Morning, all.
I'm curious as to the extent of 'sym-linking' in most of the commonly-used Linux distros. I know it's used as a matter of course by many apps/programs when they install themselves, so as to allow them to access certain, commonly-needed resources.....but I was wondering if anybody else intentionally uses it as a matter of course.
As you all know, I run Puppy pretty much exclusively. I run 9 on the 'big' Compaq, and a further 3 on the old Dell laptop. (Was 5 on the Dell, but I've rationalised things a wee bit!)
I'm a huge fan of the Chromium-based browsers; for me, FireFox (no disrespect to other users) is only ever a 'back-up' browser, in case owt goes wrong with my Google a/c.
I run Chrome, Chromium and SlimJet in all my Pups (mostly 32-bitters.)
1) Chrome version 48, which was the last 32-bit release before Google dropped support for it (still runs NetFlix, though!)
2) Chromium version 51. This also runs NetFlix, through 'borrowing' the Widevine modules from Chrome. (AlienBob from the Slackware crew has been making a tar.gz of the Widevine modules available for some little while now, expressly for this very purpose.)
3) And always the current version of SlimJet, which I package myself for the community from the zip download from FlashPeak's website.
------------------------------------------------------------
One of our Australian compatriots on the Puppy Forum published a 'How-to' a while back about making use of Puppy's in-built 'sym-link' feature. I know this is available in most modern Linux distros, but in Puppy it's extremely powerful, and super easy to implement. (Al will know what I mean about this, and perhaps Nick & Cat, too.)
David has installed the majority of his commonly-used apps onto a separate 'data' partition, and painstakingly sym-linked each and every one of them to the appropriate locations throughout his 'kennels' (he runs even more Pups than I do.....I think about 19 at the last count.) As he says, it's daft to keep re-installing the same thing over & over again.....so why not make use of the sym-link feature, and cut down on overall disk-space (and in Puppy's case, it helps to keep the 'save-file' nice'n'lean, too.)
So I've had a go at this myself. I've set up a dedicated directory within one of my large data partitions specifically for browsers; created all the appropriate directories within it, 'installed' each of the three browsers to their correct locations, then, one by one, un-installed and sym-linked back each browser to every one of my Pups. And so help me, it works.....really, really well.
With each 'installed ' browser using something like around 300 MB, I've saved, in total, something like 8-9 GB of disk space. I'm not short on space by any means, but that's a worth-while chunk to clear, wouldn't you say?
I've also taken things a step further, too.....by sym-linking the PepperFlash directory in each of the three browsers to a single, common one on the same data partition. This way, I only need to update PepperFlash once for all browsers, throughout the 'kennels'.
I've also performed this same operation for the 2 or 3 64-bit Pups I run, and it performs flawlessly there, too.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I daresay this probably sounds like an awful lot of hard work to some of you (although it's simple once you've got the 'installs' set-up on the data partition itself.) I'm just curious as to what anybody else thinks about doing things this way?
Mike.
Edited by Mike_Walsh, 20 September 2016 - 05:47 AM.