Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[seaside]

[Mstar]

Jemimah,

The frugal is on a FAT32 partition in its own subdirectory. The 2fs is the extension of the automatically generated pupsave file. I don't know if it's actually an ext2 file, but I presume it is. It's whatever Puppy creates.

Since I'm also using the psubdir command, that's a likely place to look for the problem. Here is the whole menu.lst entry:

#Rampup
title Rampup
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
kernel /Rampup/vmlinuz pemdia=satahd psubdir=Rampup ramboot=1
initrd /Rampup/initrd.gz
boot
#End Rampup

My installation quits in exactly the same way Seaside describes.

[jemimah]

Ok, I'll check out the psubdir thing and see if I can fix it.

[Lobster]

jemimah

(I have been eating red herrings again)
An OS started in ram
(do we have a networking booting Puppy)
would seem to be the most secure system
for instant shutdown.

Why might you want that?
Well let us say you have a Puppy droid
flying over a war zone dropping flower petals
(something I recently suggested to a former
defense minister)
Obviously you don't want your petal collection points
or flight path to fall into the hands of the militarily demented.

Droid down
No software.
The flowers are safe.

[jemimah]

I've uploaded a new version that hopefully fixes this problem. I haven't fixed the shutdown script yet though. I'll look that that later this weekend.

Lobster, I believe I read there's a way to retrieve data from RAM after the machine has shutdown. But my understanding is you have only mere seconds to do this before it's to garbled to recover. So this solution is probably secure enough for your flower bomber Puppy.

[seaside]

[Mstar]

Thank you Jemimah,

The pupsave is not saved on shutdown, however. If you are going to fix it, would it be possible to include the ability to re-size it as well as save it?

Just asking, I have no idea how it would be accomplished.

Thanks again for your effort and help.

[Weatherman]

I also do not get a pupsave file to save to the USB stick upon using the modified shutdown. I get an error message that says "Boot Device not found, file not saved". I did not take the usb stick out. Everything else seems to work when booting up from USB, meaning that the modified initrd says it detects the ramboot and then proceeds to bring the usb files (including a pupsave stashed on the usb from a previously unmodified initrd) to ram as it should. Unfortunately it somehow doesn't see the boot device when it shuts down...

Is there a way to manually copy the pupsave file from ram back to the usb stick when a real save is needed? I just wasn't sure is the /mnt version of pupsave is up to date. I tried to execute the save2usb script but it just says that the save is queued and the message never leaves the screen.

[jemimah]

I've updated the shutdown script. It is now working for me, with or without psubdir set. Please try the new version.

Remember not to trust this script with your important data. Even if the code is perfectly correct, power outages, system crashes, and attempting to copy a mounted filesystem, will try to ruin your day at the worst possible moment.

A better way is not to use the shutdown script at all, and save any documents you are working on to the hard drive (outside the save file) or to a usb stick. If you need to install software or something just boot without the Ramboot option. That way you get a completely clean version of the OS every time you boot; like a remaster, but easier.

[potchan]

Putting everything totally to RAM limits a lot of HW tolerance Puppy is so proud of. I would limit the RAM-MANIA to those files and folders needed to speed-up the system. There's a lot of them, most of them very light, and a conclusive work of marking them as such and distinct them from others onRAM never really done. Perhaps we should have two to three initrds like initrd1.gz initrd2.gz... (one extra letter/number allowed) to let the user choose. I personally spend a lot of time wondering if separating/clouding some of RAM can open new horizons. Connections become more and more speedy, closer and closer to HD speeds abilities and reliability.

[gyro]

jemimah,

I just tried your ramboot on a frugal install of Browserlinux355.
(Looking for a simple, secure, Internet browsing platform.)
I used the "init" script from your initrd.gz. This did not work, crashed on boot.
I then created "/mnt/tmpfs3" directory in my initrd-tree. This worked fine. Thanks.

But, just one thing:
Since my computer has 1GB of ram, ordinary puppy 431 and hence BrowserLinux355 copies pup-431.sfs to ram.
Your ramboot code copied both pup-431.sfs and pupsave2fs to ram. So I ended up with 2 copies of pup-431.sfs in ram. It just seems a waste.

I did like that it unmounted my sda1, once startup is finished, so the only mounted writable "disk" is the pupsave.2fs in ram, which then gets thrown away.

I setup 2 entries in my "menu.lst", one with ramboot=1 and one without. So if pupsave.2fs isn't right yet, I can simply reboot into a system that saves pupsave.2fs.

gyro

[jemimah]

[gyro]

[gyro]

[jemimah]

Nice catch. I must have made missed the $ when I copied it from Puppeee. I've updated the initrd.gz in the first post.