Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[paulsiu]

I recently stated that Puppy's Multimedia feature was not too useful for portable OS because too many older bios do not support multi-session boot. However, if multi-session CD/DVD works on your computer, it is a great platform for experimentation.

Here's what great about it. You can burn Puppy Linux to a CD or better yet a DVD. You can boot into the DVD and make changes. If those changes turn out to be a mistake, you can boot Puppy Linux and revert back to the previous session by running the following boot peramter on startup:

puppy pfix=1

This tells Puppy to revert back by one session. If you want to revert back 2 sesions, type pfix=2. If you want to skip all of the saved session and go back to the factory settings, type pfix=ram.

It's like a OS with built-in source control. While it is a bit slow to read and write from DVD, it is a great tool to experiment with what settings works on your computer.

Paul

[HairyWill]

The self versioning filesystem definitely made it easier for me to experiment. It is a shame that it is only available to those who have writeable optical drives that work with it. I've now got a laptop with no CD drive and I do miss the way that I could decide whether to save a session or not and also back out of my changes.

I wonder if there is a way to reimplement this so that it would work for a frugal install especially now that puppy can write to all major filesystem types?

I wonder if this process might help to track down the varying success of multisession?

[BarryK]

The idea of being able to step back to an earlier session when running Puppy not on a multisession CD/DVD seems good, but it has remained on the backburner.
One thought, in theory it could be setup to work just like a multisession CD/DVD, in which each session is saved as a folder, but to the harddrive rather than to optical media. This would be effectively identical to the multisession CD/DVD.