(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I have installed Puppy to the internal flash drive of my eeepc and it works fine. However the first time I shutdown it asks me where I want to save my session and I am given two options: save to file or save to drive.

I want to know whether the second option (which is preferable) constantly writes changes to the flash drive in real time or whether data is only written to the drive when you close down. I know that when you run puppy from a CD or external flash drive etc changes are only saved at the end of the session. Is this the same on an internal flash drive install? I am sure this has been thought through, but I would like someone with Puppy credibility to confirm this so I do not shorten the life of the flash drive with constant read/writes.

drbongo

I have done a bit more digging and I think that the drive is being written to constantly in /etc/rc.d/PUPSTATE it says PUPMODE=6 and PMEDIA='ideflash'. Apparantly I should be in PUPMODE=13 which will only write to the drive when I shutdown or every thirty minutes etc. Looks like I will have to try and force PUPMODE=13.

drbongo

I have now decided that rather than trying to force PUPMODE=13 it will be safer if I simply run the eeepc from a removable sd card rather than from the internal flash drive. I have actually wiped the internal drive completely so the eeepc boots from the sd card automatically when it can't find a boot flag on the internal drive. This also gives me 4Gb of storage on the internal drive. ( I made a backup of the original partitions using Pudd). I do not know by how much constant writing to the internal disk would reduce its life span, but an external sd cards are cheap and easy to replace. I will post this message on the Pupeee thread as well!

drbongo

Really interrested in this, can we get some more people in this thread? I want to force my eeepc to write to the internal SD as little as possible. How can this be done? Having PMEDIA=ideflash doesn't seem to do anything.

dinky, looks like your card is too good at pretending to be a drive.
solution here:
Booting and running with CF card in IDE adaptor (Solved)
I'm sure I've told Barry about it but the fix isn't in 4.02

An alternative idea would be one of the boot methods presented in this thread:
Designing Puppy to be a RAM operating system.

Hi Hairy Will, just edited my initrd.gz script, thanks so much! Working beautifully now, and will have to include this fix with further releases of TigerPup. Cheers!
~dinky

Dinky,

If you install pupeee to the internal drive, it will be a frugal install anyway - if you then save the changes in a file rather than on the drive it will only write to it when you shutdown!

This will limit the save size to 1.25G approx, but you can still save data on the rest of the drive manually anyway.

drbongo

ps. I have now had a play with the Windoze XP version and it is very slow and needs a lot of tweaking to make it work correctly. Also I had to spend the whole day installing antivirus software, open office etc because nothing is included. And then SP3 wouldn't fit on the drive anyway

Actually drbongo, that's not correct. Puppy does not automatically save intermittently to the save file with a frugal install. When you shut down your eeepc, you will see the text saying 'mounted directly on top layer', this means there's been no need to save the file. Much faster, but will wear out your laptop very quickly. Flash cards aren't made for constant writes. You need to follow Hairy Will's advice above. Also, the save file isn't limited to 1.25 Gb, you can increase it easily. I think 1.8 is the size Barry has recommended not to go over, but as this was using unionfs, this might change using aufs.

Re ms windows, yuck.... I wouldn't install it to an eeepc. At least, if I did, it would be an XP mini version... but even so, I can't think of anything I'd use it for... impressing friends who already use windows? Hmmmm.

Hi I have tried installing from a USB drive to the internal Flash/SD card using the PUI but I get an error each time when I try to point the installer to the files on the USB drive. Could I just copy the files from the USB onto the internal card, or would that cause problems.

I have read the tutorial, but this only deals with installing to removable SD card, so does not suit my situation.

Any help would be appreciated

Sam

Dinky you are right! I didn't have an eeepc with me and was relying on my deteriorating grey matter to remember what I did. I have checked and you are right, even though it is saved to a file it is mounted directly so will be read writing regularly.

However, when I first noticed this I did a bit of research and many people are of the opinion that this internal SSD is designed for 100,000-200,000 read/write cycles, presuming the wear balancing works correctly the drive will outlast the useful life of the eeepc. Of course that is just theory, we won't actually know until eeepc's start dying!

I am not sure how the installed Xandros system handles this, but it boots from a read only partition and presumably writes changes to the home partition. I don't know whether this happens regularly or when you log off.

The windows version has the virtual memory turned off, and seems to save changes on the fly. Does this mean Asus have taken account of this, or conveniently ignored the issue?

I am probably going to run Puppy off the external SD card for now, and just use the internal drive to store data, at least until this issue is resolved in the a later release.

Samsung

Installing Puppy to the internal drive is very straight-forward, the only issue you might find is that you have to point PUI to the correct folder which will mean mounting the usb drive manually to get access to the relevant files. They will then be listed in sda1 (or similar). Make sure you can see the vmlinuz file etc in the right hand window.

You also need to choose the option to install to internal flash drive (CF connected to IDE). Don't use the standard install to flash option.

Post back if you are still having problems.

drbongo

Thanks drbongo,

I have installed the files now, but the eeepc takes longer to boot up booting puppy from the internal SD than it does when it boots up with puppy from a attached USB drive. In all the boot time from the SD is 90secs from the USB 45 secs.

Have you experienced something similar.

Sam

Still working on that one Sam, my boot time running TigerPup is massive, about 2 minutes. That said, MUCH fastethan the default Xandros when booted, and much cooler too. I can live with the trade off. Glad you got them installed, I just copied them.

@drbongo
Yeah, I'm not sure about the drive life... I don't think the eepc's were designed to be used for more than a few years though... world's first disposable laptops? We're runnign puppy though, which is designed to breathe life into old, or low-powered, eqiupment. Am planning on minimizing the writes to the internal drive as much as possible, so I can use this laptop for longer than it's "expected lifespan".

Found it was a bit slow without a swap partition (which Xandros doesn't include), so I'm using a 1Gb flash card in the card reader formmatted to a swap partition. Speeds it up considerably. I might put more ram in it at some point, but it's fine for now. Cheers.
~dinky

Hairywill, I've been creating a remaster of TigerPup for the eeepc, with the edited version of init I created included. This forces puppy into using pupmode 13. Unfortunately I'm unable to keep this in a remaster... any idea how to do this? Whenever I try, and replace initrd.gz in "puppylivecdbuild" with the updated version, I get "kernel panic-attempted to kill init" on booting up. This of course goes away, and works fine when I use an init file that's not been edited. If I create a pupsave file, and swap change my initrd.gz file to the updated version while using the pupsave file, all is good. So how the heck do I manage this for a remaster? I'm using the "remaster live cd" script included with puppy 3.01. Thanks!
~dinky

dinky,
Sorry I haven't got a clue. I have never used the remaster wizard.
I would be inclined to try assembling the iso manually to discount the wizard as the problem.

I think that's where the problem lies... I HAVE to add the initrd.gz file manually, the wizard only works for previously mastered iso files. It's not just an issue with the wizard though... I'll keep looking, thanks for the input.
~dinky