HD Install :: Pros and Cons of Full Hard Drive Install
Over a year ago I decided to carry the torch for 'Frugal Awareness' in the forums, including polls, pdf howto's etc.... Personally, I have NEVER ran DSL as a hard drive installed distro and I run DSL or remasters of DSL as everyday desktop, servers, etc with multiple users for things like ftp and such. I refurbish old computers with as little as 32mb ram running a custom OS based on DSL with no issues either.
I would be willing to expand my PDF Howto to help people get a better understanding of frugal and it's benefits to help Robert and John educate the userbase. Post suggestions in the 'Why Do I Still Do Regular HD Installs' thread or PM me your questions/suggestions and I'll work more on the PDF howto. Please make sure you have READ the document before making suggestions.
Chris
I want to run DSL on my old laptop (IBM 300MHz PII) and if I run the live CD then the 1 cd rom drive on the computer is occupied. So I want to do a hard drive install. Will frugal install give me all the applications and flexability I need? Basicly that means word processor, spreadsheet, jpg's, mp3's, pdf's....ect. Advice or comments please.
Thanks....Mike
Frugal gives you what the liveCD gives you, with some minor differences. Whatever apps can be loaded in a liveCD can be loaded into frugal. It runs from the harddrive, which means it loads applications faster and doesn't need to be copied into ram to allow access to the cd drive. It also typically uses a different bootloader, which gives you a little more flexibility.
Nobody feels like defending hd installs, so I'll do it.
It's nice to have an option to install a minimal Debian-like system.
Even the Debian base system is bigger than 50 MB and it's quite unusable and you need tons of network bandwidth tpo complete the install. Debian developers are big brains but they mostly work at Universities, they don't pay for bandwidth.
Some years ago I installed an usable Debian system from the Knoppix installer and I had better results than the standard Debian disk (it was Potato, then), not to mention Ubuntu, I have been trying to boot the installation disk since last November...
No need to defend HD installs. We just want to educate people on what truly makes DSL a unique distro. You can get a small debian install....from debian. Using DSL as Debian will get many people in trouble unless they really understand what they are doing with apt and lib deps and such.
No harm in doing them if that's what you're comfortable with 
. Some of us, including roberts, would just like people to think out of the box a little and see what you can do. Remember, you can't take your HD install with you. Once you understand frugal and mydsl, you can have the EXACT SAME system on your HD, USB stick and CDrom AND you can update all three types of installs in a matter of minutes by unpacking the iso and copying a couple of files and folders.
Why wouldn't we want to shout something like this from the mountaintops 
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