Hello. I've been a Puppy Linux enthusiast for over ten years but only an occasional user and, until now, only a lurker on the forums. I'm now intending to move to Puppy as my main OS for a number of reasons. I no longer need to use a Windows system for business and my aging, Acer XC-605 desktop is struggling to run the 50+ Gb of Windows 10 that it currently has installed and it will not support Windows 11. And anyway, I just like Puppy best. So I thought I'd join the forum, explain what I'm intending to do and ask if you have any helpful hints and advice, or warnings. Here goes.
I have an ADATA Model XM11 128Gb SSD that I rescued from a dead Asus Zenbook. At the moment it's in a USB caddy and connecting by cable to my PC or laptop through a USB port. After I switch to Puppy I intend to continue to operate with the SSD as an external drive so that I can easily move between the Acer desktop and my laptop, an old Toshiba Satellite L850 with 8Gb of ram but no HDD. Essentially I'm thinking of it as a very large USB drive.
At the moment I intend to create two partitions on the 128Gb SSD. The first partition will be formatted as FAT 32 and will host a frugal installation of Fossapup 9.5 64, with a save file that I'd like to keep as lean as possible.
The second partition will be a data partition, which will become the main repository for all the personal data (less than 100Gb) that I currently hold on the Acer HDD.
So far so good, to my inexperienced eye. But then I started thinking further and some questions cropped up. I'll outline these briefly here but they're pretty disparate so you may prefer that I create individual posts for them in the appropriate parts of the forum. In that case, let me know and I'll be happy to do that.
The first set of questions are about the Fossapup installation and my desire to keep the save file small.
I use Firefox on all my devices and sync my account between them and I'd want to do the same with the Puppy installation. However the footprint of my "user profile" (not sure what the correct term is - I mean those things that make a generic Firefox installation into a ChrisH Firefox installation) is fairly big, so I'd like to keep it out of the save file. I've read lots here about keeping the user profile out of the save file but I'm really not sure that I've understood it. I'm thinking that it would be nice to have Firefox as a "load on the fly" SFS or as one of Mike's "Portables" or as an Appimage but I'm not sure how that would work nor how I'd connect it with my "user profile"? Can anyone point me at the ready answer that's no doubt somewhere on the forum?
I'm aiming to do much the same with the other non-native Puppy apps that I use regularly. Tartube and gThumb are examples.
I'm presuming that if I make the FAT32 partition about 8 - 10 Gb, that should give me more than enough space to store all the add ons and user profiles.
My second set of questions are about the best format for the second, data partition. This is really driven by the fact that I may occasionally need to use a Windows application on one or aother of the files it contains, though I intend to make as clean a break from Windows as I can.
Again, to my inexperienced eye it seems that I have a couple of options for formatting the second partition so that I can achieve this.
I can make the partition NTFS so, if i need to use a Windows (probably Office) application with a file on the SSD, I can simply plug it into the Acer and access the file from the Windows file manager. But that seems a bit of a cop out and I don't know whether there are any disadvantages to having an NTFS data partition in respect of using apps from the Puppy side.
Or I can make the partition ext 3, say, and use Grsync from Puppy to sync the original data folder on the Acer hard drive with the folder on the SSD, from time to time. That way, when I want to work with a Windows application I just work on the file on the Acer HDD and then sync it back once I'm done. But that does seem like a solution that's almost designed to lead to errors. Any better ideas?
Thanks for listening and for all your hard work in running the forum, any feedback will be gratefully received.
Regards,
ChrisH