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Topic: Frugal Explanation

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adssse

Group: Members
Posts: 505
Joined: Mar. 2005

Posted: 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.

clivesay

Group: Guests
Posts: 935
Joined: Dec. 2003

Posted: 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

mikshaw

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Posts: 4856
Joined: July 2004

Posted: 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.

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http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html

hawki

Group: Members
Posts: 175
Joined: Jan. 2004

Posted: 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

hawki

Group: Members
Posts: 175
Joined: Jan. 2004

Posted: 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

56 replies since June 16 2005,14:01

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