/usb stick which is used like a home partition -regardless how much ram you have-?

Regards,
Heart

Posted by mikshaw on July 05 2006,14:32

Using the "home=hda2" boot option will create a home/dsl directory on hda2, IF hda2 is a writeable linux partition (ext2/ext3/reiserfs).
Using "opt=hdb4" will do the same for /opt on hda4.

If you use the opt boot option it can be particularly useful if you load tar.gz extensions, since it will not use any additional ramdisk space.

Another way to ease the load is to see if any of your *.dsl extensions are available as *.tar.gz (if using "opt=" boot option), *.uci, or *.unc (doesn't matter if you use the boot option with these two), and use those instead.

And....if you don't have a swap partition, it would be a very good idea to create one.

And....if you tend to load the same extensions over and over using the mydsl gui and mydsl repository, stop it. You're only filling up your ramdisk with temp files that could instead be saved to your harddrive.

Posted by Heart on July 05 2006,14:40

...problem is that I haven't any linux partitions (no swap partition, no ext2/ext3/reiserfs) and can't make some because this laptop is "only borrowed". Only Fat32 partition is there!

So no chance for me

Posted by mikshaw on July 05 2006,14:52

You might be able to make a swap file instead of a swap partition, but i'm not sure if it's limited to fat16. Can anyone verify? If you can, this at least will give you a little extra ramdisk to work with. It's pretty hard to do much else if you're not allowed to set up the lappy for proper use of a linux system. Unfortunately fat32 cannot do Linux file permissions, so if you tried putting your home on that it would surely break immediately.

At this time, my best suggestion is to try to use uci and unc extensions as much as possible for adding software. If you have limited ram you'll find *.dsl and *.tar.gz will fill it up rather quickly.