Manual frugal installation with or without CD

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wuwei
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Joined: Sat 15 Sep 2007, 11:59
Location: formerly de; now in tranquility

Manual frugal installation with or without CD

#1 Post by wuwei »

During the last couple of days we had a discussion over in the German forum about the procedures of a frugal installation of a further Puppy after a first Puppy is already installed.
For those of you who might be interested in a translated version I have summarized and extended the German version as follows:

A first suggestion for a frugal installation was ...

With CD

1. copy browser and email data to another partition
2. download ISO and burn to CD
3. start CD and partition your HDD
4. use Universal Installer for a frugal installation
5. install Grub to its own small partition
6. Reboot into the new Puppy; install browser and email client
7. copy back saved browser and email data
8. install other programs


Since this poster used a CD for the installation of – another – Puppy, a method was suggested that avoids burning a CD:

Without CD

First step:
Only necessary for the very first Puppy on a given PC without any grub installed.

>download the desired ISO
>Burn to CD; in Win use e.g. ImgBurn
>Start CD; boot parameter pfix=ram recommended when remnants of previous Puppies could be present
> Partition with gparted; one ext2/3 partition for all planned Puppies; one swap partition. Size min 1GB per Puppy and 2GB for sundry. Swap = 2x RAM, max 1GB.
> Create one subdirectory per Puppy on ext2/3 partition, e.g. "525". Mount CD-drive and copy all files from CD to new subdirectory (actually only 3 are needed but the others are tiny and this way its much simpler for newbies).
>Install Grub with menu-system-grub bootloader config. Choose "simple" und "MBR" when asked. Put folder /boot on ext2/3 partition.
>Goto folder /boot/grub and open menu.lst. Change entry for Puppy 525 to read similar to this:

Code: Select all

# Linux bootable partition config begins  
title Puppy 520 Frugal-ext3 (on /dev/sdb5)  
rootnoverify (hd1,4)  
kernel (hd1,4)/525/vmlinuz PMEDIA=atahd PDEV1=sdb5 psubdir=525  
initrd (hd1,4)/525/initrd.gz 
# Linux bootable partition config ends
Adjust this to your partition geometry.

Reboot and create pupsave file in the process when prompted.

Second step:
For installing the second and any further Puppy one only needs to start an existing Puppy and create another subdirectory on the ext-partition (/mnt/home). Mount the new ISO and copy the content to that subdirectory. Amend menu.lst. Reboot and create pupsave file. This entire process takes less than 5 minutes.

Third step:
Configuration: Larger applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, Office etc. will be installed to /mnt/home. There are generally two different methods.

Add an SFS file which can be found and downloaded through Quickpet.

Or one can directly install a programm to /mnt/home. E.g. Firefox can be obtained as tar.gz at the Mozilla site. Download and unpack to /mnt/home. Starting it once creates /root/.mozilla. This directory can be moved to /mnt/home and symlinked back to /root. This way a possibly fast growing profile folder is kept outside the pupsave file. Similarly for Thunderbird, or an Office Suite (see two relevant posts here
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=66202
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=65918
Or, if you want to always get the latest Open Office or Libre Office directly from their websites, first install this pet
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=27067
then download the rpm or deb packages from OO or LO and unrpm/deb them. Put the folder on /mnt/home and drag the executables to the desktop. Done.

Users with an existing grub install for another Linux can omitt step one entirely.


Finally the discussion turned to the subject of a small extra partition for grub. This can be done, e.g. to a 1-2 MB size sda1 partition. However, even then, the MBR is subject to overriding when reinstalling Windows.

nooby
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Joined: Sun 29 Jun 2008, 19:05
Location: SwedenEurope

#2 Post by nooby »

Don't get me wrong now. I am not into criticizing at all. Just trying to be practical and logical and friendly :)

Some users don't want to do partitions and formatting and resizeing and such.

And if they only need to use puppy and other linux that boot on NTFS then they don't ahve to do any of that and can still boot on NTFS using both old grub1 and grub4dos and it just work.

Shinobar using the grub4dosconfig pet/program made a copy of the MBR so one could restore it if something went wrong and then he helped me install frugal puppy on the Ms Wind7 partition which is NTFS on my Acer D250 and it worked just fine.

I am also booting several slax version and even one Arch Linux and Knoppix on it. Using a USB stick with grub2 on it I can also boot Several ubuntu in live CD frugal install on the NTFS hdd. Works great.

So apart from the description given here one could add what I refer to now. Flexibility and choice is a good thing. More options for the user. :)
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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r1tz
Posts: 162
Joined: Thu 09 Sep 2010, 05:19
Location: In #puppylinux (IRC)

#3 Post by r1tz »

hmm... you might want to state the countless number of ways to do this, like using a USB loaded with a bootloader.

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bodbozzle
Posts: 45
Joined: Tue 03 Aug 2010, 20:41
Location: El Barrio GMT +1 (de)

#4 Post by bodbozzle »

nooby wrote:... Some users don't want to do partitions and formatting and resizeing and such.

And if they only need to use puppy and other linux that boot on NTFS then they don't ahve to do any of that and can still boot on NTFS using both old grub1 and grub4dos and it just work.
...
If some user got Puppy on their hard drive without formatting, they have the equipment for easily going the next step, leaving their ntfs reserve.
I do not know if it is important to do frugal installs on ntfs only.
But there are lots of useful cases for frugal installs.

wuwei also pointed out on Pmagic oder SystemRescueCD frugal install
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=63147
And this thread should kept continued:
List of distros that boot frugally with menu.lst code
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 6&start=15
sorry for the poor English

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