PPR/TCE vs. PPR/TCZ vs. PPI – what’s holding me back?

[kerpob]

I use TCL on a laptop (an eee 701). As it is a laptop, an important factor to me is boot speed.

TCL base is great at a fast boot, but PPR/TCE isn’t, as the more TCEs I add the slower the boot gets. Or at least it did in TCL 1, not sure if it is any better now.

I have therefore gone for PPI, but the problem with PPI is that once you install a TCE you are stuck with it, as there is no way to uninstall. So, for example, I can’t try out the various types of browsers without ending up stuck with them all/being forced to do a reinstall from scratch & lose all my settings/bookmarks.

This is probably the main thing that is holding me back from full endorsement of TCL. Does anyone have any suggestions? Am I missing something obvious. Like TCZ – can you use these without compromising boot speed?

Thanks!

[alu]

i just save in my tce directories the apps and libs i really need to start regarding my daily use of tc; basically, you can boot tc without any extension and load them afterwards depending on what you need for current tasks (i am almost doing so); i don't use ppi but ppr and tcz apps, my boot time is around 15 sec. on a slow 256mbram and 400 mhzcpu box; it beats every os which i have run on this machine.

[roberts]

I prefer tcz, much fater boot speed and lower memory requirement.

[Jason W]

Most all configuration settings that are not static exist in your home directory.  Even those that are beneath /usr/local can be included in a backup for redundancy in case you wipe your PPI install.  If you are using a persistent home, things such as your browser bookmarks will be preserved.  Same if you include the home directory in your backup and back it up.  

Using a persistent home (my preference), or backing up home and backing up key files in /etc or wherever else is the easiest way to preserve your settings.  Using PPI or not becomes a non issue and you can wipe it clean at will.

[kerpob]

Thanks Jason - I think I might go down the tcz route... with persistant home.

[junan]

until this time i use tce (for tces not ppi compatible) and ppi. for tcz , i only use it for loading OSS. i'm afraid loading too many tcz. is there any limitation when loading tcz ? i use P4 2,8 with 512MB memory and 10GB partition for TCL only.

[Jason W]

The kernel supports up to 256 loop devices that I know of, so booting with the cheat code "max_loop=233" would give you that many loop devices.  I am running with 150 tcz's right now and boot time is fast and there is no issues.

[samedirection]

That's good to know, Jason.  I'll now use TCZs with abandon.  Can anyone estimate (or measure) what the speed hit is when *running* something from TCZ?  Surely it doesn't beat running from RAM (with a TCE), but what can a person expect? Or rather, what have you noticed?    I notice that Firefox 3.5 (tcz) is sluggish on TC compared to my Ubuntu install on the same machine, which I suspect is down to the overheard of running via a compressed loop device. 

[linus72]

My method is alittle different

I nstall the depends as tce's and the big stuff like opera, firefox, gtk2
I install tcz's
so, I get the benefits of both I think

is that true or no?

[kerpob]

I've gone down the tcz route and I like it a lot.

My problem now is that I have shiretoko with flash but when I loaded opera tcz, it doesn't have flash. I think the fix is to point opera's plugins at mozilla or something, but I'm not sure. Anyone know?

[Jason W]

You need for all browsers that you want flash for installed before running the getflash script.