I have a 2 GB UFD that I managed to install TinyCore 3.0 with multi-booter GRUB running at boot time. I am not sure if GRUB is really necessary if I don't have another OS and I can use BIOS to choose devices.
My questions:
1. PARTITIONING
TCL is installed in 128 MB primary with fstype = ext2 and flagged bootable, and the rest of the UFD (1.8 GB) is a logical partition of fstype = FAT32 (all done with gparted running in TCL). Why? I want persistence of user data to be available to other OSes. I also want persistence of extensions I am to frequently use, but not sure how much size they need and what fstype they should be stored.
What is best practice for partitioning of the 2 GB UFD?
2. "UNIVERSAL" BOOT-TIME and SHUTDOWN SHELL SCRIPTS for REAL and VIRTUAL MACHINES
I will use TCL 95% of the time as a guest OS running inside VMware Player with a MS Windows 6.x (Vista) host, at least until I can kick the MS Windows addiction that is forced on me whenever I have to buy a notebook machine whose OEM won't sell it without a Windows version bundled with it.
The VMware Player provides:
- virtual network card (VMnet 8 NAT)
- virtual sound card
- virtual HDD: 8 GB area probably somewhere on the real machine SATA/PATA/IDE HDD
- other storage when I connect other UFDs
- connection to a host OS Windows "shared folder" I create using a mount point through network interface
The other 5% of the time, I may actually run TCL on a real machine.
Given that much advice has been given to avoid using the UFD for any session activity that does a lot of read/write operations because the UFD has limited lifetime of write operations, a boot-time shell script would ideally check its environment (resources), determine if it is in a virtual or real machine, look for (possibly create for the session) the proper resource for a swap partition/paging file (or not boot with warning to user if there is a failure to detect), and do persistence (Backup/Restore) to the UFD on demand and/or at session close.
For instance, what should a boot time script do to see if TCL is running in VMware, what should it detect and choose as a resource for temp data and swap/paging/vram, and how to construct restoration of user data and extensions I don't want to install/DL from Appbrowser?
My question is if this is a good strategy, and as I am not proficient at writing Bourne scripts (even when I wrote them at a basic level years ago), how would I write such scripts? What would/should I take into account with virtual machines (VMware) to minimize UFD write operations and keep vram off the device and used on the HDD?
Thanks