Install: Frugal vs Full USB

[idiopup]

HI All,

I initially had a Frugal install on a USB stick. I had the 8GB USB stick partitioned into a 5GB ext2 partition, and a 2.5 GB fat32 partition, and I had my frugal install in the ext2 partition.

At some point, when I went to save, I clicked a button to save to the entire USB and the frugal install seems to have expanded into a full install on that partition.

My question is this: by having a full install am I losing the advantages of running in memory and having all writes cached to happen at intervals, thus saving the life of my USB drive? Is this true, or is there any other reason to go back to a frugal install?

I am wondering, if using a frugal install, if it makes any difference what type of filesystem is used. Would it be any worse to just have the frugal install on fat32, in which case I might not need extra partitions at all.

Thanks for any help, I'm learning a lot
IDIOPUP

[rjbrewer]

Puppy does not do "full" installs to usbflash or other usb
connected drives!!

[idiopup]

What does it mean then that it installed to the whole USB partition? It just means it isn't saving everything within a few files?

I think I need to do more reading here...

[tlchost]

What does it mean then that it installed to the whole USB partition? It just means it isn't saving everything within a few files?

I think I need to do more reading here...

On a usb drive(bootable) you can store things within the save file(somepuppysave.somefs(2,3, 4) or outside the save file(usually in /mnt/home).

I have a 32 gig USB drive that is formatted in fat32....so windows can see it, and so can puppy. I make use of a lot of portable wine apps, both in windows and in wine running in Puppy.

Thom

[Sky Aisling]

tlchost,

You write:

On a usb drive(bootable) you can store things within the save file(somepuppysave.somefs(2,3, 4) or outside the save file(usually in /mnt/home).

So, is one way is more efficient than the other? What are the pros and cons?

Thank you.

[bigpup]

When Puppy is installed frugally to a USB flash drive, you have the choice of saving the session to either a file or to the entire partition.
Of course, saving session to a file has it's advantages, such as you can have lots of them and they are easy to backup.

Saving to the entire partition of a USB drive is a kind of quasi-full-Linux-installation. You are using the entire partition to save your session, so you have available all the free space of that partition.
Partition must be a Linux format

In Puppy operation, both methods are used the same way.

In a file manger, if you open a Puppy save file or look at the contents of a (save to partition) partition, they will both have the same items in them.

From how Puppy works

Solution 1:
One solution is not to use a "pup100" file at all. When you purchase a Flash drive, it is invariably pre-formatted with a FAT16 filesystem, and we normally leave that as-is. However, if we replace that with a ext2, ext3 or reiserfs filesystem (a Linux filesystem), then the entire partition can be used for personal data storage.
Meaning that you have the entire drive available for personal storage, nothing to resize later.

The downside of reformatting the Flash drive with a Linux filesystem is it becomes more difficult to share files with Windows. That is, if you boot Windows, plug in the Flash drive, Windows won't recognise it. However, there is a native ext2/3 driver for NT/XP, and there are also some Windows applications that allow viewing and reading files from a ext2/3 filesystem.

Solution 2:
If you want to stay with the puppy1 approach and retain a personal storage file, now named pup_save.3fs, no problems. Now, you can make it any size.
If you have, say, a 750M pup_save.3fs file and the PC has only 256M total RAM, maybe not even any swap partition or swap file, how on earth does puppy avoid writing to the Flash drive during a session?

This is one of the key architectural points of puppy. At bootup, pup_save.3fs is mounted read-only from where it is on the Flash drive, and it's contents are not copied into RAM. Instead, a tmpfs filesystem in RAM holds all new and changed files. This is still actually very fast, as all the "working files" are in RAM.

Periodically and at end of session, those "working files" are written back to the pup_save.3fs file. Or to the partition if you chose the "solution 1" described above.

What this means in practice is you could have a PC with maybe as little as 64M RAM, booting off a 1G Flash drive, and all writes to Flash are eliminated during a session, and it runs fast.
Seems like magic, hey?
3. Works on PCs with very little RAM

Puppy will take advantage of more RAM, but if your PC is RAM-challenged, no problem.

The key point here is that the personal storage (I also refer to this as the persistent storage) partition or pup_save.3fs file is not loaded into RAM, only mounted read only, and only the "working files" are in RAM.

What you will have in a RAM-challenged PC is the kernel, initrd.gz (uncompressed) and the "working files" in RAM. Those "working files" are only new and changed files, so there will hardly be anything in RAM, meaning that we are going to find our Pup running on very minimal systems.

Note though, the set of "working files" will grow during a session. Any new or modified file will get added to it. However, there is a daemon (a background program) that will warn if RAM space is running low, then there is a simple fix -- flush the "working files" to the persistent storage.

Now, you may think, isn't that still going to be slow? Okay, having the "working files" in RAM is good, but when you want to start a big application, such as Mozilla, all of the Moz libraries will have to load off the Flash drive.
Yes, true, so the RAM-challenged PC will run a bit slower.

If your PC does have more RAM, say 128M or more, puppy will automatically see that and will load the "pup_xxx.sfs" file into RAM.

So, if the PC has enough RAM then all the library files will be preloaded

[sullysat]

On a usb drive(bootable) you can store things within the save file(somepuppysave.somefs(2,3, 4) or outside the save file(usually in /mnt/home).

I have a 32 gig USB drive that is formatted in fat32....so windows can see it, and so can puppy. I make use of a lot of portable wine apps, both in windows and in wine running in Puppy.

Thom

Hey Thom, is there a thread somewhere that can explain more about how you set up your USB that way? I use portable apps a lot when I have to be on other people's Windows machines, but if I can do double duty on some things by using Wine - and more importantly save off files to the USB so that Windows can see too (or other Linux machines, for that matter), I'd have a whole different set of uses for my Puppy sticks.

I had no idea you could do some of that. Very cool.

Cheers,
Sully