mydsl problem with frugal
Forum: DSL Embedded
Topic: mydsl problem with frugal
started by: mgmont
Posted by mgmont on June 10 2005,16:19
Hello everyone,I have done a DSL 1.1 frugal install to a cf which is partitioned as 56 meg (hda1) for DSL and 200 meg (hda2) for file storage and backup/restore.
When I did the installation, I specified hda2 as the target for home, opt, mydsl, and backup/restore. According to the "Getting Started with DSL Version 1.1" document, you should copy your apps with the .dsl extension to the root of your drive designated for mydsl storage. I down loaded Openoffice with the uci extension and Festival.dsl as a test.
When I reboot, the apps are not recognized. I can go into emlfm, highlight the apps and click mydsl and the are loaded and it all works until I reboot.
Did I miss something during my frugal install? I was following the directions posted by clivesay on this forum and have reinstalled two more times with the same results.
By the way, I am fairly new to DSL and I am really impressed by DSL, the user community, and your helpful spirit.
Posted by RoGuE_StreaK on June 10 2005,23:57
When you first get into emelfm, does your home in the dsl system look the same as the one on your cf hda2? ie., does it look like that's linking properly at boot, maybe check if it's booting with the home=hda2 opt=hda2 options. Try saving something to /home/dsl in the system, and on reboot see if it appears in the home dir on your cf hda2?That's about all I can think of at the moment, thinking that if it's not linking to hda2 at boot, it won't see the extensions to load.
Just getting rid of the obvious(?) causes first.
Posted by mgmont on June 11 2005,16:08
Thanks for the reply, RoGuE_Streak. I checked the /home and /opt directories on both the hda2 partition and the ram disk. They both appear to be identical.There must be a file that points to where mydsl apps are stored that is not being updated when I do the frugal install. Would this be the .mydsl_dir file located in the /opt directory? This file contains the entry /tmp at the present time.
Unfortunately, the computer that I am playing with is at work and I will not be able to try any thing else until Monday I hate having to set around all week end worrying about a silly problem that I am probably causing by an installation error, but such is life.
Posted by mgmont on June 11 2005,16:12
Sorry, I accidently double posted and do not know how to remove this second post. Thanks for your understanding.
Posted by ahodgekins on June 14 2005,22:03
Did you have any luck? I'm having the exact same problem. Followed the howto for a frugal install to the letter, and have hda1 as my main partition with hda2 set for everything else, including mydsl.System is a VIA C3-800 on an AOpen PLE133T MATX board (same chips you'd find on an EPIA 800).
Tried choosing hda2 as the download directory when getting mydsl extensions and it put everything in /mnt/hda2/home/dsl. Mydsl extensions don't load on reboot, and also get copied to my ramdisk. Wouldn't let me copy them to the root directory of hda2 until I loaded emelfm as superuser, but still the mydsl extensions don't load on startup. I have downloaded the .dsl for GTK2+ and the .uci for Firefox 1.04.
Currently have the partitions set up on a 15gig harddrive, but planning to use a 512mb CF card in an IDE converter.
Posted by mgmont on June 15 2005,20:06
So far no luck. I have not had much time this week to work on the problem and probably will not next week either. By the way the system that I am using is one that I salvaged out of an old Wave Wireless access point and contains a mother board model MB-58LMP and I am not sure who the manufacturer is. It has a Cyrix 233 processor, 256 megs of ram, one IDE port, parralell port, two serial ports, built in sound, built in eithernet, PS2 KB and mouse ports, and two USB ports. It is a little on the slow side, but a good machine to learn on.If any one has further ideas for me to try, let me know. I plan to get more serious about this problem in a couple of weeks when I get back in town.
Thanks for your interest and replies.
Posted by clivesay on June 15 2005,20:15
Did you all format hda2 as an ext2 partition. If you do ext3 you'll have problems. | Code Sample |
| sudo mke2fs /dev/hda2 |
Chris
Posted by mgmont on June 15 2005,23:45
yes, both hda1 and hda2 are formated with ext2. Also I have reinstalled with DSL 1.2 since my first post but still have the same results. Thinks for the suggestion anyway Chris. It will probably be something dumb that I am doing or not doing. Sometimes it takes someone to ask a basic question before it dawns on you what you are doing wrong.
Posted by clivesay on June 16 2005,01:55
hmm, this is a strange one. Where did you enter the mydsl boot code? Did you enter it on the boot code line and/or on both the boot code line AND the mydsl prompt? When you do a frugal install you have the option to enter boot codes but later on in the script you are prompted for the backup/restore partition and the mydsl partition.I'm just trying to think of different things. Have you looked at my frugal howto doc in the /downloads/pdfdocs folder? Maybe there's something there you can see that's different from what you're doing.
Chris
Posted by mgmont on June 16 2005,02:45
I have tried it several different ways. The first time I specified hda2 when frugal prompted for the mydsl location. Next, I added mydsl=hda2 on the boot code line and ignored the prompt. After that I tried it in both places. Also I read somewhere that a frugal install inherits the boot settings that you add when booting the CD from which you install frugal. I tried adding mydsl=hda2 when booting the CD and then installing frugal. I always end up with the same results. I am thinking that I might start over and try just making one partition on the cf and install mydsl on the root of hda1 and see what happens.
Posted by ahodgekins on June 16 2005,15:49
I have also tried all of the above things, and cannot get it to work. Have also tried messing around with the mydsl_dir options, but to no avail.Pretty sure I followed the instructions for the frugal install script to the letter; I've had a couple of goes at it, with the same result each time.
Had also considered going for the one-partition route, but not tried it yet.
Posted by mgmont on June 17 2005,14:23
I had a chance to play with this problem a llittle more this morning. I have a cf setup with two partitions with frugal installed on hda1 and home and opt set to hda2 and mydsl set to hda2. I changed the default down load directory for apps from /tmp to /opt because I found that the apps were lost when I reboot if loaded into /tmp.I found that if I download an app, execute emelfm in supervisor mode. I can copy it from hda2 to the root of hda1.
After rebooting and watching the bootup process I see that it recognizes the app but gives various errors depending on the app.
Also some apps such as Imagemagick and abiword permenantly install themselves and are in the myDSL menu after install, but after reboot there is no myDSL entry in the menu but those applications have an icon on the desk top and work properly if selected. I think the errors i got from those applications were due to the fact that they produce multiple files when installed and I failed to copy all instances to hda1.
Festival produced an error of "Invalid Tar Magic" and Imagemagick produced and error of "gzip Short Read". These errors only occur after copying them from the /opt directory where they were downloaded to the root of hda1.
Since there is an error it does not install it in the DSL menu. This leads me to the conclusion that although hda2 was specified as the location for mydsl, the system is still looking at hda1. When you down load an app you are logged in as user DSL but you cannot write it to hda1 unless you are logged in as supervisor.
Is there possibly a bug in the frugal install utility?
Posted by clivesay on June 17 2005,16:48
I think I see the problem. When you d/l a mydsl file using the MyDSL browser it's installed temporarily to your system until you reboot. If you like the app and want to keep it, you need to grab the tar.gz/uci/.dsl file from wherever it was temporarily downloaded (/tmp) and move it to the ROOT OF THE HDA2 PARTITION. Just placing it in /opt will not do it. The file needs to go to /mnt/hda2. Give that a go.
Chris
Posted by ahodgekins on June 17 2005,18:43
Thanks for the help everyone, but still no luck.Haven't tried moving apps to hda1 because it's only a 60-meg partition and there wasn't room for the ones I downloaded. That'll be my next step.
Clivesay - I had already tried moving things to the root of hda2, since i'm aware that the /opt directory is the once place that if you put a .dsl file it won't load. That didn't work either, and I had to move the file as superuser in order to gain access to the root of hda2.
For some reason I think the install isn't picking up that mydsl files are on hda2. I've found references to the mydsl location in numerous different places (all set to hda2, sorry I can't be more specific). Which file in which folder contains the definitve setting?
Will try a reinstall with a bigger hda1 partition.
Posted by mgmont on June 17 2005,20:33
Thanks for the reply, Chris. However That is what I was doing when I started this thread. But since I have reinstalled and reconfigured so many times, I thought I would start over again from scratch with a different CF. Here is my present setup. I have a 128 meg cf with a 60 meg hda1 and the rest as hda2. both partitions were formatted with ext2 with hda1 set as boot.
I did a frugal install to hda1. I pointed home and opt to hda2. I also pointed restore and myDSL to hda2 during the install process. After the installation I downloaded three apps with the download directory of /opt. All three installed properly and I had a myDSL sub menu with all three apps within. I then executed emelfm and moved festival from /opt to /mnt/hda2 which should put it at the root of hda2 in my understanding. Then I rebooted.
I watched the boot up process and when the checking for myDSL apps line appeared, no apps were found. When the boot up process completed, abiword and imagemagick both had icons on the desk top and worked properly. There was no mydsl submenu. I checked /mnt/hda2 with emelfm and festival was still there. I highlighted /mnt/hda2/festival and clicked the emelfm mydsl button and it installed festival. Also the myDSL sub menu appeared with the two festival entries within.
I rebooted again with the same results. Festival was not recognized, abiword and imagemagick were still OK. and festival had to be manually installed with emelfm even though it is in the root of hda2. I hope this step by step description will help shed some light on my problem.
Again, thanks for all your help and patience in helping me solve this problem
Posted by ke4nt1 on June 17 2005,20:55
| Quote (mgmont @ June 17 2005,15:33) |
I did a frugal install to hda1. I pointed home and opt to hda2. I also pointed restore and myDSL to hda2 during the install process. After the installation I downloaded three apps with the download directory of /opt. All three installed properly and I had a myDSL sub menu with all three apps within. I then executed emelfm and moved festival from /opt to /mnt/hda2 which should put it at the root of hda2 in my understanding. Then I rebooted. I watched the boot up process and when the checking for myDSL apps line appeared, no apps were found. When the boot up process completed, abiword and imagemagick both had icons on the desk top and worked properly. There was no mydsl submenu. I checked /mnt/hda2 with emelfm and festival was still there. I highlighted /mnt/hda2/festival and clicked the emelfm mydsl button and it installed festival. Also the myDSL sub menu appeared with the two festival entries within. |
How did you "point" the restore and mydsl to hda2 during the frugal install?
It sounds to me like your persistant /opt and /home is working OK,
( explains why you have icons on desktop, and apps in /opt )
.. but your mydsl is non-functional ..
Looking at your quote, did you use myDSL=hda2 ?
That would be a typo, and cause it to fail..
restore=hda2 mydsl=hda2 home=hda2 opt=hda2
should be what you used during the frugal install ..
Just my thoughts..
73
ke4nt
Posted by mgmont on June 17 2005,21:23
Hey ke4nt1, thanks for the reply. I set home=hda2 opt=hda2 and answered the prompt for restore directory as hda2 and answered the prompt for mydsl directory as hda2. In previous installs, I had tried listing them all on the boot option line as you suggest but I still had the same results. For some reason it seems that frugal can't recognize that I want myDSL to be pointed to the root of hda2.
Thanks
Posted by ke4nt1 on June 17 2005,21:42
Follow-up..I just did the same thing using hda3 on my drive..
No issues.. mydsl works.. hmm..
Will try tonite using my CF with 2 partitions, and see if
I can duplicate your error..
thanks for your reply..
73
ke4nt
Posted by mgmont on June 17 2005,23:52
ke4nt1, I appreciate your efforts. I hope you can come up with a solution. I will not have a chance to work on the problem myself until the 28th as we are leaving town on vacation this weekend. I will be on a Carribean island with no phones, no computer connectivity, no television, and no Dallas smog. : )At any rate I will be checking the board as soon as I get back
Thanks
Posted by adssse on June 18 2005,22:44
I am having a similar problem with my frugal install. I also set home=hda2 and opt=hda2 and answered the prompts with hda2. I have tried putting them in /mnt/hda2 and /mnt/hda2/opt without success in either case.
Posted by ke4nt1 on June 21 2005,19:52
I keep seeing references in this thread to a directory called /opt ...The proper name for the directory for mydsl stuff is
/optional
it is not /opt ..
(.. perhaps it CAN be called 'opt', but it is not the same directory that is normally seen inside a booted DSL OS under the / ..)
I was always told to use the dirname '/optional' ...
/opt is a directory in your normal filesystem.
It is where bootlocal.sh is stored, where .uci extensions are mounted, and other items are placed..
/optional is a directory in a mounted, formatted partition
that is recognized by the mydsl script as containing extensions.
Assuming you have the boottime command 'mydsl=hdXx'
pointing to the location of /optional, you should see that.....
Extensions 'outside' this directory are considered in the "root"
of the partition, and should autoload at boottime.
Extensions 'inside' this directory are NOT loaded at boottime,
but are available from the extension area of the desktop menu,
to be loaded in a single click, then run from the 'mydsl' area
of the desktop menu ..
73
ke4nt
Posted by adssse on June 21 2005,23:21
| Quote (ke4nt1 @ June 21 2005,15:52) |
| Assuming you have the boottime command 'mydsl=hdXx' pointing to the location of /optional, you should see that..... |
I am sorry, but I am not sure I understand. I dont see a /optional directory in my /mnt/hda2 so I assume I messed something up. I followed the pdf explaining how to use the install script but my extensions are not being found. I am using hda2 for my home, opt, mydsl and backup/restore. I have tried using the prompt during the script when it asks about mydsl and answering with "hda2" and I also tried putting "mydsl=hda2 " with "home=hda2" and "opt=hda2" when it asks for boottime options. I am sorry for the bother, but if you could help me by explaining how I could get mydsl working I would appreciate it.
Posted by ke4nt1 on June 22 2005,03:12
The directory called /optional is the one that you make. By hand.Should you choose to have an area for keeping extensions,
the process usually involves creating a partition, formatting it,
and adding the /optional directory in it.
( or, you can use an already existing formatted partition )
DSL has no way of knowing your choice in where you wish to keep
your downloaded extensions..
This step is left up to the appliance operator..
Create the directory where you wish, put whatever extensions
inside it, and/or outside of it that you wish,
and then point to it at boottime with the mydsl=hdXx command ..
Let us know..
73
ke4nt
Posted by adssse on June 22 2005,20:33
ke4nt1, I finally understand what you meant with the /optional thing. I got that working, thanks to you. I appreciate the patience of those that are willing to help those of us that dont know any better. 
Posted by clivesay on June 22 2005,20:56
WooHoo!! 
Posted by adssse on June 23 2005,04:36
I second that clivesay. I had some trouble but I am finding it very rewarding. I am very impressed with the frugal install.
Posted by ke4nt1 on June 23 2005,04:43
| Quote (adssse @ June 22 2005,23:36) |
| ... but I am finding it very rewarding. I am very impressed with the frugal install. |
That makes it all worth it right there !!
Thanks for your patience..
73
ke4nt
Posted by ahodgekins on June 23 2005,21:52
Success! (of sorts)If I put a mydsl app in the root of hda1 then it gets picked up, but not if I put it in hda2.
All the settings in the frugal install script were set to use hda2. Is there anywhere else that i need to change this setting?
Posted by adssse on June 24 2005,13:21
I had a similar problem. Read through this thread, towards the end I tried a couple things and seem to have mine working.< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....;t=6441 >
Posted by ahodgekins on June 26 2005,16:20
Thanks adssse, I'd missed that thread. All working now Looks like some kind of flaw in the Frugal install script, but it seems to work fine for others. Weird.
Posted by mgmont on June 30 2005,15:14
I just got back from my trip to Dominica yesterday and read all the new entries in this thread including the thread mentioned by adssse. In that thread adssse mentioned that he added "dsl mydsl=hda2" to the boot options line. I tried that and it worked! After that I did several more installs trying different combinations of parameters. My conclusion is that you must have "dsl mydsl=hda2" (without quotes) entered on the boot options line. If that statement is not there, it seems to default to hda1.
The frugal install script seems to ignore the entry you put on the line that ask you if you want to specify a default restore partition. I did a little further investigation and looked for lilo.conf files using midnight commander and found two instances ( /mnt/hda1/boot/lilo.conf and /cdrom/boot/lilo.conf ) where the append line contained the exact parameters that I entered during each install. Even though I specified hda2 as mydsl partition and it was shown on the append line, it did not work right unless I entered the "dsl mydsl=hda2" on the boot options line.
At any rate, we now know a work around for the problem and it works great.
Thanks adssse, ke4nt1, hawki, and all the rest of you who have contributed to this thread. You are a great group.
Posted by adssse on June 30 2005,20:55
Thats great to hear mgmont. Thanks for posting your investigations, it is interesting to hear that the prompt seems to be ignored. Congrats.
Posted by roberts on June 30 2005,22:02
But the prompt does work. I just ran through a simple install with 3 partitions, hda1 for system, hda2 for mydsl & restore, hda3 for swap. No problems. The prompt may be redundant because you may use the first prompt and type everthing. However, being reminded with the second prompt is not the problem.
Posted by adssse on June 30 2005,22:26
hmm... Seems like only some of us were having trouble with this I guess.
Posted by mgmont on June 30 2005,23:12
Reply to roberts. You are obviously doing a frugal install to a hard drive since you have a swap partition in your install. The problem that several of us are working on is a frugal install to a CF in a IDE adapter. I don't know why they results would be different, but all I can tell you is what I have experienced. My setup is an old cyrix 233 processor with 256 meg of ram, an cf to ide adapter with a 256 meg cf, and a cdrom drive. The cdrom and ide adapter are both on the same ide channel with the adapter set as master and the cdrom set as slave. I use the cdrom to do the frugal install to the cf which is partitioned with 80 meg for hda1 and the balance as hda2. I do the frugal install to hda1 and put home, opt, mydsl and restore on hda2
Could some of you more experienced people try and duplicate this setup and see if you have the same results that I do?
Although my setup is now working by using the method discovered by adssse, I would still like to find out why it will not work the way it is supposed to.
Thanks to everyone for all your help and interest.
Posted by roberts on June 30 2005,23:46
OK. No problem using a 256MB CF with IDE adapter. Two partitions. One a 64MB system, the 2nd is the remaining for backup and mydsl. This is on an old 256MB old celeron system. Absolutely no problems. Entered hda2 for backup prompt and hda2 for mydsl prompt. I find it funny that *this* would come up as an issue now. I wrote this script specifically for CF-IDE devices back at dsl-0.6.0 and required two partitions as orginially I did not allow writes back to the system partition. I run three such CF-IDE system here for development.
Posted by mgmont on July 01 2005,00:44
I have access to several old laptop comptuters at work and I just ordered a 44 pin adapter from the DSL store. When I receive the adapter, I will try this setup on the laptops and see if the problem might be hardware specific. I will let you know if my results vary.
Posted by roberts on July 01 2005,04:10
You will like the CF in notebook computer. If you search the forums, you will see when I wrote about that long ago. A 233Mhz 32MB AMS Rodeo notebook computer no hard drive, just a CF with 44-pin adapter. I also run a CF in a Sony notebook. No hard drive to spin, so battery seems to last longer.Like I said, I made the frugal script for CF based appliances, and thus hard to "breaK'. But this script is not recommended for hard drives hosting multiple OS. Or if you wish to change boot options often.
With the next release of DSL, I have written a frugal_grub script for an easy frugal grub install. This will be recommended for hard drives with windows or other OS.
Posted by adssse on July 01 2005,04:33
I have a question. Right now I am using an old computer and installed frugal with a hd using hda1 for the filesystem, hda2 for backup/mydsl etc. and hda3 for swap. If I was using a CF would I have to do this without the swap so that I would not wear out the CF with so many writes? Just trying to understand how it would work in case I try it in the future.
Posted by roberts on July 01 2005,05:19
Yes, I would not recommend swap on a CF, nor persistent home on CF, as the cache would also be very hard on CF device.
Posted by adssse on July 01 2005,13:26
Alright, thanks for the reply roberts.
Posted by magicpio on July 02 2005,12:24
Hi,I've a similar problem with backup/restore!
DSL just won't, no matter what I'm trying.
The last thing I did was:
Reformatting and Reinstalling frugal to hda2 (hda1 is swap, hda3 is my precious stuff) with following parameters given when the install script asks for command line:
restore=hda3 home=hda3 opt=hda3 mydsl=hda3 dma
All other questions of the scrip regarding mydsl and restore I have answered with NO.
When booting, I can see the DSL message of restoring from hda3
Then I changed /opt/bootlocal.sh and /opt/powerdown.sh.
Then I checked for /opt/.backup_device , it exists and contains hda3
Then I did a shutdown, power off, power on.
DSL again displayed the message restoring from hda3,
but the code I added to bootlocal.sh isn't executed.
When opening /opt/bootlocal.sh with emelf, it doesn't contain
my previous changes anymore.
I've also tried the desktop backup/restore feature.
No success.
I'm really lost
Any ideas? Thanks
Pio
Posted by b1ackmai1er on July 02 2005,18:05
@roberts>Yes, I would not recommend swap on a CF, nor persistent home on CF, as the >cache would also be very hard on CF device.
Could you elaborate on the cache mechanism, I am using a frugal install on a CF card. hda1= dsl boot image hda2 = /opt /dsl /home ect. no swap
Is this setup caching to the CF device?
What is persistant home?
regards b1m1
Posted by magicpio on July 02 2005,19:41
OK, I think I found out, why my backup/restore didn't work.Maybe some of you more experienced guys can confirm this:
1) I have been loggin onto DSL using SSH/Putty as root.
(This should not be related to what I found but .....)
2) I had a look at
/KNOPPIX/usr/sbin/filetool.sh
and saw that a file xfiletool.lst is being referenced.
3) I ran
filetool.sh backup
and got the error message
"tar: /home/dsl/xfiletool.lst : No such file or directory"
"tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now"
4) This means, the script is actually looking for xfiletool.lst
and not filetool.lst on my system.
Why this I don't know yet.
5) Solution:
cp /home/dsl/filetool.lst /home/dsl/xfiletool.lst
6) I ran filetool.sh again, this time without error.
Rebooted.
Backup seems to work now !!
Is this a bug?
Would be nice if somebody could check my assumption.
Pio
Posted by mgmont on July 05 2005,21:13
Response to magicpio. It sounds to me like you did not have a file named xfiletool.lst to begin with for some reason. By doing the "cp /home/dsl/filetool.lst /home/dsl/xfiletool.lst" command you created one which allowed the backup script to run error free.I searched the forums and found the following entry detailing the use of xfiletool.lst.
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....ool.lst >
This file allows you to exclude individual files or directories from a directory that you are backing up which is pretty neat.
The thing I do not understand is that by coping filetool.lst to xfiletool.lst, it seems that you would cause the filetool.sh script to exclude everything that you want to backup. I am reasonablly new to DSL and I am trying to learn and understand as much as I can.
Can anyone else verify my thoughts and explain how this works?
Thanks
Posted by adssse on July 05 2005,23:48
| Quote (mgmont @ July 05 2005,17:13) |
| The thing I do not understand is that by coping filetool.lst to xfiletool.lst, it seems that you would cause the filetool.sh script to exclude everything that you want to backup. I am reasonablly new to DSL and I am trying to learn and understand as much as I can. |
That is the way I understand it too. With xfiletool.lst being the same it would exclude everything that it was going to backup. It may not be giving an error anymore but is it working like you wanted it to?
Posted by magicpio on July 07 2005,21:17
@mgmont| Quote (mgmont @ July 05 2005,17:13) |
| Response to magicpio. It sounds to me like you did not have a file named xfiletool.lst to begin with for some reason. By doing the "cp /home/dsl/filetool.lst /home/dsl/xfiletool.lst" command you created one which allowed the backup script to run error free. ....... The thing I do not understand is that by coping filetool.lst to xfiletool.lst, it seems that you would cause the filetool.sh script to exclude everything that you want to backup. |
Strange! One thing I can say for sure is that after installing DSL 1.1, updating to 1.2.1, deleting partition hda2 again, reinstalling 1.2.1 on hda2 from scratch, I did not have a xfiletool.lst in the /home/dsl folder. (hda1 is swap, hda3 is persisten opt and home, which I did never touch during all the messing with hda2)
Furthermore, my current xfiletool.lst contents is exactly the same as my filetool.lst, which would mean that what is included is completely excluded as well. Ergo no backup, which is not the case. My backup/restore works!
Pio
Posted by mikshaw on July 08 2005,12:42
I didn't see anything in the tar documentation, but it's possible that the include overrules the exclude. Typically you would add a directory to the include file, and specific files in that directory to the exclude file. If you have a specific file in the include file, tar must assume that you want that file in the archive, regardless of whether it's also in the exclude file
Posted by mgmont on July 08 2005,13:37
Thanks Mikshaw. That makes sense. Now that my curiosity is up, I will have to play with that when I get a few spare minutes.
Posted by mgmont on July 10 2005,02:47
My 44 pin cf to ide adapter arrived in the mail yesterday. Several posts back I had told roberts that I would test it out on a laptop and see if I still had the mydsl problem that I originally reported.I purchased a new 512 meg cf and installed it and the adapter in a Micron TraansPort ZX. I partitioned the cf as 60 meg for hda1 and the balance to hda2. I did a Live cd frugal install from a fresh copy of DSL 1.2.1 that I just downloaded. The first time I did the install exactly like the instructions by clivsey. After the install , home opt and restore all appeared on hda2 but mydsl did not work on hda2.
I did a second install and this time I put the following in the boot options prompt of the install : dsl mydsl=hda2 home=hda2 opt=hda2
I answered no to the question of do you want to specify another partition for mydsl and hda2 for the restore question. After this install everything was right and worked correctly.
So for me, the original problem still exists on two different computers.
However, since I know a work around, I am very happy with the results. The laptop is really fast compared to the original harddrive install. Thanks Roberts and all you other people for such great system.
Posted by roberts on July 10 2005,06:37
I would caution you about using persistent home and opt on a CF device. I personally would not do that. Having live filesystems will be high wear on the device. If you must, than at least make a link and move the browser cache to the ramdisk. As for your issue, it is possible, as I never run that combination. I recently made a testing grid for the beta testers. DSL has so many combination and perumutations that testing all is becomming most difficult.
Posted by mgmont on July 11 2005,01:20
Thanks for the words of caution, roberts. I watched the files associated with firefox and I can see what you are talking about. I did not notice any activity within /opt at least from what I was doing. Is there any advantage to having /opt on another partition? Does this save ram space? My computer is maxed out at 256 meg.I did a new frugal install to hda1 and put mdsl, opt, and restore on hda2. Hopefully that will extend the life of my cf. It is still very fast with this configuration.
Thanks again,
Mel