On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 18:45, Nick Rout wrote: > On Sun, 2005-02-13 at 18:15 +1300, Lindsay wrote: > > I've been on the Puppy site reading up again. Forgot some details. > > > > It seems you have to have an exisiting partition. None of my machines > > have an extra partition. > > > > How did you get around it cyril? > > perhaps you didn't read the post about puppy the other day > > "A little more detail - Puppy is a small distro that boots from CD (or > USB or HDD or FDD or just about anything that you can persuade the > computer to boot from). It loads entirely into RAM, clearing the > originating CD for normal use. It aims to give you all the normal tools > you want, in a small package - Abiword, Firefox, etc. It's very easy to > roll your own puppy .iso, tweaked and augmented (or shrunk) to your > hearts content. Downside: You need RAM. The entire OS and software > loads into RAM. 128MB gives you everything. It is claimed that you can > get away with any 586 and 32MB RAM with tweaking. Upside, it is quick. > You can point it to a USB stick or local filesystem for persistent > /home. Today was my first exposure to it, and I was impressed. " > > Say again, It loads entirely into RAM. > > >From the puppy site: > > "When Puppy boots, everything uncompresses into a RAM area that we call > a "ramdisk". The live-CD will bootup on systems with only 32M RAM, but > the more RAM you have the more Puppy is able to keep files permanently > in ramdisk hence more speed. A PC with 128M RAM is the recommended > minimum. > > Note that Puppy will automatically use a swap partition if it exists. > When booting from a USB Flash device, Puppy tries to load all the Flash > files into physical RAM, but if there is not enough RAM then Puppy is > able to copy the excess to a swap partition if it exists. This > eliminates writes to the Flash memory during a session, greatly > extending its life span. > > You may need to have a swap partition to run Firefox on PCs with less > than 64M RAM. Certainly, for a PC with only 32M RAM, a swap partition is > necessary to run most of the large GUI applications." > > You don't need another partition for norrmal use on a system with 128M > RAM. If you have less than 128M RAM you would be better off to have an > existing swap partition. > > Just download the .iso, burn a cd and boot off it. and no, in response > to your friday post, it won't eat your MBR.
And if you read the FAQ [1] on the Puppy site you will discover that you can d/l a file, extract it to your C: drive and use that as a fake of your /home partition. Alternatively you can downsize you Windows partition using a utility such as qtparted. ( don't forget to use the scandisk and defrag windows utilities beforehand ) All these utilities will only 'eat' you mbr if you halt the programs while they are running. Most people happily punt on the very good chance that the mains power will continue to be available throughout the operation, but you have been warned. Remember that while there are many systems like Puppy they are all tiny Linux under featured systems. Please don't judge Linux by Puppy or its ilk alone. [1] http://www.goosee.com/puppy/faq.htm -- Sincerely etc., Christopher Sawtell
