scatter / hybrid mode

[apacherulzz]

As I understand it these modes are not supported. However, they are of great interest to me as I have no desire to reinstall every program on my netbook each time I decide to shutdown or reboot. As this is a netbook, I am doing this constantly. One thing I have found extremely convenient is that if I ever did want to reinstall all of my extensions I could merely delete my tclocal directory.

I digress. 

I have enabled the copy.flg and put every extension in the copy.lst. I removed the tce boot option and added the local one. When rebooting, all extensions are loaded on boot just as if I was using tce and not local. I have no problems. However, the next reboot once tclocal has been created does not work. The main problem I am having is with Xorg. startx is located in /usr/bin and not /usr/local/bin and therefore, as little as I know about Tiny Core, this is the reason why it is not working. I would _greatly_ appreciate the communities help.  If this is looked so far down upon that I cannot receive help, I will simply accept the fact that all extensions must be reinstalled on every boot. 

[roberts]

Your wording 'reinstalled' is misleading.
The default mode is mounted which is far from reinstalled.
Your choice to use copy2fs is your choice, but on a netbook SSD I would wonder why?
A friend of mine uses a Dell Mini 9 with mounted apps including Xorg, Alsa and even Gtalk with no issues.
Using tclocal as a file is of fixed size and therefore can quickly become problematic.
Tiny Core offers many runtime choices. But it is often better to 'walk before you run' and know why you are choosing to not use the defaults.

[apacherulzz]

I do stand corrected and remember reading now that they are indeed mounted. My only reason for the copy2fs flag was bc I thought it may be required to get scatter/hybrid mode working properly.

My question then is this. Surely even when using hybrid scatter mode the hard drive needs to be mounted so why is it so much faster? My guess is that when not using hybrid mode not only does the hard drive need to be mounted but every extension needs to be mounted as a loopback device of sorts as well.

Nevertheless, as I understand it hybrid scatter mode emulates your typical OS so I see no disadvantages to using this mode versus say a gentoo install. Because I have always taken these risks and boot times with all of my extensions would be significantly faster, I am interested. Perhaps I am ignorant as there may be a better reason than your typical software corruption for this feature to be unsupported.

[tinypoodle]

Nevertheless, as I understand it hybrid scatter mode emulates your typical OS so I see no disadvantages to using this mode versus say a gentoo install.

While this statement per se might be right, the benefit of advantages particular to TC is given up.
Plus there is less support for scatter install than with an OS which would primarily be designed for such; an example would be the in/ability to uninstall packages.

[curaga]

Not all packages install completely to /usr/local (Xorg for example), for these packages you'd need to keep them loading via tce or otherwise make it so that the files outside /usr/local appear in their place.

The info files usually say when the ext won't work out of the box in PPI.

[apacherulzz]

I didn't notice anything in Xorg's info file but thats ok. I can find out what will and wont work  So it sounds like there is a way to mix hybrid mode (for those extensions that support it) and mount mode (for those that dont)? I will look into this further as I have done no searching on the topic but your comments would be appreciated. I feel like everything that I have read has said not to use the tce and local boot codes simultaneously.

[curaga]

Yes, if it breaks you get to keep both pieces

[tinypoodle]

Just avoiding extensions which are not PPI compatible altogether may be less troublesome.