Understanding mounts/memory/RAM & filesystems/_save file

Booting, installing, newbie
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Brown Mouse
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Joined: Tue 09 Jun 2009, 21:06

#21 Post by Brown Mouse »

Could somebody explain what happens when the pup save file is full.Can another one be added and how?

Bruce B

#22 Post by Bruce B »

Brown Mouse wrote:Could somebody explain what happens when the pup save file is full.Can another one be added and how?
Apologies for a late reply if you will.

Don't fill it.

About 80 to 90 percent full, decide what to do.

Maybe some house cleaning is all you need to do.

If house cleaning (deleting and moving files) is not
sufficient, then use the Puppy utilities to enlarge the
pup_save file.

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SilverPuppy
Posts: 143
Joined: Fri 29 May 2009, 02:21

Re: Potchan's view and search for enlightnment on mem' stuff

#23 Post by SilverPuppy »

Bruce B wrote:
potchan wrote:Hi Dennis, Bruce B and Team,

Take a look at this:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=37660

Any help for you ? :roll:
Only I noticed amigo referenced the swapon -s switch and
it doesn't exist in Puppy's swapon. I've attached the full
featured swapon if you want it.

Code: Select all

Usage:
 swapon -a [-e] [-v] [-f]             enable all swaps from /etc/fstab
 swapon [-p priority] [-v] [-f] <special>  enable given swap
 swapon -s                            display swap usage summary
 swapon -h                            display help
 swapon -V                            display version

The <special> parameter:
 {-L label | LABEL=label}             LABEL of device to be used
 {-U uuid  | UUID=uuid}               UUID of device to be used
 <device>                             name of device to be used
 <file>                               name of file to be used

~
Groovy, man! I thought that swapon was a kernel module that had been stripped down and couldn't be easily restored to full functionality. I now have fully-functional swapon and hence have double the swap speed with 2 physical swap devices of equal priority! Before it was impossible. Bravo!

danna
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue 17 Nov 2009, 12:09

#24 Post by danna »

To me memory means RAM

To Puppy memory means in most cases 'physical storage space' and some times might mean RAM.
Basically, this. Thanks for the info btw. I understand it now.


Regards,
Danna
Ordinateur portable pas cher

gonkbag
Posts: 29
Joined: Thu 07 Jan 2010, 17:32
Location: uk

#25 Post by gonkbag »

Hello
I've jusy read and (mostly) digested this entire thread, as it sort of answers some questions I have (paricularly post by DMcCunney).
Noteably my pupsave file never gets any smaller no matter how many files are deleted, I particularly noticed this yesterday when I thought I'd try vlc and mplayer to see if they where any better than xine, now if I install them both on my fedora 12 laptop and then uninstalled, my hard drive free space would return to it's original size.

I decided to keep mplayer and plugin and delete vlc using the add/remove software facility that I used to install, only when I looked in /usr/bin vlc is still there, so deleted manually, any ideas why that is so ?
Also I had 18Mb free vlc is 7.8Mb, after installing and playing a dvd my free space dropped alarmingly to 1Mb, I decided to do a hard shutdown (no pupsave) after restarting I had my 18Mb back and tried vlc again, again the same drop to 1Mb.
I had to increase the pupsave by 16Mb had a restart and installed mplayer, decided to keep mplayer and got rid of vlc, once again removing vlc and a couple of other unused downloads the pupsave has exactly the same amount free.
Reading this thread I'm thinking my 1Gb memeroid stick must have some "slack space" anyone know of a linux equivalent to CHKDSK or am I going to have to use a windoze machine to try and restore ?
My pupsave file is now 192Mb (firefox 3.6+a few addons and mplayer+plugin only additional software installed) which is sort of going away from the point of puppy for me, i.e small and fast
Any help is appreciated
btw I'm usng 4.3.1 on an old hp compaq laptop with 2Gb ram and my son's 1001ha eeepc 1Gb ram

DMcCunney
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Joined: Tue 03 Feb 2009, 00:45

#26 Post by DMcCunney »

gonkbag wrote:Hello
I've jusy read and (mostly) digested this entire thread, as it sort of answers some questions I have (paricularly post by DMcCunney).
I'm glad it helped you.
Noteably my pupsave file never gets any smaller no matter how many files are deleted, I particularly noticed this yesterday when I thought I'd try vlc and mplayer to see if they where any better than xine, now if I install them both on my fedora 12 laptop and then uninstalled, my hard drive free space would return to it's original size.
I'm not an expert on pup_save files, but I think you misunderstand how they work.

On your Fedora system, you have a full install to disk. The total space is the size of the partition on which you did the install As you add files or remove files, the amount of available space on the disk shrinks or grows, but the total size remains the same.

Think of your pup_save file as a disk. It has a fixed size, determined when you create it. It is treated as a file system and mounted by Puppy. If you add applications, the free space in the pup_save will decrease by the amount the applications took. If you remove the applications the amount of free space in the pup_save file will will increase, but the overall size of the pup_save file will be the same.

There are utilities in Puppy to resize a pupsave file, such as making it larger if you decide you need more space in it, but it does not grow and shrink dynamically. It's whatever size you specified when you made it.
Reading this thread I'm thinking my 1Gb memeroid stick must have some "slack space" anyone know of a linux equivalent to CHKDSK or am I going to have to use a windoze machine to try and restore ?
The Linux equivalent of CHKDSK is fsck, but "slack space" isn't your problem, and fsck isn't the cure.

Slack space is an artifact of the FAT16 file system used by MS-DOS and Windows 3.X. (Windows 9.X introduced FAT32, which is a different matter.)

The smallest unit of disk space on a FAT16 system readable/writable in one operation was the cluster. Each cluster had to have a unique address. FAT16 used a 16 bit integer to hold the address, so there were a maximum of 65,536 clusters available on a FAT16 volume. (2^16=65,536) How big a cluster was was determined by the size of the volume. 2GB was the maximum possible volume size under FAT16, and on a 2GB volume, a cluster was 32KB.

Only one file could be on a cluster, so if you saved a 1K text file, it used 32K of disk space. The unused space in the cluster was the "slack space" referred to.

On Linux systems, the standard disk block size is 1K, so slack space isn't really an issue.

You need to discover what the applications you want to run need in terms of space, and resize your pupsave file accordingly. You need more than just the actual space taken by the program. Many programs need to create temporary files as part of what they do, and those will be in the pupsave. (It sounds like that was wht vlc was doing.) Some programs will remove temp files they create when they exit. Others may not, and it will be on you to clean up if needed after they are run. (And it will depends on where they are created. If they get written to /tmp, for example, that is normally cleared on shutdown and reboot.)
My pupsave file is now 192Mb (firefox 3.6+a few addons and mplayer+plugin only additional software installed) which is sort of going away from the point of puppy for me, i.e small and fast
Any help is appreciated
btw I'm usng 4.3.1 on an old hp compaq laptop with 2Gb ram and my son's 1001ha eeepc 1Gb ram
RAM isn't the issue. You have more than enough for Puppy on either machine. I don't play media files on my Puppy box, so mplayer isn't an issue, but I do use Firefox 3.6 and addons. It's a fairly large program. For that matter, I also use Open Office 3.2 (which is something like 160MB for the programs themselves) and other large things like IBM's Eclipse programmer's IDE, which is another 170MB or so.

Puppy itself and the bundled applications that come with it are relatively small and fast. Other things I run are big and slow. I knew that going in.

I run Puppy in a Full install to an 8GB partition, so space isn't a worry. If I ran a Frugal install I'd look at using a different strategy. I might get the big apps like Firefox as SFS files, and only mount them when I planned to use them, instead of having them as part of my pupsave and loaded every time.
______
Dennis

gonkbag
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Location: uk

#27 Post by gonkbag »

Hello
thanks for the reply, although no linux virgin I must confess to not quite understanding how the pupsave file works, and am still not quite understanding why my available free space never gets any smaller.
Having 18Mb free and deleting an 8 Mb file I'm still left with 18Mb free, it's as if the pupsave file cannot be overwritten or space on it freed up, or there's another trash file somewhere (other than ~/.trash) full of junk, if so could anyone direct me to it ?
I may just delete my pupsave file and create a new one with just firefox and mplayer, I prefer youtube etc without flash
thanks again

zbys
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Joined: Mon 06 Apr 2009, 13:04

pupsave files

#28 Post by zbys »

Deleting a pupsave file works well for me - I first create a new pupsave and then copy over various stuff such as the Mail directory in /root/.mozilla/default/"randomfilename"/ this keeps my old emails. There are other files in this "randomfilename"/ directory that hold bookmarks and addresses too. I also copy the my-* directories in root where I have placed things like the skype bins and libs (though skype also needs /var/lib/dbus copied to work and the sounds from usr /share/skype/sounds. Its easy enough to do by copying complete directories though you can get more than you really need. All my documents, pictures, sounds (which is the vast majority of the files) I keep on a separate partition.

I don't do this anymore- reason I used to copy the pupsave file like this was that every now and then it would crash and be corrupted - this is true for usb sticks and a usb harddisk and for at least 3 versions of puppy (4.1.2 , 4.2 and 4.3.1). I have since found that by rebooting with another pupsave and running e2fsck -y on on the unmounted original pupsave file the corruption goes away . I intend to add this to the rc.shutdown script but first want to see if there is a way to stop the corruption happening in the first place.

There is a lot of very useful information in this forum but it does seem to indicate a pattern that though puppy/linux is the best way to run a old/small pc (that's why so many use it), it does have many quirks especially with the filesytem and booting.

Zbys

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RetroTechGuy
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#29 Post by RetroTechGuy »

gonkbag wrote:Hello
thanks for the reply, although no linux virgin I must confess to not quite understanding how the pupsave file works, and am still not quite understanding why my available free space never gets any smaller.
Having 18Mb free and deleting an 8 Mb file I'm still left with 18Mb free, it's as if the pupsave file cannot be overwritten or space on it freed up, or there's another trash file somewhere (other than ~/.trash) full of junk, if so could anyone direct me to it ?
I may just delete my pupsave file and create a new one with just firefox and mplayer, I prefer youtube etc without flash
thanks again
I find that deleting files within the pupsave doesn't immediately clear the space (perhaps a result of the union filesystem). However, typically upon reboot, it shows the space cleared. And that may also be an artifact of running the pupsave on a flash drive, versus HDD (as Puppy avoids thrashing your flash, by storing in memory)...

Other things that help with internal pupsave space is moving large files/folder outside of the pupsave, and symbolic linking them back in. For example, I moved my entire .thunderbird folder out onto /mnt/home/, then dragged the folder back to produce the symbolic link to it (my Email folder is larger than my pupsave). I have also pushed the 2 big firefox index files (.sqlite?) out to /mnt/home/, as they annoy me. And my ClamAV virus defs now sit outside as well. These latter 2 examples, the files themselves are symbolically linked in.

These last two changes pushed my available free space to about 200 MB (and my pupsave is still less than 512MB -- I could probably go back to my original 256MB size, with the changes above).

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RetroTechGuy
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Re: pupsave files

#30 Post by RetroTechGuy »

zbys wrote:Deleting a pupsave file works well for me - I first create a new pupsave and then copy over various stuff such as the Mail directory in /root/.mozilla/default/"randomfilename"/ this keeps my old emails. There are other files in this "randomfilename"/ directory that hold bookmarks and addresses too. I also copy the my-* directories in root where I have placed things like the skype bins and libs (though skype also needs /var/lib/dbus copied to work and the sounds from usr /share/skype/sounds. Its easy enough to do by copying complete directories though you can get more than you really need. All my documents, pictures, sounds (which is the vast majority of the files) I keep on a separate partition.

I don't do this anymore- reason I used to copy the pupsave file like this was that every now and then it would crash and be corrupted - this is true for usb sticks and a usb harddisk and for at least 3 versions of puppy (4.1.2 , 4.2 and 4.3.1). I have since found that by rebooting with another pupsave and running e2fsck -y on on the unmounted original pupsave file the corruption goes away . I intend to add this to the rc.shutdown script but first want to see if there is a way to stop the corruption happening in the first place.

There is a lot of very useful information in this forum but it does seem to indicate a pattern that though puppy/linux is the best way to run a old/small pc (that's why so many use it), it does have many quirks especially with the filesytem and booting.

Zbys
For some reason, the pupsaves don't cleanly umount. I also think that this occurs more often on the HDD, than on the flash drive (my suspicion is that Puppy _thinks_ that it has synced the HDD, and so it spends less time making sure it syncs and umounts correctly -- my flash drive version takes MUCH longer to umount and shutdown).

On my frugal install, I added pfix=fsck to the kernel line. I have also remastered the Puppy 4.3.1 CD and added pfix=fsck to the boot sequence (so those machines I boot from CD have that feature). I haven't had a trashed pupsave since.

To do this, I created a fresh, new pupsave (or pfix=ram), so you don't add any of your personalized, goofy crap into the CD. Then use the remaster command (under Menu, Setup, Remaster). Select all defaults, and edit the isolinux.cfg, and follow Pizza's answer:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 7&start=60

adding pfix=fsck on the "append" line, save it as an ISO and/or burn it off.

This is now the version that I'm giving to people (I want it to check their pupsave on every boot, so they don't have issues).

I'm hoping that Barry will make this the default, in the next official release (I don't want newbies to need to learn too much, too fast -- make it easy for them to "join the club" ;) )

Bruce B

Re: pupsave files

#31 Post by Bruce B »

RetroTechGuy wrote:
I'm hoping that Barry will make this the default, in the next official release (I don't want newbies to need to learn too much, too fast -- make it easy for them to "join the club" ;) )
Yes, there are good reasons a person would not want to run the operating system on a filesystem in need of repairs. Good reasons.

Nevertheless, I highly doubt what you are 'hoping' for will happen at the developer level (i.e. Barry) The reason why is he already did it and guess what? Lots of complaints because users were having to wait for the e2fsck to complete. (I think it was version 3.1)

However, if you can, it's easy to modify initrd.gz to have this option and other options as you please.

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RetroTechGuy
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Re: pupsave files

#32 Post by RetroTechGuy »

Bruce B wrote:
RetroTechGuy wrote:
I'm hoping that Barry will make this the default, in the next official release (I don't want newbies to need to learn too much, too fast -- make it easy for them to "join the club" ;) )
Yes, there are good reasons a person would not want to run the operating system on a filesystem in need of repairs. Good reasons.
Indeed. Critical reasons! It's particularly bad practice to mount a damaged FS in read-write mode.

I personally had several pupsaves become corrupted to the point of being unusable. A colleague of mine has a similar problem, and he was rather disappointed in Puppy at that point (he also tinkers on a good deal of old equipment -- he's not a "newbie" when it comes to this).

Puppy looks really good, and works really well...and then it commits suicide, after a couple dozen reboots.

At least the M$ Windows OS's take several months, to several years, before committing suicide.

Let me say again, that I am a big fan of what Barry and others have done here! We just need a couple tweaks to make Puppy "ready for prime time".

On my frugal install, I patched the menu.lst to "pfix=fsck". On the live boot CD, it is more difficult (I did this also, but this may be beyond what a newbie could do). Prior to this CD patch, I had been typing "puppy pfix=fsck" on every single CD boot...very tedious.

If the point of Puppy is to make things hard for newbies, and discourage them from using Linux (after they lose all their data in their pupsave, which they yet haven't learned to back-up), then the status quo is the right method. Otherwise, a simple patch will help keep them out of trouble. (if I sound a little grumpy about it, I am... I like systems that "just work")
Nevertheless, I highly doubt what you are 'hoping' for will happen at the developer level (i.e. Barry) The reason why is he already did it and guess what? Lots of complaints because users were having to wait for the e2fsck to complete. (I think it was version 3.1)
OK, so we add it as a query, whose default answer is "yes", with a timeout (if you're not sitting there waiting, and only have 1 pupsave to load, it continues booting without waiting for your answer... fscking the pupsave in the process).

Let's be realistic here. Most pupsaves are small. In fact, I read somewhere that it wasn't recommended that you exceed 2GB for the OS (i.e. pupsave). Even a 2GB partition doesn't take very long to scan. And given the data integrity issue, it's worth the wait. Even with the fsck on my pupsave, the boot time is shorter than loading Windows 98 on my machines (I currently have 3 machines which regularly run in Puppy, and it's true on all 3).

Part of the problem here is that Puppy does not cleanly umount the pupsave (I found this in in several 4.x versions). This seems to be more common for pupsaves stored on the HDD, than on a USB flash (my HDD shutdown is very quick, and ALWAYS corrupted. My USB shutdown takes MUCH longer, and only occasionally shows corruption).

So the fsck is simply a bandaid for this larger issue (I might agree that fsck is somewhat unnecessary on every boot, if the partition is cleanly umounted).

The "speed" complaint reminds me of a copy issue I had in an early version of Linux. The "cp" command was really fast. Unfortunately, it didn't copy correctly a substantial fraction of the time, so it was often faster to reboot into Windows98 and perform the copy, then reboot back to Linux (as I often stored files on a Fat32, so they were accessible to both OS). Otherwise, you had to copy the files, then perform a CRC on them, to make sure that they had copied uncorrupted...then recopy the corrupted files. Bad...bad...bad...
However, if you can, it's easy to modify initrd.gz to have this option and other options as you please.
Actually, you remaster the CD and follow Pizza's instructions:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 7&start=60

placing pfix=fsck on the isolinux.cfg append line.

In a frugal install, you can add it on the kernel line, in menu.lst

BTW, I am now distributing my "fsck" modded CD to the folks that I give it to (i.e. the same as the original, with only this change).

Bruce B

Re: pupsave files

#33 Post by Bruce B »

RetroTechGuy wrote: To do this, I created a fresh, new pupsave (or pfix=ram), so you don't add any of your personalized, goofy crap into the CD. Then use the remaster command (under Menu, Setup, Remaster). Select all defaults, and edit the isolinux.cfg, and follow Pizza's answer:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 7&start=60

adding pfix=fsck on the "append" line, save it as an ISO and/or burn it off.

This is now the version that I'm giving to people (I want it to check their pupsave on every boot, so they don't have issues).

I'm hoping that Barry will make this the default, in the next official release (I don't want newbies to need to learn too much, too fast -- make it easy for them to "join the club" ;) )
If you work careful and want to save time, you can use a hexeditor to make some modifications to the boot args. The reason this is possible is because it is in plain text.

Use overwrite and not insert mode, which is default with most hexeditors. We don't want to add any bytes.

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Béèm
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Location: Brussels IBM Thinkpad R40, 256MB, 20GB, WiFi ipw2100. Frugal Lin'N'Win

#34 Post by Béèm »

I just started to use .3fs save files, as it seems they are more stable.
Not long enough to give valuable feedback yet.

I used information from two posts to do this
  1. http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=51410
  2. http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 296#293296
Time savers:
Find packages in a snap and install using Puppy Package Manager (Menu).
[url=http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HomePage]Consult Wikka[/url]
Use peppyy's [url=http://wellminded.com/puppy/pupsearch.html]puppysearch[/url]

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Béèm
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Saving to ext2, ext3, ext4, etc..

#35 Post by Béèm »

Saving to ext2, ext3, ext4, etc..

Good news from Barry.
Time savers:
Find packages in a snap and install using Puppy Package Manager (Menu).
[url=http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HomePage]Consult Wikka[/url]
Use peppyy's [url=http://wellminded.com/puppy/pupsearch.html]puppysearch[/url]

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RetroTechGuy
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Re: pupsave files

#36 Post by RetroTechGuy »

Bruce B wrote:
RetroTechGuy wrote: To do this, I created a fresh, new pupsave (or pfix=ram), so you don't add any of your personalized, goofy crap into the CD. Then use the remaster command (under Menu, Setup, Remaster). Select all defaults, and edit the isolinux.cfg, and follow Pizza's answer:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 7&start=60

adding pfix=fsck on the "append" line, save it as an ISO and/or burn it off.

This is now the version that I'm giving to people (I want it to check their pupsave on every boot, so they don't have issues).

I'm hoping that Barry will make this the default, in the next official release (I don't want newbies to need to learn too much, too fast -- make it easy for them to "join the club" ;) )
If you work careful and want to save time, you can use a hexeditor to make some modifications to the boot args. The reason this is possible is because it is in plain text.

Use overwrite and not insert mode, which is default with most hexeditors. We don't want to add any bytes.
I don't tinker much with debuggers and hex editors any more.

But it was relatively painless to re-master the CD. (and fixing the frugal install was simply a case of editing menu.lst).

I have started handing out copies of the automatic fsck CD (I want my victims...errr..."converts" to find it easy to use the system... ;) ).

Zpup
Posts: 3
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#37 Post by Zpup »

I have been running Live CD's and a frugal USB installation. If I understand it there is no way to "flush" re-initialize the cache. This reminds me of "memory"lock" / leak, zombies-hidden ?

An analogy may be, droppings and artifacts left over.

So, I have to re-boot...

Can't complain though, I am getting mileage from my Dell D610, when the XP SP3 annoys me,and I take Puppy for a walk...

Bruce B

#38 Post by Bruce B »

Zpup wrote:I have been running Live CD's and a frugal USB installation. If I understand it there is no way to "flush" re-initialize the cache. This reminds me of "memory"lock" / leak, zombies-hidden ?

An analogy may be, droppings and artifacts left over.

So, I have to re-boot...

Can't complain though, I am getting mileage from my Dell D610, when the XP SP3 annoys me,and I take Puppy for a walk...
There is a way to "flush" re-initialize the cache, although there isn't
much reason to do it because Linux manages the cache and buffers well.

You do it with a command, better placed in script or alias if you do it
regularly.

sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches


As far as rebooting, this is likely because you used Windows too much. After
I started using Linux, it took me a long time to teach myself to stop
rebooting several times a day.

But eventually I learned.

~

gcmartin

Mount CD to drag and drop files to it

#39 Post by gcmartin »

Done it lots of times on MS, but never on Linux.
  • How do you setup a CD on Linux so that I can drag and drop files to it?
  • Can it be done as easily as I do it on MS?
Thanks in advance

noryb009
Posts: 634
Joined: Sat 20 Mar 2010, 22:28

#40 Post by noryb009 »

gcmartin: You can try pBurn, and write a MULTISESSION CD/DVD. You will need to do a little extra (menu > multimedia > pburn, select file, burn), but it's pretty good.

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