rufwoof wrote:Dropped the iso into a VirtualBox and booted. Painfully slow to boot, perhaps a couple of minutes of dots before finally seeing a desktop (I know that's down to huge initrd, but other new users might not be patient enough and simply think something went wrong and reboot).
I'm unable to reproduce it...
Booting FD from ISO in VBox (also running in FD) with 1G of RAM takes less than 40s down here (Intel i3 @2.13 GHz, 4G RAM + 2G SWAP, VBox-5.0.32).
Booting in QEmu is somewhat slower, but it's still below 90s.
I even booted into my ancient Slacko-5.7 installation and it (FD in VBox) still loads in reasonable time...
Yes, it's a known issue that some BIOSes can't load the huge initrd at reasonable speed, but AFAIK (unless I'm wrong) VMs are emulating BIOS on their own, so this shouldn't be the case here.
rufwoof wrote:Tried booting the iso using qemu-kvm .... with no luck
I'm using practically the same options and no probs.
Do you have another OS installed to try VBox/QEmu+FD on?
rufwoof wrote:Added a VB HDD and ran the install program. Didn't work (had to recreate a GPT using gparted first). Re-ran the install program after creating GPT and formatting and it worked OK.
Didn't work how? Any errors popped up?
Btw, when you select a disk/partition on the first tab in Fatdog Installer, a button "Modify Partitions" appears on the right. It launches GParted for this specific disk.
rufwoof wrote:Clicked initrd to open it up, moved fd64.sfs to / and used the rebuild initrd script.
Rebooted .. to command prompt (tried xwin, startx ...etc after logging in as root using woofwoof password, but they didn't work either).
From FAQ (the 'Help' icon on the pinboard), emphasized by me:
FAQ -> Humongous initrd wrote:Or, if you only want to get a smaller version (not the smallest):
• Extract only the fd64.sfs by clicking on your installed initrd (this should open it up).
• Move fd64.sfs outside to a place accessible by the bootloader (perhaps the same location of vmlinuz and initrd itself)
• re-pack the initrd by clicking repack-initrd.sh..
• Please remember to use the basesfs parameter on your bootloader to tell Fatdog where to find the basesfs.
Did you use that boot param?
If so, could you post how exactly it looks like?
rufwoof wrote:Haven't read the entire thread maybe this review has already been mentioned.
Yes, I've seen it. Some of the issues mentioned there are addressed in FAQ and some statements are simply not true (e.g. that FD is based on Slackware), but some look like real problems.
The thing about Fatdog is that - although there are many similarities - it's
not a Puppy, so an average Puppy user (actually: any user) who's not yet familiar with FD, should really pay attention and carefully read all the stuff.
That comes from my own experience - before I read the docs I also had many issues, e.g. with not finding
fd64.sfs, etc.
I'm not saying I haven't had problems that were genuine bugs, though.
rufwoof wrote:Sorry guys. I appreciate the effort involved and could just politely have remained quiet. Sometimes however critique can be a positive and that is my intent here (I'm most certainly not having a dig).
Don't be sorry and don't be quiet. Every non-hostile and well-founded criticism is appreciated and helps.
Greetings!
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