Frugal's being a pain

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Frugal's being a pain
started by: musther

Posted by musther on May 14 2005,01:37

I am (eventually) going to install DSL frugally to a compact flash card, maybe only a 128mb card. In order to be in as good a situation as possible when I do this I've decided to do a test on an old HDD. I made two partitions; both ext2, hda1=52mb and hda2=70mb. I did a frugal install from the live CD, I installed to hda1, and told it to use hda2 for backup/restore and myDSL. It booted just fine, so to test the backup and restore I created a file in the home directory, and I set up the netcard, I then ran backup (to hda2) and rebooted. During shutdown, DSL said 'backing up files to hda2' or somesuch thing. Upon reboot, all my settings were lost, and my file had vanished, despite DSL saying that it was restoring from backup on hda2.

I don't think I'm being a fool, I really don't, but I can't figure out what's going on, can anyone give me a hand?

Oh, just one more thing, when I mount and have a look at hda2, the backup is there.

Thanks!

Posted by Rapidweather on May 14 2005,02:37

You are very close to success! The default filetool.lst file in /home/dsl needs to be modified to add lines for the specific items and directories that you want to have saved on shutdown. First you create the filetool.lst file like you want it, then backup via the menu to the partition you want, then when you shutdown, DSL will do the backup again, and on Bootup, will search for and locate the restoration tarball in the disk partition. Here is my filetool.lst that I use with an older DSL version, that I have remastered:

Code Sample

/home/damnsmall/filetool.lst
/home/damnsmall/download
/home/damnsmall/upload
/home/damnsmall/Calendar
/home/damnsmall/QuickList
/home/damnsmall/Mail
/home/damnsmall/.opera
/home/damnsmall/.sylpheed
/home/damnsmall/.gftp
/home/damnsmall/.xserverrc
/home/damnsmall/.fluxbox
/etc/wvdial.conf

Yours will refer to the /home/dsl directories in DSL 1.1.
Now, how to add to the filetool.lst? Open the Emelfm, via the menu. I find that I often have to open a root shell, and run Emelfm from that.
DSL's Emelfm now has a button "add to filetool.lst", that will automatically do just that when you highlight a directory or item in Emelfm. Note that I have several directories that you might not find in DSL 1.1, but these are shown in the above filetool.lst for an example of what can be done.
You will want to edit your filetool.lst using the Beaver editor, to get it just like you want it.
Once it has all your items, when you shut down DSL, it will write all that to your backup tarball, automatically.
Note that I do not have anything for Firefox. I found that can increase the size of the tarball, as there is a lot to backup/save, and also, your passwords and usernames, etc. would be saved, as well as browsing history and cache, which you may not want to do. So, leave it out of your filetool.lst. I do have Opera in mine, as my registration number needs to be restored each time, or I get an Ad Banner in Opera.
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Hope this helps.
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Also, I thought your partition for DSL was just enough, and I would want a little more, just to have more than enough room for DSL, say 60 MB.

Posted by musther on May 14 2005,05:27

Thanks, that's helpful, I'm starting to understand what's going on, although I'm not quite sure how those lines actually work as home/dsl/.mozilla (for example) doesn't exist, or am I missing the point somehow? Anyway, it seems to be working, what do I need to add to backup my network config (for eth0)?

Also, when I've finally connected this machine to the net, will I need to add anything extra to backup myDSL stuff, or will that be done automatically?

By the way, I'd like to add firefox stuff, how much larger does it make the backup?

Oh, and finally, none of the lines in your filelist (as I understand it) backs up any files created in the home/dsl directory, is it easiest just to create subdirectories and backup those, like your download line?

Thanks for all your time and help!

Posted by cbagger01 on May 14 2005,23:25

Linux files that begin with a "." period are considered hidden files.

You can see them if you press the "H" button at the top of the emelfm window pane.

Or from the command prompt,

ls -a

will show all files including hidden ones.