DSL on USB key file system behavior

Synesthesia · 08-08-2006, 12:16 AM

The point of using a usb key instead of a live cd is that you can continually maintain your file system like an installed OS. How do you make DSL embedded behave like an installed OS on a usb key so that all file system changes are committed upon shutdown. Thanks for your help.

mickyg · 08-08-2006, 06:59 AM

As far as I was aware the purpose of booting from a usb pen drive was that it's a lot smaller and more flexible (i.e. with re-mastering) than a CD, you're not installing DSL on the pen drive, you're booting and running DSL from the pen drive exactly as you would the CD.

Unless I've missed something??

Synesthesia · 08-08-2006, 01:28 PM

you've missed everything [-_o].

It would be nice if I could keep the packages installed (after reboot) since the usb key has a lot more space. I'd also like to save files to it, so it does not completely reset after shutdown.

Diophantus · 08-09-2006, 08:48 AM

You can do this - try Puppy, it saves sessions and settings by update. It's also very quick.

mickyg · 08-09-2006, 10:50 AM

Oh right, I see what you're on about now, you want to save the DSL and UCI packages you've d/l so you don't have to keep d/l and install them each time you run DSL? To do this just d/l the packages to the root of the usb drive and then specify it using the 'mydsl' boot option, i.e. 'mydsl=/dev/sda'

Also, have you tried using the 'myconfig=/dev/sda' and 'home=/dev/sda' knoppix cheatcodes, I would imagine that since DSL is based on knoppix these codes should work(?) although in order for those to work it would make sense that you'd need to boot DSL then create you're persistent home and save your personalised configuration first. You're only problem there would be that /home can't be mounted on a fat32 filesystem, which I'd imagine your usb drive is formatted as. Don't know how you'd get round that....

thisbl3 · 08-25-2006, 10:15 PM

I am running 2.4 on a pen hdd and after downloading the my.dsl extension, I put the extension in the cdrom dir under knoppix dir in manager...I then clicked the my dsl in emilfm to install and then used the back up restore tool for device sda1(the pen) it loads all extensions and settings at boot or you can type at boot: dsl restore=sda1...if that helps