Experimental frugal install

[DukeComposed]

(In other words, I am using MX since 2018 without it ever being "installed" in the traditional sense. Also, the same install -- literally the same five files (vmlinuz, initrd.gz, linuxfs, rootfs and homefs) -- is re-used in three PCs here and also boots into PCs of friends and relatives w/o problems.)

In all those years I haven't had a single problem which I could trace back to me using a frugal install. The one thing that very occasionally creates trouble is software that requires systemd (frugal apparently doesn't support booting into systemd... have never tried it).

I don't think I've ever heard a better endorsement of frugal installs.

[trawglodyte]

literally the same five files (vmlinuz, initrd.gz, linuxfs, rootfs and homefs) -- is re-used in three PCs here and also boots into PCs of friends and relatives w/o problem

I appreciate you suggesting it to me, and sharing your guide about it. This is really fun for me and now I do think it's going to work out. I probably will do it over again at least once. Now that I have a better understanding of it, I think it would be nice to get every step right, get the packages from the deb.multimedia repository I like, install the nvidia, tweak the desktop, install the apps that I know I'll always want, and then make a remastered linuxfs, super-clean with everything just how I like it. That would be really nice to have, and could come in handy over and over, like you've said with yours it has.

[Adrian]

Haven't tried frugal installation in a loooong time, does it add an entry to UEFI?

fehlix covered how a frugal install modifies the system, namely it adds a directory to an existing partition and copies files into it. That's it. No partitioning, no creating file systems, no modifications of any bootloaders. The philosophy behind this was to first do no harm. IOW, we try to play well with others and be a well behaved guest so we make it difficult for the user to use a frugal install to harm the current system or prevent it from booting.

Would it be nice/possible to provide a way to install a UEFI entry?

IMO the frugal install process is not the best time to do this. The basic idea of the frugal install is to piggy-back on the existing system using an existing bootloader, either the live-usb bootloader that was used to do the install or an existing Grub bootloader already installed on the system.

For example, we provide the text of a Grub entry for booting directly into the frugal install but we rely on the user to manually add this entry to their grub.conf. This avoids us having to select/guess which grub.conf to modify and avoids us possibly screwing up the existing bootloader.

In the bad old days frugal installs would often bork existing systems and do other weird things. We tried to steer clear of this bad behaviour as much as possible.

I understand the philosophy, but adding a UEFI entry is not actually touching other OSes on the disk, it's just adding a new UEFI entry, it cannot even overwrite other entries (unless you already have one called "MX23-frugal", so no real danger there). The only "weird" thing that might happen is that the entry might become the default one at boot time, but I think we can guard against, and it's not the end of the world anyway. The only other problem I could think of is ESP running out of space, but we can also check for that.

Even as a fairly technical user, when I install an operating system I expect it to boot and I expect it to boot without the help of another OS or other geekery involved like having to boot live again and mount different partitions and copy files between partitions manually, getting messy editing GRUB menus and so on. Grub-recovery is a great idea, but still a bit too complicated and a step too far for many users. In my opinion one should be able to do a frugal installation on a empty drive that doesn't have any working OSes and still be able to boot without a live medium, also, what happens if one wipes or replaces the OS that boots the frugal OS? If you have an OS that depends to boot on another OS it will forever be the second citizen on the system, if we had a easy UEFI boot option for frugal install it would make it much more user-friendly, I still don't think grandma would go nuts doing frugal installs, many users won't bother with that, but it would open the gate for regular Linux users to do it if they are into "immutable" OSes for example, right now booting issue is a high enough barrier to stop people from even trying.

[thomasl]

I probably will do it over again at least once. Now that I have a better understanding of it, I think it would be nice to get every step right, get the packages from the deb.multimedia repository I like, install the nvidia, tweak the desktop, install the apps that I know I'll always want, and then make a remastered linuxfs, super-clean with everything just how I like it.

One of the more interesting features of a frugal install is that it lends itself perfectly to experimentation. Backup your rootfs (and homefs if you use one), and install, remove, delete, add, change things to your heart's content. Once done, copy back the persistence file(s) and everything is your pristine original. I regularly use this to test-drive software (and later often install in my regular install).

Here's another thing worth knowing: if you've copied the rootfs file into RAM (what's called dynamic persistence), you can separately mount it, say in /mnt/rootfs and do controlled changes there. This works v well for small edits, say in /etc, copying a few files or similar stuff. Just reboot and you have it all there. No need to call persist-save or remaster.

[trawglodyte]

if you've copied the rootfs file into RAM (what's called dynamic persistence), you can separately mount it, say in /mnt/rootfs and do controlled changes there.

I can set a boot paramater "persist=static" for static persistence, should I put "persist=dynamic" instead? Or where do I choose? The information I was reading about static vs dynamic explained it a little differently. I'm pretty sure I'm already loading it into RAM. IDK, I may just make a note and come back to this later. For some reason the word "persistence" just bugs me too. I'm not sure why, I guess it's just because the English definition of that word is about a person who doesn't give up easily. I get how that is sort of what people are talking about, but wouldn't "write to disk" just be a lot more accurate way to say the same thing? Who cares I guess, it's persistence now, and that's the term people use. They should add an entry to the dictionary.

[fehlix]

if you've copied the rootfs file into RAM (what's called dynamic persistence), you can separately mount it, say in /mnt/rootfs and do controlled changes there.

I can set a boot paramater "persist=static" for static persistence, should I put "persist=dynamic" instead? Or where do I choose? The information I was reading about static vs dynamic explained it a little differently. I'm pretty sure I'm already loading it into RAM. IDK, I may just make a note and come back to this later. For some reason the word "persistence" just bugs me too. I'm not sure why, I guess it's just because the English definition of that word is about a person who doesn't give up easily. I get how that is sort of what people are talking about, but wouldn't "write to disk" just be a lot more accurate way to say the same thing? Who cares I guess, it's persistence now, and that's the term people use. They should add an entry to the dictionary.

These are the boot parameter available within the Live-GRUB menu to select from:

Code: Select all

These persist-options do store /home within a antiX/rootfs persistence file,
together with all other changes with "/"-top root-folder

persist_root    Save root and home in RAM then saved at shutdown
p_static_root   Save root and home on disk together

and these ones do store /home into a separate antiX/homefs file:

persist_all     Save root in RAM, save home on disk (save root at shutdown)
persist_static  Save root and home on disk with home separate on disk
persist_home    Only home persistence

The frugal boot options allow in addtion to enable persistence 
to create and searching for "Frugal" installation:
frugal_persist  Frugal with root in RAM and home on disk
frugal_root     Frugal with root and home in RAM then saved at shutdown
frugal_static   Frugal with root on disk and home separate on disk
f_static_root   Frugal with root and home on disk together
frugal_home     Frugal with only home persistence
frugal_only     Only Frugal, no persistence

You can switch persistence with every boot.

[anticapitalista]

https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki ... Parameters

Might be useful

[trawglodyte]

I feel obligated to put something here about a couple things I ran into. I wish I could pinpoint these things better and hand the devs the solution. But often I'm not even sure if it's a bug or user error on my part.

1. When I do the frugal install I wind up as user "demo", and I probably should have just left that alone. But I tried using MX User Manager to Rename User Account, and it didn't go well. I eventually got it sorted, my user is mxl now, but I'd be happy to do another install and try it again, perhaps give better info on what exactly happened if someone thinks this is important.

2. It seems that when I use the startup and shutdown screens for loading and saving rootfs (I'm doing semi-automatic mode) everything is fine, but when I try to use RemasterCC to Save root persistence things go wrong. Like next time I boot it can't load rootfs. I also once attempted to add a homefs, and I don't think that got loaded next time I reboot. Again, no problem for me, I really only need the remastered linuxfs and a rootfs and the option to save or not when I reboot or shutdown. Right now what I think is that the scripts that create rootfs on startup, and give me save options on shutdown/reboot somehow do not cooperate with RemasterCC>Optional operations>Save root persistence, and maybe not with RemasterCC>Basic operations>Persistence, but I could be way off on that. To put a different way, I think when I make a rootfs with RemasterCC it doesn't load when I reboot, and I have to create a new one with the startup script, losing any changes I saved. If it would be helpful I can clone my frugal install and test further.

3. Despite choosing frugal_root on install, the boot paramater created was persist_root. Which (I think) is doing what I want it to do, and when I tried changing it to frugal_root I think maybe it didn't do what I wanted. So, anyway, leaving it persist_root is cool with me. Just wanted to document that here.

I do have a conky showing RAM % and am pretty sure it's all in RAM how I wanted it to be. I've added some things like a few browsers, kdenlive, krita, obs-studio, and audacity. I don't know yet if it would be a good idea to do complex audio/video with many clips in the editor on a frugal install fully loaded into RAM, but I think for the type of basic stuff I do it will be fine, and would even be fine if I had 16G RAM instead of 32G. But I'll have to keep playing with it.

I don't think I've mentioned it in this thread, but trying to run a VM or several VM's may not be wise in a frugal install fully loaded into RAM. I have all that shutoff in BIOS, so I won't be testing it unless someone really wants to know. I just always multi-boot, don't know anything about VM, but would like to learn and try it eventually. For my interests, having OS's running on their own, not on top of another OS seemed important to me. But, like I said, I'm just ignorant about VM's so I really don't know.

[thomasl]

I don't think I've mentioned it in this thread, but trying to run a VM or several VM's may not be wise in a frugal install fully loaded into RAM.

On my main machine the frugal MX23 install runs in RAM (meaning linuxfs and rootfs are loaded into RAM; homefs is always mounted). I also have two VMs (VirtualBox), one for 32-bit Windows 7 (which is in use almost every day) and a second one for 64-bit Windows 10 (used once per month or so for just one app which requires Windows 10 ). Both VMs run flawlessly and even can run in parallel though I very rarely do that. (One thing that always amazes friends and relatives is when I take out my fast 64GB USB stick with my complete frugal install on it, boot MX on their PCs and start the Windows 7 VM... it's running from USB so it's a bit of a but hey, it works!)

I just always multi-boot, don't know anything about VM, but would like to learn and try it eventually. For my interests, having OS's running on their own, not on top of another OS seemed important to me. But, like I said, I'm just ignorant about VM's so I really don't know.

I started looking seriously into Linux as a production OS when it became clear that Windows 10 was a no-go and Windows 7 was nearing its end of life. Back then, one of the main reasons why I looked into MX17 and stayed with MX18 was the frugal install option: it allowed me to dual-boot into a fully-fledged Linux system w/o having to change anything on the existing HDD: no added partitions, no resizing, just copy a few files into the main NTFS partition, install a new boot-loader and be happy. For a while I used this dual-boot setup to great effect but it became clear that this wasn't a long-term solution. OTOH I had (still have) a handful applications that require Windows. So I looked into wine and VirtualBox VMs. From a purely technical perspective wine is an amazing achievement but I've never found it reliable and stable enough for my purposes. So I bit the bullet and transferred my Windows 7 install lock stock and barrel into a VM, removed the dual-boot stuff and never looked back.

Once you're happy with your frugal setup perhaps a VM could be the next mountain to climb

[trawglodyte]

@thomasl lol, this is just turning into the thread where I don't know what I'm talking about over and over. haha, that's okay, that means I'm learning things. One that is surprising to me is the biggest RAM hog so far seems to be loading an audio track or two into Audacity. I wouldn't have thought that, I would have guessed videos in kdenlive, but no.

Anyway, I've got this frugal tweaked how I like it and I also have a regular install with file directory on / and /home partitions. So, I guess I'll set that up with the same apps and everything and make some side-by-side comparisons. Some things, like launching Krita are noticably faster for sure. But I don't know if you just pay back the seconds here and there when you make the save. I know one thing, I can duplicate the entire frugal folder is a few seconds. I'll have to look at backup tools in normal install, but that would be tough to match. tar.gz'ing it takes longer.