Persistent home dir

Forum: DSL Embedded
Topic: Persistent home dir
started by: JeffElkins

Posted by JeffElkins on Jan. 06 2006,21:46

I'm remastering embedded dsl 2.1 for use on a 'real' HD and 512M flash drives, running under WinXP. I'm new at this and am wondering if keeping a persistent home directory will have harmful effects on the flash media. I can't imagine why, but like I said, I'm a noob

Posted by mikshaw on Jan. 06 2006,21:54

It is likely to wear your flash drive out faster as $HOME than it would just by using it as storage. There are at least a couple of files in $HOME that get written many times over the course of a session.

Posted by JeffElkins on Jan. 06 2006,23:01

Quote (mikshaw @ Jan. 06 2006,16:54)

That's what I was wondering mikshaw, thanks.

What gets repeatly rewritten in /home?

Posted by RoGuE_StreaK on Jan. 06 2006,23:39

Probably the main one would be your mozilla cache.

Posted by mikshaw on Jan. 07 2006,02:10

Yeah...that's the big one....constant writes there.
If you install mydsl applications, the fluxbox menu gets rewritten every time you install or remove one.
If you switch desktops, .desktop gets rewritten.

Actually, any application that stores configs will write to $HOME whenever you make a change, and some of these apps will write their configuration on close regardless of whether you've made any changes.

If you have DSL on a flash device, it's really best to run toram, and backup your settings once at the end of the session.

Posted by desnotes on Jan. 07 2006,05:49

I was looking up the 'toram' cheatcode on the wiki. Just to be clear, if I have enough RAM can I put all my virtual drives on RAM? hda, hdb & hdc (I added my own hdc)?

I currently have this in my .bat file:

-hda KNOPPIX/knoppix

-hdb qemu/harddisk

-hdc qemu/hdd0032

I would like to run them all in RAM (I have 2GB RAM on host) so I don't think it would be a problem.

What would the config look like?

Thanks,

desNotes