(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Chubby Puppy would be ideal for a multisession DVD. Has anyone managed to get multisession Puppy to work on a DVD? Puppy's gcombust won't burn DVDs (asks for money.)

I did not know that, as I don't have a dvd burner....


That's horrible, me thinks...


There are plenty of free dvd burning apps out there, why not ditch gcombust...

(rather detracts from the free, open-source natue of the distro, you know?)

Hey, that's also news to me about Gcombust.

You can use tkDVD to burn DVDs, but I've never tried that either.

growiso works for normal puppy on DVD I have been able to us it to backup a windows img to full size of DVD. I found the mkiso setup in ./etc/rc.d/rc.reboot-cd here is the correct growiso command to start new DVD
from a multi-booted version of 1.04:

growisofs -Z /dev/scd0 -J -R -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table /livecd/


add to later with:

growisofs -M /dev/scd0 -J -R /path_to_new_file_or_directory

the multi-stuff will not work due to cdrecord lack of support for DVD. growisofs does not use cdrecord hince it will work. the change for the scriptors would be to remove cdrecord and change mkisofs to growisofs dropping the -pad option.
Ted Dog

Thank you. That is very tantalizing. It is over my head, and leaves me with many questions. I had no idea Puppy contains a program capable of writing a bootable or multisession DVD. I found the home page for dvd+rw-tools:

http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/

and hope to figure out from it how to put multisession Puppy on a DVD.

as the DVD for a price and other info emerges - please update here

http://www.goosee.com/puppy/wikka/PuppyBurn

dvd+rw-tools: already exists in puppy. the command 'growisofs' is its primary way of burning DVDs. The link provided by Flash gives a good detailed examples. I'll try to rescript the multi-methods used by puppy to support DVDs as soon as I locate my RW DVDs
Ted Dog

from a live-cd boot option 5
put blank DVD into DVD writer drive
open terminal

type:

growisofs -Z /dev/scd0 -J -R /livecd/

copy attached file (rc.reboot) to /tmp
and copy same file to /root/my-applications

add these two lines to ~/.etc/rc.d/rc.local

cp /root/my-applications/rc.reboot /tmp/rc.reboot
chmod 777 /tmp/rc.reboot

reboot as normal leave the DVD in drive to save all setting when rebooting choose YES

Ted Dog

from a live-cd boot option 5
put blank DVD into DVD writer drive
open terminal

type:

growisofs -Z /dev/scd0 -J -R /livecd/

copy attached file (rc.reboot) to /tmp
and copy same file to /root/my-applications

add these two lines to ~/.etc/rc.d/rc.local

cp /root/my-applications/rc.reboot /tmp/rc.reboot
chmod 777 /tmp/rc.reboot

reboot as normal leave the DVD in drive to save all setting when rebooting choose YES

Ted Dog

DO NOT FOLLOW ABOVE DIRECTION YOU WILL GET A COASTER NON-BOOTABLE DVD.
CORRECTIONS TO FOLLOW SORRY....

to start new DVD
from a multi-booted version of 1.04:

growisofs -Z /dev/scd0 -J -R -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table /livecd/

extract above file to /root/my-applications and /tmp
next to make the new rc.reboot file return after reboot
add two lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.local

cp /root/my-applications/rc.reboot /tmp
chmod 777 /tmp/rc.reboot

type in terminal
chmod 777 /tmp/rc.reboot

was able to get chubby puppy to boot on a DVD by this command

growisofs -Z /dev/scd0=puppy-chubby-1.0.4-mozilla-openoffice.iso

It doesn't appear to reload prior saves, but the files are added same as normal puppy with the above rc.reboot script. Still testing.

Ted Dog

After second reboot everything worked on multi- chubby puppy same as with regular puppy. Thanks Flash for the idea.

I'll try to make a dotpup. This puppy thing is only a few days old for me. I have to do a lot more reading.

Ted Dog (Ted from Texas)

You're welcome, for sure. All I did was wonder if it would be possible to do. I hope you're using rewritable DVDs.

By the way, the dvd+rw-tools homepage has a discussion of why DVD+R/RW is better than DVD-R/RW for this purpose. It also explains that a rewritable DVD should not be considered as a suitable replacement for a hard drive because it can only be rewritten a few thousand times before it "wears out." This suggests that multisession puppy must be designed to run only in RAM if it can't find any swap memory, writing to the DVD only when told to save the session. Being unable to use the DVD as if it were a hard drive, large applications, such as OpenOffice, or applications which work with large files, such as Gimp, are out of the question for multisession Puppy unless the host computer has a large RAM or a swap memory.

Fortunately, a solution presents itself: Puppy must deal with the same restrictions when it runs from a USB flash memory stick. Barry designed Puppy so that it does not write to the USB memory except at the end of the session. Here's a thread discussing that subject.

Flash,
I reviewed the thread provided and the reboot script provided earlier does add directories to a non RW. I have been using DVD+R (faster) and DVD-R with the above script. It worked for chubby and normal puppy 1.04 versions. Since I only made one coaster in the testing process using normal DVD+Rs I never looked for my RW DVDs. I agree the growth of a DVD save sessions quickly swamps the RAM in PUPPY I loaded as many DOTPUPs as I could and ran out of usable RAM in a couple of hours. Puppy still booted but the Xwin froze on start. But files or directories added to the DVD outside of PUPPIES methods are not automatically reloaded so some hope exists to have programs at the ready but not reloaded. The Ideal would be able to resquash usr after adding programs. And have the resulting usr run only from its cd image (you would lose the use of the DVD drive for other things)
Ted Dog