USB booting :: Small Complaint



1] Default practice - harmless if nugatory in the circumstances  :;):

2] If there's already swap on the host I would use that & swapoff the USB, but would always assume that I should never make swap on the host - it might be somebody else's machine  :;):
Oh, BTW I have DSL working up to a sizable system, with OpenOffice.org and so on ...

3] My first attempt was indeed to use the DSL script tool installation of frugal on USB, and the bootfloppy-usb.img  that goes with it.
But on my system it would only load the USB drivers if booted in 'expert' mode.
I messed about with the linuxrc startup script in minrt24.gz for a bit, but not making quick progress I just went for the 'vanilla' bootfloppy.img instead, which does the job perfectly for the way I use the system.


To summarise, this set-up could be viewed as a 'standard' DSL that is distributed across a bootcd|bootfloppy and USB stick, bringing the convenience of recordability on the USB, although in over-all functionality it's not much different to a DSL CD with USB as an auxiliary data repository.
2) okay, but afaik using a swap on a flash-based drive will kill it much faster due to all the rw operations.

3) uhh, not sure what you did here, as I think the bootfloppy-usb just is the vanilla bootfloppy image with the "fromusb" code.
2) Yes those are my thoughts too, that's why I would swapoff the USB unless forced to use it.

3) From examination of the respective linuxrc scripts, the bootfloppy-usb seems to be adapted from the 'vanilla' bootfloppy, being tailored to suit the frugal usb configuration produced by the script in DSL tools. The fromusb cheatcode is available in the 'vanilla' bootfloppy (and CD) and luckily that's what works best in my systems  :)
Quote (JohnnyH @ Aug. 07 2007,12:21)
2) Yes those are my thoughts too, that's why I would swapoff the USB unless forced to use it.


If I were doing this I would choose to do it the opposite way, turn on swap on the USB stick only when I needed it, if I needed it. If you wait until the end of boot up to turn it off, on a low RAM system, it might already have written to swap, thus using up some of the life of the USB stick, if the stick is flash memory. YMMV.

As far as I can tell, DSL does not make a swap on a system hard drive unless a linux swap partition already exists on the drive. So, you could choose to run without one or turn the one on your USB stick on when needed.  

However, if the reason you don't want to use an existing swap on the system is because you're worried about leaving traces behind when you shut down, there is a thread about encryption in the archives somewhere.
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If I were doing this I would choose to do it the opposite way, turn on swap on the USB stick only when I needed it, if I needed it....

Good point :)
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...However, if the reason you don't want to use an existing swap on the system ...

I would happily use an existing swap, but I would not create one on somebody else's system (afterthought - at least not without asking for informed consent :;):     )

Thanks for the responses everybody - all stimulating thought  :)
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