cbagger01
Group: Members
Posts: 4264
Joined: Oct. 2003 |
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Posted: May 14 2005,18:23 |
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Hmm...
Maybe I am looking in the wrong place, but I cannot find a simple description of the frugal install concept in the documentation. Anyways, here goes:
DSL is designed to be a livecd. The cd-r disk contains a small linux distribution that is stored inside a compressed read-only file system, or cloop filesystem.
The cd also contains a flexible bootloader that works if your computer supports booting from a CDROM drive. The normal dsl livecd uses the ISOLINUX bootloader, but there is also a version that uses the SYSLINUX bootloader because some older computers don't work with ISOLINUX.
These bootloaders give you the ability to specify cheatcodes at boot time, which allows the user to customize the boot options depending on the computer that is being used (as a livecd, you can boot with an old computer, or later in the same day with a new computer and each can be told to boot in a different manner), and SYSLINUX is also used for the DSL boot floppy for computers that do not support CDROM booting.
Besides booting from the livecd, it is possible to copy the \knoppix\knoppix file (which contains the compressed filesystem) over to your hard drive and boot up from cd or floppy but run the operating system from the hard drive. This is called a "poormans install".
Because the filesystem is running from a harddrive instead of a cdrom drive, it is much faster than running from a livecd.
A "frugal install" is similar to the poormans install, except the additional step of LILO. The frugal install script (listed on the user menu) will also install the LILO bootloader to your hard drive, so you will no longer need a cd disk or a floppy disk in order to boot up DSL. Because the filesystem is still compressed and read-only, your operating system will not be making frequent writes to the hard drive (or "flash drive, in your case).
Finally, you can do a full hard drive install via script. This install will copy all of the individual files from the livecd over to a normal linux hard drive partition and then install lilo. This is similar to the normal installation process that is performed by most linux distributions like Red Hat, Slackware, etc. But this is not ideal install if you have a flash drive because the frequent writes (swap partition, log files, web browser cache, etc) will eventually cause your flash device to fail.
Hopefully this explanation is what you were looking for.
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