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Topic: Frugal Explanation

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reidar

Group: Members
Posts: 92
Joined: Sep. 2004

Posted: 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

hawki

Group: Members
Posts: 175
Joined: Jan. 2004

Posted: 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

adssse

Group: Members
Posts: 505
Joined: Mar. 2005

Posted: 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?

SomeGuyWithDSL Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 27
Joined: June 2005

Posted: 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.

clivesay

Group: Guests
Posts: 935
Joined: Dec. 2003

Posted: 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

56 replies since June 16 2005,14:01

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