frugal install : summary of problems and solutions

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francois
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frugal install : summary of problems and solutions

Post#1 by francois » 19 Jan 2011, 00:12

If I am not wrong frugal or poor man's install of porteus on hdd is not officially supported. If this not the case, I imagine that the interested protagonist will correct this proposition.

I am really a fan and even an unconditional of the frugal install wether it be the slax or the porteus installation. I eve try to get along with porteus as my main system on some of my boxes. What I appreciate is the speed and the simplicity of porteus. The easiness with which I can install some new sofwares. If there are some advantages to the porteus linux os frugal install, there sometimes some drawbacks. This thread is meant to discuss the advantages ans disadvantages of working with such an installation. Your comments are welcome.

Working with frugal install of porteus it happens that one will encounter some problems associated to that type of installation. The problems you encounter and the solutions that you found to fix these problems. Hyperlinks to the pertinent material are appreciated.
Last edited by francois on 29 Dec 2011, 03:40, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: frugal install : sumary of problems and solutions

Post#2 by brokenman » 19 Jan 2011, 00:41

Not officially supported .... please define this. If someone asks for help, and they have breached the 'official install guide' i'm sure we won't say "No way man! Get lost, you get no help because you're weird, and so is the way you install Porteus" :crazy:

As long as Porteus remains in it's compressed form, i believe it doesn't matter where you run it from. I see no difference in running Porteus from an internal or external hard drive. I think the benefits of the compressed state of Porteus are:
  • A smaller footprint
    Boot to RAM is fast
    Portabillity
    Extremely fast install time
    You can install it on anything (i have it on my watch)
    Managing backup is simple
    Everyone wants to be your friend

The downsides i see are:
  • you are keeping your changes in a .dat file then you don't have immediate access to the files when Porteus is not booted.
    Women don't like anything that is frugal
    The use of posixvol is prone to freak outs
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Re: frugal install : sumary of problems and solutions

Post#3 by francois » 19 Jan 2011, 01:37

brokenman wrote:Not officially supported .... please define this. If someone asks for help, and they have breached the 'official install guide' i'm sure we won't say "No way man! Get lost, you get no help because you're weird, and so is the way you install Porteus" :crazy:
...
[/list]
Good to know that. Does that mean that we could dream someday of an augmented porteus distribution with a nice array of sofware to be installed by newbies as their main distribution on hdd? The kind that newbies would find the perfect dream distribution?
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Re: frugal install : sumary of problems and solutions

Post#4 by brokenman » 19 Jan 2011, 04:20

Yes. It will be sold in all major retail outlets. $150. Porteus is free, but the box costs $150. It will come in packaging like this:

Image
:wink:
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Re: frugal install : sumary of problems and solutions

Post#5 by X-Factor » 19 Jan 2011, 04:57

@brokenman
Maybe the free one come with wild west of the sea box?

edit//
Found your label ( its no 2)
http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=162
(for some user it might be like riding a shark trying to understand linux :D but it worth their while though=free :D
Last edited by X-Factor on 19 Jan 2011, 09:23, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: frugal install : sumary of problems and solutions

Post#6 by Burninbush » 19 Jan 2011, 08:35

I think the benefits of the compressed state of Porteus are:

A smaller footprint
Boot to RAM is fast
etc., etc. >jayflood

++++++++++++++++++

Something I've been pondering -- is compression =required= for a live distro? Why not just unionfs?

To the thread topic: I have both 64bit and 32bit Porteus running frugal here, on vfat, changes saving to a container.dat file, and except for the changed cheatcodes it installs/boots/runs just like slax did. Let's be honest, a usbstick install is a frugal install.

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Re: frugal install : sumary of problems and solutions

Post#7 by brokenman » 19 Jan 2011, 11:15

I guess it's not essential, but if the files exist as a directory structure already on the media then there would be no reason for union anyway. Wouldn't it be just a normal linux install? I guess the compression comes from requiring a small footprint for portable media. No other reason. It's amazing that even though live systems must decompress everything before starting they are still marginally faster to boot into.
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Re: frugal install : sumary of problems and solutions

Post#8 by francois » 19 Jan 2011, 16:31

brokenman wrote:Yes. It will be sold in all major retail outlets. $150. Porteus is free, but the box costs $150. It will come in packaging like this:

Image
:wink:
I have to recognize that you have a great sense of -humour-. I would add that you were quite ready to answer to my question. Lets say that the image is efficient. In french we woud say: -l'image a du mordant-. I don't know if there is such an english expression, the equivalent being that the image has some teeth.

Maybe you should change the sentence on the box for:

With Porteus you will be ready to face any situation!
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Re: frugal install : sumary of problems and solutions

Post#9 by Burninbush » 19 Jan 2011, 20:06

I guess it's [compression] not essential, but if the files exist as a directory [structure already on the media then there would be no reason for union anyway. Wouldn't it be just a normal linux install? >brokenman

++++++++++++++++

Uhmmm ... well, I may be mixing apples and horse-apples here. Running up against the limits of what I know. I had thought that union was the foundation for how slax modules work? Most livecds that I have used claim to be working with unionfs.

I have never seen a definitive answer to the compression question, whether it is quicker to load a larger uncompressed file from disk, or to load a smaller file and uncompress it. I reckon that the answer would be obvious for a standard cd, but maybe not so obvious for a frugal install -- the thread topic.

Anyway, we know why Tomas spent so much time with compression techniques -- he had the bizarre goal of keeping the size to under 200mb so it would fit onto a small cd blank. I wonder if anybody ever actually did that? I know I never did, and the goal seems whimsical to me, given the available drives all take the larger disk.

So, with the widespread distribution of dvd writers maybe it's time to take another look at optical. I'm especially fond of multisession writing, and union allows me to replace anything except the kernel after boot. Their size would hold a substantial distro uncompressed.

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Re: frugal install : sumary of problems and solutions

Post#10 by hayzoos » 29 Jan 2011, 13:54

Compression gives the obvious advantage of taking up less space. It also gives the advantage of fewer bits to pass through storage subsystem bus. That translates into faster. Over the years system bottlenecks are found in different places depending on which parts are the slowest. Current SATA hard drives cannot provide bits fast enough to use all the SATA bus bandwidth. So compressed data needs fewer bits to pass through the bottleneck.

There are some long held beliefs that compression/decompression processor overhead nullifies the bottleneck speed gains. That was true until about the second generation pentium.

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Re: frugal install : sumary of problems and solutions

Post#11 by francois » 13 Jul 2011, 21:28

hayzoos wrote:Compression gives the obvious advantage of taking up less space. It also gives the advantage of fewer bits to pass through storage subsystem bus. That translates into faster. Over the years system bottlenecks are found in different places depending on which parts are the slowest. Current SATA hard drives cannot provide bits fast enough to use all the SATA bus bandwidth. So compressed data needs fewer bits to pass through the bottleneck.

There are some long held beliefs that compression/decompression processor overhead nullifies the bottleneck speed gains. That was true until about the second generation pentium.
A formal reference for this last affirmation would be appreciated.
Thanks.
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