Those red/yellow/green myDSL extensions

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Those red/yellow/green myDSL extensions
started by: jhsu

Posted by jhsu on May 25 2007,17:13

I'm referring to the flags in the linked pages at < http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/damnsmalllinux.org/mydsl/ >

used to classify the programs.

Can someone enlighten me on what the different colors mean? I don't understand the explanation given at the top of the page.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on May 25 2007,19:08

If you don't get what it means, then you probably don't need to worry about how they work internally

Basically you'd always want to get a green extension (or previously, some blue), as they minimally use your ramdisk.

Posted by mikshaw on May 25 2007,21:37

If you have no concern for how much ram applications use, the colors don't matter much. If you have 1 or 2 gigabytes of ram, you could probably install every extension currently available all at once without running too low, or at least most of them. However, ram is not the only factor to consider. The color red also signifies a greater risk of system damage.

Green: UCI and UNC packages are mounted, not installed, so they can be stored anywhere and will not use any of the ramdisk apart from creating a mount point directory, and possibly icon and menu item, when they are mounted. I've never been sure why gnu-utils and dpkg *.dsl extensions were listed as green. The unc packages use unionfs to bind the directories in /opt/my_unc_package to the read-only directories, so they will behave as if the files were installed to the base system without actually writing to the base.

Yellow: *.tar.gz extensions extract into ramdisk, which means the entire application is installed in ram (unless you are using a persistent /opt directory). However, these applications are installed in the /opt directory as self-contained programs, which means they do not write to potentially hazardous locations such as /usr or /sbin.

Red: *.dsl extensions first run the mkwritable script before they install. This script adds more of the KNOPPIX filesystem to the ramdisk, making more of the filesystem writable. Then the package is installed in the same way as *.tar.gz, except the files are installed into the base system (/usr, /sbin, /lib) instead of in /opt. The result is more ram used, and more possibility of breaking your system.