roberts
Group: Members
Posts: 4983
Joined: Oct. 2003 |
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Posted: April 27 2008,22:29 |
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Update:
Still making progress on the tiny core. Based on observations, both my own, and recent remarks. Some directions that I am working towards...
I want to try to address many of the older computers that DSL has traditionally targeted. The most often reason cited, from those who know frugal yet still perform traditional hard drive installation, is the slowness from running from compressed read-only images. I now find myself experiencing such with the very large Firefox v2.
Yet I am pleased to see that many are contributing UCI type extensions. With the new system, I want to run those uncompressed. The UCI will morph into mountable application directories. Only the download delivery method will be compressed (TBD). I am planning on only supporting two extension types, our traditional .dsl, which is really a gzipped tarball with menu and optional icon. The second will be the mountable application directory.
Doing this should provide a boost in performance. With the physical size of pendrives ever increasing, and all that unused hard drive disk space, storing and running mountable uncompressed applications seems natural.
Also is the advantage of avoiding the issues with read-only. No more sym linking out to a writable area. Yet still we have the advantage of simple removal of either the .dsl or the application directory.
For those with much ram, use .dsl, and those without use .map (Mountable Application Directory)
Currently I am running a mix of tradtional .dsl and mounted application directories with better results than everything in compressed loops.
I can easily switch 'flavors' by boot options.
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