Frugal Explanation

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Frugal Explanation
started by: adssse

Posted by adssse on June 16 2005,14:01

I have read many posts about the frugal install and have read through the "how to" pdf on the subject but I am still kinda confused as to what the advantages & disadvantages are as compared to a normal hd install. I realize that they are both installed on the hd and that frugal can be updated when a new release comes out but beyond that the subject is kinda fuzzy to me. I am not sure I really understand the persistent /home and /opt on a partition and so on. I have been reading so much about it and all the support it has from those on the message boards you have convinced me to try it. I have two machines I run dsl on, a 233mhz 128ram desktop & a 450mhz 128ram laptop. If someone wouldnt mind filling me in on all of the advantages/disadvantages, tips, etc. I would greatly appreciate your help.

Posted by clivesay on June 16 2005,14:30

I'll try.

Presistency means that the /home and /opt directories are located on a partition instead of ramdisk. This helps to save memory and allows you to install the tar.gz/uci extensions from the repository without using additional ramspace since /home and /opt are located on the HD.

The frugal script includes an option for upgrading your install. Basically to upgrade your whole system you only need to replace the compressed KNOPPIX file and maybe minirt.gz or logo.16. The Frugal upgrade takes care of all this.

Your machines should run frugal very well. If you have a machine with say 512mb ram, you can run frugal in toram mode and still have plenty of room to run many other extensions. This makes computing VERY fast. I run toram for frugal, livecd and pendrive. You can run toram in as little as 192mb ram but there's not much room left if you are doing very many things at once.

These are the big things that I love about frugal.

One extra note.....

A cool feature is running many different 'versions' of frugal on the same partition. I use the grub bootloader to setup a 'Base' DSL and an 'XFREE' DSL. With the mydsl_dir bootcode you can place your MyDSL files in different folders on the same partition and point grub to boot to the one you want. That way I have a 'Base' I can boot into to build .dsl extensions and I can have an 'XFREE' version to boot into with all my personal files and nvidia acceleration.

There are so many things you can do and upgrading only takes a couple minutes.

I'm completely sold on it!

Chris

Posted by mikshaw on June 16 2005,14:50

I can't really give a thorough explanation since i've never used a harddrive install of DSL, but here are some of my thoughts:

Frugal behaves very much like a liveCD in that it uses the compressed KNOPPIX image as its base rather than extracting the contents onto the harddrive. The difference between this and liveCD is that it runs from harddrive rather than CD, so it's faster and you always have a free CD drive to use. Otherwise it's pretty much the same, using backup/restore and myDSL to keep your apps and settings in place with no permanent changes done to the base system.

With a harddrive install you are extracting the contents of KNOPPIX onto the harddrive, making the whole system writeable and persistent...any mistakes you make are retained when you reboot, just like a typical Linux distribution. It's my opinion that the harddrive install was not in the original plan, and may never be as useable as another typical harddrive-installed distro. There are many things in DSL which were built for use by user dsl, and not carried over to a multi-user environment. However, since changes are permanent, any changes and additions you make are easier to manage since you don't need to backup every file you add to the system.

Using a persistent /home and /opt gives you a way to keep your personal settings, and even some applications, saved to hard disk without the need for backup/restore. This also helps lighten the load on RAM, since your files are on a mounted drive rather than held in ramdisk. You can keep saving files into /home/dsl all you want without eating up all your RAM and eventually crashing.

Posted by hawki on June 16 2005,15:08

Hi
I'll give it a try. With a frugal install you are running directly from a compressed filesystem exactly as it was created every time you boot. To give it a M$ spin is it is like reinstalling a fresh copy of the operating system everytime you boot. To update the system software all you do is replace the single big compressed file called /knoppix.

If you want to customize or save "stuff" from one boot to the next you create a persistent home to save this stuff off to. This is usually some sort of storage device like a internal hard disk partition, a thumb drive, or external hard drive of some sort. In effect what happens is your saved "stuff" is reinserted into your fresh clean install at every boot. You get to choose what gets retained and what is not.

The .dsl extensions work much the same way. The files in the extensions are inserted into the fresh clean newly booted system by the myDSL script. You also get to choose which ones get added either auto-magically or manually as you wish. If you install something that doesn't work or you just don't want anymore you just don't add it back the next time you boot.

With a hard disk install the files for the operating system are pulled from the compress image file and distributed around the disk in their normal locations. Since they are no longer compressed they take up more disk space. It also makes it harder to update. Usually you need to wipe out what you have and start over. If you install applications with .dsl extentions they are extracted from the .dsl files and inserted into the filesystem on disk. Since there are no deinstall scripts anything you add is permanently on disk unless you like to delete things by hand.

So to summarize

frugal
1. Updateable
2. Customizeable
3. Permanent data (effectively - permanent home)
4. Portable data ( if you use a thumbdrive for permanent home)

hard disk install
1. Permanent
2. Maybe faster

I hope this helps and maybe even makes sense.
good luck

Posted by hawki on June 16 2005,15:11

Wow, by the time I got back and actually hit the add reply button I see I was a little late.

Oh well you got my opinion
later

Posted by newOldUser on June 16 2005,16:45

Question...

If I've got this right, the LiveCD and Frugal both load the operating system to a ramdisk in order to run. A hard drive install of DSL does not load to a ramdisk when running.

So, if I have a machine with limited memory (is there a magic number? Lets say less then 128meg), then I might want to consider a hard drive install since the only thing in memory at any given time are the processes I'm running at the moment, not the whole OS. Is this correct?

If I don't use the home, opt and mydsl options at boot time then ALL those files in the /home/dsl and /opt directories also get loaded into memory on a Frugal boot. So if you have the storage space available it makes sense to use those options at boot. If you do a hard drive install you don't need those options since the directories are already on the hard drive and will not be loaded into memory. Are all the boot options documented?...

I assume that all flavors of DSL would use a Swap partition if one is present at boot time. Is that correct also?

thanks

Posted by green on June 16 2005,18:00

I'll throw in my two cents....

Right now, I"m using a Live CD of 1.2.1 and have a Lexar 256Mb USB flash drive that contains myDSL and restore. The USB flash drive has a single partition, I did not make multiple partitions, and it has a directory named /optional
The backup.tar.gz is saved to /mnt/sda1 which means it is on the root / directory of the USB drive. Thus, when booting the Live CD, I type in this:

dsl toram mydsl=sda1 restore=sda1

toram loads the whole thing into ram, i have 256Mb on this machine.
sda1 is the flash drive partition where stuff is stored.
mydsl=sda1 means /optional
restore=sda1 means / or root of sda1

So DSL loads up anything that is in the / or root of the flash drive and anything that is in the /optional directory gets listed in the fluxbox menu as:

myDSL -> Install Optional Extensions ->

that way, I can load those ones up as I need them.

I am using the CD and USB flash drive on a 'company owned' laptop that has Win2K installed on the entire drive. Because this laptop is company owned, I did not want to chance resizing the single 20Gb NTFS partition for frugal. This method works great.

=================

On other machines I have frugal installs. Not one hard drive install.
One in particular is a 200Hhz, 128Mb ram, 512Mb Compact Flash drive, no hard drive, just the CF card with an adapter.
I followed the same basic steps that Clivesay put in his pdf document.
However, I do load the whole thing toram, with only 128Mb of ram. I do not have anything loading at boot time from / or root, but there are things waiting in the wings via the fluxbox menu from my /optional directory off of the CF card. I use that box for web surfing, email, streaming audio listening via xmms, ssh to other boxen, ftp, etc. It runs great and has never had any issues. Upgrading is very simple, which I do for every version that John and Robert put out there.

It took me a while to get a full understanding of the / and /optional thing (mydsl= & restore= + frugal). I just jumped in a did it. I used to do the hard drive installs, but found that my lack of knowledge caused me to mess it up on a regular basis. That does not happen with frugal. A reboot fixes what my fat fingers fornicate. I'll never go back to HD install.

I could go on forever about frugal and persistancy, but I digress.....

Once you get the / and /optional and frugal thing down, do the:

Make myDSL CD remaster

That is a lot of fun! You end up with a CD that contains any/all of the files/programs from / AND /optional, plus any boot time options you like. That way, you pop in the CD and go. It's awesome. It's like a PC on a CD. It doesn't get any better.

DSL rocks.

Posted by green on June 16 2005,18:08

Quote (newOldUser @ June 16 2005,12:45)

" If I've got this right, the LiveCD and Frugal both load the operating system to a ramdisk in order to run. A hard drive install of DSL does not load to a ramdisk when running. "

A frugal CAN load everything to ram, but it does not have to.
A LiveCD CAN load everything into ram, but it does not have to.
These are options.

" So, if I have a machine with limited memory (is there a magic number? Lets say less then 128meg), then I might want to consider a hard drive install since the only thing in memory at any given time are the processes I'm running at the moment, not the whole OS. Is this correct? "

I have a machine with 48Mb ram, it's runs a frugal off it's 1Gb hard drive. But it does not load the whole thing into ram, it runs from hard drive, but as frugal, not a hard drive install. I do not consider a hard drive install an option.

" If I don't use the home, opt and mydsl options at boot time then ALL those files in the /home/dsl and /opt directories also get loaded into memory on a Frugal boot. So if you have the storage space available it makes sense to use those options at boot. If you do a hard drive install you don't need those options since the directories are already on the hard drive and will not be loaded into memory. Are all the boot options documented?... "

If 'toram' is chosen as a boot time option, then /home/dsl and /opt are loaded into ram, but not if you don't choose 'toram'. If you've got the ram, you might as well use it.

" I assume that all flavors of DSL would use a Swap partition if one is present at boot time. Is that correct also? "

If you have correctly setup a swap partition on your hard drive, yes, DSL will find it and use it.

Posted by adssse on June 16 2005,19:33

Thanks for everyones help, its great how everyone here is willing to offer information for those of us that are not as experienced. I am not sure that I understand how all of the backup/restore, and /home /opt stuff works exactly but I am going to give it a try. Unfortunately that means you will probably see more stupid questions on this subject from me, but I am learning alot. If anyone has any more information to add it is all appreciated.

Posted by adssse on June 16 2005,19:34

Posted by hawki on June 16 2005,21:10

Hi again
I'm not sure any of us has made it absolutely clear how frugal works. I don't think I can in a few words but here's another try. Most of the filesystem is not loaded into memory. Symlinks are used extensively to make it look like the files exist on hard disk but actually read directly from the compressed file /KNOPPIX.

For instance /bin normally exists on disk as a subdirectory of /.
If at a shell prompt you type
ls -l
you will see
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Jun 14 14:55 bin -> /ramdisk/bin
This would make you think that in has been loaded into ramdisk. But if you cd to /bin and type
ls -l
You will see as the first entry

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Jun 14 14:55 arch -> /KNOPPIX/bin/arch

Sooooooooooo

When you run the command arch it is actually read directly from the compress file /KNOPPIX.

If you follow the links for /lib and /sbin you will discover the same thing.

On the other hand /opt and /home do actually exist in /ramdisk. This means that it will be lost after a reboot unless saved somewhere. The permanent home allows you to do that. Anything you load there does take up memory in the form of /ramdisk.

I hope this helps. It made me think anyway.
good luck

Posted by ke4nt1 on June 16 2005,22:11

hawki is correct...

A typical "HDInstall" - debian-style, of DSL takes about
250MB's of hard drive space..

We are not loading up this entire filesystem into ramspace.
Thru the "frugal" use of symlinks, and other tricks, the OS
loads into 64MB's ram easily.. I have one using 40MB's on
one of my laptops.. Many have run the X desktop with 32MB's.
(just like liveCD, look at your ram usage sometime after boot)

I have about 15 boxes, counting my laptops, car-audio,
desktops, and the studio.. all running frugal installs.

I do "test" many things in a quickly installed HDinstall ,
but just for testing pre-releases and some extensions..
But I'll reformat that, and use it for swap or other data.

(Can you imagine re-installing 15 HDInstalls
with every new DSL release??? )

Not to mention losing my custom options and tweaks that
I've added to my boxes, servers, desktop, gaming box, etc...

One thing for sure..
Nothing beats running DSL using "toram" ..
If you've not tried running your ENTIRE OS in ram... DO IT.
The performance, especially in low-end machines, is impressive.

For my daily activities, browsing, emails, burning DVD's/CD's,
games, playing music and watching DVD/Videos, and working
on DSL stuff like extensions or new applications...
Frugal + Toram is IT.. " It just works great! "

73
ke4nt

Posted by adssse on June 16 2005,22:38

Ok, thanks to all of you and clivesay's pdf in particular I believe I have my first frugal install up and running. I do have a few questions already though.
When I am looking in emelFM, it opens up to /ramdisk/home/dsl. Is this the /home I set up on a seperate partition (I used hda2 for /home and /opt). Or do I need to mount hda2 to get to those?
Also I saw at the end of the pdf that it is recommended to use .uci extensions instead of .dsl. I was wondering how these would work because I read that they need to be mounted, and I have been using the .dsl extensions thus far.

EDIT: Another thing I have run into is I need to edit lilo.conf so that it boots in 800x600. I did this before on a regular hd install, but am now having trouble. I am trying to change vga=normal to vga=788 using vi, but when it enter "w" to write it says "readonly option is set (use ! to override). So when I enter "!w" it says "lilo.conf E166: Can't open linked file for writing". I didn't seem to have this problem before.
Sorry for all of the questions. If someone could help me figure these things out I would appreciate it.

Posted by roberts on June 17 2005,00:54

The easiest way to change boot options is to re-run frugal_instal.sh and use the update feature. At the first prompt to enter boot options enter:

vga=788 home=hda2 opt=hda2

To use uci just mydsl-load it or using emelfm select it and then double click it

Posted by adssse on June 17 2005,04:37

hmm... I wasn't able to get that to work. When I added vga=788 all I had was a blinking cursor and a black screen. I went back through frugal_instal.sh again and just put home=hda2 and opt=hda2 for the options and after that it booted up again but in text mode it is still at 1024x768 so I cannot see the last few lines of text while it is booting or while I am in text mode. Just to check I used the live cd and entered vga=788 at boot and got the following message:
could not find kernel image: vga=788

I know on my last hd install all I did was change lilo.conf and it worked fine for me but as I stated in my last post I am having trouble with that. I would like to be able to see all of the screen in text mode because I often use that. Any help is appreciated.

Posted by reidar on June 17 2005,05:20

This has been a great thread!! I realise that there are so many things with frugal installs that I haven't yet got a correct understanding of. But I am getting more and more convinced that this is the best way of running a computer!

I have one question to Green, or at least a question that popped up reading his reply. You said:

Quote

If 'toram' is chosen as a boot time option, then /home/dsl and /opt are loaded into ram, but not if you don't choose 'toram'. If you've got the ram, you might as well use it.

Does that mean that if you store a lot of personal files in your /home/dsl, all of that is loaded into ram? Even documents, pictures, etc.? If I use my computer that way I guess the ram disk would be overloaded? Is that really so? Or is it just the files you have put in your filetool.lst that are loaded?

-r

Posted by hawki on June 17 2005,13:21

Hi again Adssse
First I think when you tried to boot the cd with vga=788 you should have entered

dsl vga=788

I'm thinking you forgot to enter the dsl part.

Second you can't edit lilo.conf while booted with a frugal install because it is mounted read-only. You can edited it by rebooting with the cd and mounting the frugal partition. Try this.

Boot from cd
mount the frugal partion let's say it's hda1
open an Xshell with root access
edit lilo.conf

beaver /mnt/hda1/boot/lilo.conf

save it

run lilo with the new file

lilo -C /mnt/hda1/boot/lilo.conf

Keep in mind I haven't tried this for a while. I do remember I did it. If you mess it up you can end up with a system that won't boot and you'll have to start over.

good luck

Posted by adssse on June 17 2005,14:12

hawki, thanks for the reply.
You were right I was forgetting to use the "dsl" when entering dsl vga=788 at boot. This worked with a live cd, but I tried rerunning the frugal_instal.sh with the following options "dsl vga=788 home=hda2 opt=hda2", but but once again I got the blinking cursor. So I tried to edit lilo.conf but ran into a snag. When I try to run "lilo -C /mnt/hda1/boot/lilo.conf" after editing I receive the message "Fatal: creat /boot/map~: Read-only file system".

EDIT: I noticed that when I mounted hda1 and looked at lilo.conf it already had vga=788. So I booted with just my frugal install and I could see the all of the text when booting. I then looked at lilo.conf and it has vga=normal. Not sure exactly why it is booting up at 800x600 now, but I am happy about it. I would just like to know how it happened so when I need to reinstall or something I will know how to do it again. Any ideas?

Posted by SomeGuyWithDSL on June 17 2005,14:33

Wow. I wasn't even intending on getting involved in this conversation (thought I was doing a plain HD install) until I read all of you so graciously trying to explain "frugal install."

Let me see if I've got this straight, as one option I have with frugal install:

1. I can install everything to my laptop's hard drive, no longer requiring the LiveCD for daily usage (like a hard disk install).

2. The kernel, modules, apps, etc. will be compressed and read-only so that every time I boot things will be "fresh" again in that regard (unlike a hard disk install). Disk access is cut way down because no changes are made to these, and updating Knoppix is easy because you just swap out the compressed file.

3. That would mean creating my own custom CD with the apps I want, and doing the frugal install from that disc, if they are different than those contained in the default DSL .iso.

4. The user storage areas where I keep my files are "normal," and persistent, just like it was an HD installation. They reside on the hard drive. They are unaffected by updating the Knoppix file, etc.

5. I only have 32 megs of RAM, so I can still run everything off the HD and a swap file. "toram" is not an option for me.

... Is that right? Sounds like the way to go unless I'm missing a big "something" somewhere.

Posted by clivesay on June 17 2005,16:43

You're right. If you have persistent /opt and/or /home and/or an automated backup/restore, all yor settings will remain after updating the KNOPPIX file.

Chris

Posted by mikshaw on June 17 2005,16:46

3. I'm not sure, but i seem to recall reading something about frugal install not working right with a custom CD. Maybe that was embedded or something, though...or maybe i'm just hallucinating.
In any case, with Frugal you don't really need to create a new CD to get custom applications. myDSL apps are used in the same manner in frugal as they are with liveCD, so you could have them available to auto-load when you boot up.

4. the /home and /opt are not persistent by default. You will need to pass a boot parameter to DSL from your bootloader to tell it where your files are (e.g. home=hda1 opt=hda1).

Posted by clivesay on June 17 2005,17:00

He's only got 32mb ram so he may have to remaster a few apps into the base if they are .dsl files. You can remaster apps into the base and use frugal as long as you don't change any of the DSL config files.

Chris

EDIT: I should say that remastering the base should be avoided if at all possible because yuo won't be able to easily upgrade.

Posted by ke4nt1 on June 17 2005,18:00

Quote

Posted on June 17 2005,00:20This has been a great thread!! I realise that there are so many things with frugal installs that I haven't yet got a correct understanding of. But I am getting more and more convinced that this is the best way of running a computer!

I have one question to Green, or at least a question that popped up reading his reply. You said:

Quote
If 'toram' is chosen as a boot time option, then /home/dsl and /opt are loaded into ram, but not if you don't choose 'toram'. If you've got the ram, you might as well use it.

Does that mean that if you store a lot of personal files in your /home/dsl, all of that is loaded into ram? Even documents, pictures, etc.? If I use my computer that way I guess the ram disk would be overloaded? Is that really so? Or is it just the files you have put in your filetool.lst that are loaded?

As I understand it...,

If you use the persistant /home and /opt bootoptions
they are only placed on your HD, and not in ramspace.
Same with your backup.tar.gz, it is written to HD, not ram.

If you aren't using persistancy, then the /home and /opt
dirs ARE in ram, but only contain the minimal default stuff.
From there, you add to them using your backup to
save/restore things you want to keep, and they are ALSO
added to your ramspace..

73
ke4nt

Posted by newOldUser on June 18 2005,02:00

Great thread.

I've done a frugal install and done some experimenting. I probably should have done this long ago.

I don't use the toram option when I boot, I have:
dsl nomce nodma quiet restore=hdc6 frugal host=dsl120 home=hda2 mydsl=hda2 opt=hda2 fromhd=/dev/hda4

I want it to load dsl from the file on /dev/hda4
I want to save most of the other files on hda2
When it does the backup/restore I want it to use hdc6

When I booted I was worried because it looked like the home directory was in the ramdisk. I did a little test. I opend a terminal and listed what was in the /mnt/hda2/home/dsl directory. This should actually be on my hard drive. I then used Beaver to modify one of the files in the /ramdisk/home/dsl directory and saved it. When I went back and relisted /mnt/hda2/home/dsl the file was modified.

So.... now I'm convinced that my home directory will be kept on my hard drive. If this is the case then what should I put in Filetools.lst? I guess I would only put the names of files that reside outside of the /opt or /home directories that I want saved.

Thanks again to all of you for having the patience to go over this subject again and again.

Posted by newOldUser on June 18 2005,11:29

Did a little more testing, rebooting, playing....

I've answered my own question about filetool.lst

assuming you use the home= and opt= parms on bootup you still need to put file names in filetool.lst if they will be overwrittin by .dsl packages at boot time.

So lets say you download and install Samba.dsl You make your mods to /opt/samba/smb.conf and life is good.

Then you do something stupid, like rebooting your computer...

If the Samba.dsl package is in your mydsl= path then it will be reinstalled at boot time. This is probably a good thing since you may want Samba each time you boot up. The bad thing is that since the smb.conf is part of the Samba.dsl package it gets put back into your /opt/samba directory and overlays your pretty smb.conf that you spent hours setting up.

The solution is to add the /opt/samba/smb.conf file to your filetool.lst They made it real easy to do. Go into emelfm. Highlight the file. Click no the Add2Filetool button.

Now the next time you reboot (you fool!). The Samba.dsl package will be reinstalled just like before, putting the default smb.conf in the /opt/samba directory, but then along comes the restore and wham-bam your smb.conf is copied from the backup file to /opt/samba/smb.conf

pretty neat. It's taking some time to get my head around such a dynamic environment. It's very different then what I was use to.

Posted by pcause on June 18 2005,18:34

I am using frugal and DSL 1.2.1 and running under QEMU. haven't changed anything. I see messages about backing up to /dev/hdb (which is the virtual hard disk), but I don't see any opitons for home= or opt=.

Is there some built-in use of /dev/hdb in frugal?

If I want persistant /opt and /home do I just modify the dsl-windows.bat and add to the -append argument a "home=/dev/hdb opt=/dev/hdb"

Thanks

Posted by roberts on June 18 2005,20:00

With embedded you are "runing under Qemu" which is a virtual machine.
You are right to note that the backups are going to hdb which is a virtual drive.
Qemu does not allow access to the machines real devices.

In order to have more "drives" you would have to make more virtual drives for home and/or opt or you would have to use samba to be able to access the real devices on your machine. Either way, not a trivial task. But if you are in the mood to explore go for it. I don't see any reason why it would not work.

Running with liveDSL either cd or frugal it is very easy to accomplish. It is the current restrictions of Qemu that are the main obstacles here.

Posted by adssse on June 18 2005,20:12

I was wondering where I am supposed to store my .dsl & .uci for my frugal installation. As of right now they are at /ramdisk/home/dsl and when I reboot they are not automatically installed, I have to go in emelfm and use the myDSL button. I used hda2 for all of the options such as /home, /opt, backup/restore and mydsl.

EDIT: I have also tried placing them in /mnt/hda2 and /mnt/hda2/opt with no signs of progress in either location. All I am able to do with any of these places is do it manually.

Posted by newOldUser on June 18 2005,22:40

adssse,

I think Frugal DSL will look and load in the directory specified by mydsl= so if you had mydsl=hda2 then it would probably look in the root of hda2. I think you could put them in the /opt or any directory and then use that name with the mydsl= parm... mydsl=/hda2/opt

good luck

Posted by adssse on June 19 2005,22:57

I have put them in /mnt/hda2 but I have not had any luck so far. Are they supposed to be in a mydsl menu after reboot? Right now I have to redo them manually after reboot. I followed the pdf word for word as far as I remember (just different numbers for the partitions), and the /home and /opt persistencys seem to be working correctly. During the install when it asked if I wanted to specify a place for mydsl I entered hda2. I did a frugal install on my laptop and an old desktop and I am having the same situation with both of them and I am not sure what to do.

Posted by ke4nt1 on June 21 2005,19:37

Has anyone used the command "fb800x600" at the portion of the
frugal install script that asks for other boottime options?

I seem to remember reading somewhere here that lilo didn't
like having the vga=xxx line in the append section of lilo.conf,
but somewhere else in lilo.conf was ok ( near the top? )

perhaps I'm confused, or have my facts reversed..
I'll research more in-depth in the forums about vga= in lilo.conf.

73
ke4nt

Posted by roberts on June 21 2005,20:37

I usually place my vga=normal after the timeout line, i.e., it becomes the third line from the top. It is not in the append section.

Posted by hawki on June 21 2005,20:48

Hi Adssse
I think the reason your mydsl stuff isn't working is because of the way that option wants your input. You would think that it would want mydsl=/hda2 or mydsl=/hda2/opt but that is not it.

It actually wants mydsl=hda2 or mydsl=hda2/opt
good luck

Posted by adssse on June 21 2005,22:20

Do I need to enter mydsl=hda2 on the line of boot options where I put home=hda2 and opt=hda2? Because I just used the prompt where it asked if I wanted to specify a place for mydsl. I said yes and when prompted entered hda2.

Posted by hawki on June 22 2005,13:20

I use GRUB as my loader so I don't know exactly which works best. With GRUB I do the frugal install with no options at all. I then specify my boot options on the "kernel" line. I think that the equivalent would be to put it on the same line as your home and opt settings. Here is a portion of my GRUB config file. This way I can boot any of several ways depending on what I need at the time.

# Boot automatically after 30 secs.
timeout 30

# By default, boot the first entry.
default 0

#or, for frugal,

title DSL-frugal-mydsl-ssh-nodhcp (hda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/isolinux/linux24 root=/dev/hda5 mydsl=hda6 ssh nodhcp
initrd /boot/isolinux/minirt24.gz
boot

title DSL-frugal-base-norestore (hda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/isolinux/linux24 root=/dev/hda5 base norestore
initrd /boot/isolinux/minirt24.gz
boot

title DSL-frugal-toram-ssh-ftp-nodhcp (hda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/isolinux/linux24 root=/dev/hda5 mydsl=hda6 toram ssh ftp nodhcp
initrd /boot/isolinux/minirt24.gz
boot

Posted by ke4nt1 on June 22 2005,17:51

I gotta think adssse is seeing something
'out-of-the-ordinary' ....
adssse is pretty familiar with how DSL works,
and seems to know what to expect from the mydsl system..

Is anyone else seeing issues with having extensions loaded
or available from the menu upon entering the desktop
after running thru the frugal-install/reboot routine ??

I too have been using grub for my bootloader for a while,
and when testing pre-releases, usually don't use the
mydsl= options for getting to the desktop to test new features..

adssse , does adding the mydsl=hda2 to the same options line
as the home=hda2 opt=hda2 make any difference to your issue?

I will dbl-check this tonite..

My mydsl is functioning normally,
and within expected parameters.

73
ke4nt

Posted by adssse on June 22 2005,20:31

ke4nt1, thanks for your reply. When I entered "dsl mydsl=hda2" from a live-cd boot, it worked. So I started trying different combinations and options.

1. Added 'mydsl=hda2' to the same line as 'home=hda2' & 'opt=hda2' and answered both of the prompts with 'y' and then 'hda2'. This did not provide the desired results.

2. This time added 'dsl mydsl=hda2' to the boot option line but also put 'dsl home=hda2' & 'dsl opt=hda2' and answered the restore prompt with 'hda2' and answered no to the mydsl prompt. This seemed to work for me, as it detects my extensions at boot.

Thanks to everyone for your help, I am starting to realize why frugal is so much better than a regular hd install.

Posted by milosz on July 03 2005,17:11

Hi
I've installed DSL, but I didn't install lilo, because i want to have GRUB in MBR.
I've added DSL to grub.conf, but when DSL starts, after few seconds there is Kernel Panic. There is sth wrong with init (sth like that ;)
Is it possible not to install Lilo not to MBR??
Regards

Posted by spotslayer on July 04 2005,18:53

Happy 4th of July guys!

I have a day off, so here I am foolin' around with frugal install. I am begining to get a grasp on this way of doing things, but have seen something during the loading process. I have the following

Checking for myDSL apps...sr0: CDROM(ioctl) reports ILLEGAL REQUEST.

I have mydsl=hda4 set in the append line of lilo.conf. Now if I have a .dsl in the root of hda4 it will load regardless of that line. I also have a hda4/optional which loads properly.

I would also like to understand where to save .dsl files when I use the mydsl browser. I think it should be to /hda4/optional. Then if I want the .dsl to load during the os load I should move it to hda4/. Is this correct?

Just as a side note, I am having a blast with DSL and a frugal install.

David

Posted by ke4nt1 on July 04 2005,19:00

Yes, sounds like you've got it all figured out and working.
I usually see that ILLEGAL REQUEST error if I left my CDROM tray open.
Yes, saving them to /mnt/hda5/optional is a great idea.
Yes, moving them out of hda5/optional , and into hda5, will autoload at boottime.

I too am enjoying all the benefits of the frugal method of running my linux OS.
Even my servers now all run frugal..

Happy 4th.

73
ke4nt

Posted by spotslayer on July 04 2005,20:33

Thank's KE4NT.

I get that error every single time no matter what. There must be a way to fix it. I just saw your post concerning sound on a TP. I have that issue now on a 600e that I am using. I had the same on slackware. TP's are bears with sound and linux. Slack was a pretty involved fix. Yours looks simpler.

David
WD5CLE

Posted by ke4nt1 on July 04 2005,20:45

ke4nt de wd5cle

I have a couple of thinkpads, and have no issues with them at all.
My 240's and 770's require some input from me to setup,
but no troubles once I add those commands to /opt/bootlocal.sh,
and make a fresh backup..

I did have to run "rmmod sound" to UNLOAD the attempt at boottime
to install the soundcard, and to free up the soundcard,
so the modprobe commands would take.

Search the forums for ' cs4232 ' .
I have many posts discussing successful sound usage in DSL with thinkpads.
It's usually a matter of getting the right io and irq addresses in the syntax,
and unloading any older attempts to load sound.o and soundcore.o at boot.

Frequently, I find that uart, or opl3, or ad1868 need to be loaded first
on many different brands of laptops..

73
ke4nt

Posted by green on Aug. 18 2005,13:17

Bump. Good thread. More need to read it.

Posted by oldfella on Aug. 22 2005,01:21

I've been reading this thread & will be experimenting with a frugal install, & was wondering where to find the how-to pdf that has been referred to here? I'm on an old hp paviion with 32 MB ram(rescued from the trashman!!) thanks everyone for all the info.

Posted by adssse on Aug. 22 2005,01:37

Here is a pdf that clivesay put together that is really good.
< http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub....pdfdocs >

Posted by oldfella on Aug. 22 2005,02:13

Thanks addssse for your quickness!

Posted by oldfella on Aug. 22 2005,03:46

& thanks to clivesay for an easy to follow(even for a newbie) how-to, I'm posting this from my new frugal install!!

Posted by aldsl on Aug. 25 2005,03:48

I want to Install Frugal but it says tht it can safely install on hda1 but my HDD is detected as hdc
hdc1 = NNTFS
hdc2 = Linux
Hdc3 = Free Sapce
hdc4= FAT32
hdc5 =Linux swap..
wht is this swap..it is not used at all..
How to configure MBR so tht it allows my XP also to boot..after installing to Hard drive..

Posted by ke4nt1 on Aug. 25 2005,05:15

How did you get 5 primaries on that hard drive?

I usually see hdc1,2,3,5,6
( 4 is skipped for the setup for logical partitions, or 3, or 2 ..)

Is this hard drive mounted on your secondary IDE cable?
What's on your primary cable ? ( hda)?

Are you using raid ? ( IDE 3 & 4 ) ?

Do you have a bios option to switch the primary booting
hard drive from ide1 to ide2 ?

What is the reason for not having this drive on ide1? (hda)

Let us know..

73
ke4nt

Posted by aldsl on Aug. 26 2005,11:56

on (hda) Primary Master is CDROM ...USB is detected as sda1...Plz tell me how dual boot with XP tht is more important..

Posted by Icey on Sep. 06 2005,20:40

Question...

So I'm still a little confused about this frugal stuff.

If I do a frugal install, will it keep what I install on the machine after reboot. For instance if I install Java (JDK) and then reboot will it stay?

Posted by ke4nt1 on Sep. 06 2005,21:29

Icey,

Using your example of java with a typical new user box for a frugal-grub-HD-install....

Let's say hda1 is an XP install..

We'll add hda2, a small linux partition, 100MB's , formatted ext2, for the frugal install..

We'll also add hda3, another linux partition, 200MB's , formatted ext2, for storage..

Your java can go on either of the two linux partitions, by way of our DSL 'extensions' ,
found in the DSL repository. The java extension currently used for DSL is "jre1_5_0.tar.gz" ..

Should you choose to place it in the root of the hda2 partition, it will autoload at every boot.

Should you choose to place it in the root of the hda3 partition, you can still have it autoload,
with the "mydsl=hda3" boottime code.

Should you choose to place it inside a directory called /optional in hda2,
it will be an item added to your desktop menu, ready to install.

Should you choose to place it in a directory called /optional in hda3,
it will be an item added to your desktop menu, IF you use the "mydsl=hda3" boottime code.

Should you choose to place it in any other directory on either partition, it can be installed at any later time
by entering the directory that stores it, and using the emelfm "myDSL" button,
or the shell command "mydsl-load jre1_5_0.tar.gz" ..

If you would like even more flexibility, or need to conserve precious ramspace,
there is a .uci version of the java extension, called jre1_5_0.uci.

It follows the same rules as the .tar.gz version of java, but is uninstallable on the fly,
by repeating either of the install command options I listed earlier.
( emelfm or shell ) , it can install/uninstall on command.

This same technique works for a pendrive as well.
Substitute sda1, and/or sda2, in place of the linux-type hard drive partitions I mentioned earlier..

This will not work for an application you've installed thru apt-get,
or built from source, and ran make install.
The frugal system is a dynamic filesystem, and refreshes itself upon every bootup.

Once the core extension system is more familiar to you, taking a compile or binary one step further,
and making it an extension, is not a difficult task, if you choose to run something not found in the repository..

73
ke4nt

Posted by hs7sv on Oct. 11 2005,01:56

I'm using DSL 1.5:-

hda1- swap
hda2 - Bootable Frugal Lilo HDD Install (ext2)
hda3 – myDSL and Backup/Restore (ext2)

Question:
What is the best way to do, if something happened and I need to clean hda2 (like format and re-install)?

Posted by mikshaw on Oct. 11 2005,02:58

You probably will never need to format. If you do, then something very unusual has happened.

The frugal installation is mainly just one file, so it should be pretty simple.
The easiest way to reinstall or upgade your current setup:
Boot into a liveCD (or other linux system if you have one on that machine).
Copy the KNOPPIX file from the CD, overwriting your current one.

Posted by indianx on Oct. 21 2005,03:54

Hi,

I have one question. If we plan to add more programs using MyDsl, what size do you recommend the partition with the persistent /home and /opt to be in general?

Is it possible or recommended to make the partitions ext3 rather than ext2?

Thanks.

Posted by ivrobi on Oct. 21 2005,06:44

Hi!

Depends on the size of the MyDSL programs you would like to install...
I have a partition of about 250 MB for the persistent /home and /opt and installed xampp (takes some space

) and few smaller MyDSL apps. I still have some 120 MB free space.

Greetings!
IvRobi

Posted by indianx on Oct. 21 2005,15:50

Thanks for the response, I set about installing dsl on an amd 3000+ processor. I used cfdisk to create a primary partition of 65 mb for the compressed image and a logical partition of 2 gb for the persistent directories and a logical partition of 500 mb for the swap. I formatted them and rebooted the computer in order to run /usr/sbin/frugal_instal.sh as said in clivesay's pdf file. I booted into dsl 2 using the live cd and when the root prompt came up, I mounted the /dev/hda2 partition and typed in /usr/sbin/frugal_install.sh and answered all the queries and the following prompts about the x server and mouse, but it failed to boot into level 5.