(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I've put together some of the info I've been collecting in my quest to ease/share the burden of hosting Puppy ISO files.

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/DistributingYourPuplet

If you publish (or plan on publishing) your own remix of Puppy, this page should offer some useful tips for getting it out to the world without too many server meltdowns or bandwidth charges.

It covers regular hosts, content distribution networks, P2P filesharing, metalink, delta patches etc.

Comments appreciated.

Wow, great. Thanks for making this page. I'd like to add MediaFire (for files under 100Mb - no time expiry limit) thats been mentioned here before, but are there any objections first?

good work, well done

I wasn't aware of xdelta. I'm impressed that it can offer savings when applied to compressed file systems.

Yes xdelta is a great way to go. Thanks klu9 for getting this started.

wNOP and NOP use xdelta now and hopefully more will jump onto the xdelta bandwagon.

It saves time, bandwidth and gives people with slow connections like me a far better experience on updates. The service packs are another great way as in 2.14R from Dougal and Pakt.

Eric

Yes, I was surprised for the same reason. I wouldn't have thought there would be enough unchanged data for that to work. But it does. The next ISO of pcPuppyOS (will post tonight) will also offer an Xdelta patch from RC3 to RC4, at only 16 mb (compared to the 602 MB iso).

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. Glad you liked it.

Re mediafire, I've been using them too (puppy xdeltas, pawedcasts, manuals), so I'd recommend them too, but maybe in the linked-to Hosts for Large Files thread, where limits, experience etc can be discussed.

Re xdeltas, now that I've played around with them a bit, I can't believe everybody everywhere isn't using them. I think these will be the real bandwidth saviour.

I've been pimping them in the Spanish & French Puppy forums too, so some non-English puplets & localizations might start appearing in xdelta format.

Re CoBlitz, maybe we need some kind of control experiment, to see how a CoBlitzed and unCoBlitzed download compare, to see if it really makes a difference to the host. Because if it does, then that is just so damned easy. Just http://coblitz.codeen.org/ at the start of any link you publish.

I tried this XDELTA system with my speak-pup iso, or rather a new one that I put together based on fat free puppy 2.17

Fat free pupy 217 weighs in at 53 megabytes
speak2pup.iso weighs in at 91 megabytes

I used xdelta -e -s fat-free-pup-2.17-.iso speak2pup.iso oldisotonewiso.delta

That created the oldisotonewiso.delta file which weighed in at 23 megabytes.

I deleted the speak2pup.iso file and recreated it using

xdelta -d fat-ree-2.17-.iso oldisoto newiso.delta speak2pup.iso

to recreate the speak2pup.iso. It did. This version of speak2pup.iso weighs in at 48 megabytes. It may be some forty years since I took high school algebra but I don't believe that you can take one size file, combine it with another and come with a file that is smaller than the first.

So what did I do wrng?

I'm using 2.17. Does xdelta only work in 3.xx?

Try adding the -s option:

create .delta file:
xdelta3 -e -s oldfile newfile oldisofiletonewisofile.delta
use .delta file:
xdelta3 -d -s oldfile oldfiletonewfile.delta newfile

Best way to check it worked: make an md5sum of the original, and compare it against the one you create. It should match exactly.

md5sum oldfile
md5sum newfile

Or, if you want to create (or use) a text file with the md5sum inside:
create:
md5sum oldfile > oldfile.md5.txt
check:
md5sum -c oldfile.md5.txt
That method assumes the file you're checking has the same name though.

Thanks adding the s parameter did the trick.