Running OS from SD Card


More room for stuff.


There is only room for one, reasonably compact OS on the NAND.


Some people want to test other OSs/versions, for example.


If you like playing with deep settings, you can always get a working environment back by rebooting from NAND when/if you mess up while away from another computer.
 
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Some people simply prefer not to use the NAND. (All flash memory has limited read/write cycles, although most of us will never hit those limits on the Pandora.)


It's a good practice for developers, and other people who make use of opkg. If you fill up your NAND doing this, you pretty much have to reflash. An added bonus of doing dev work from SD, is that you always have a 'fresh' firmware on NAND for testing (if it works there, it will work for other users).


SD is also the way to try other distros like Debian, Arch, Gentoo. And maybe Android some day.
 
I was hoping there may be some speed-up on the desktop, mainly internet browsing.
 
Any speed differences will come into effect when reading/writing the storage device. So, when initially launching an app, when opening/saving files, and in the case of a web browser, working in the cache. Obviously SD card speeds vary - there may be some that are actually faster than NAND but I'm not up to date on this.


On paper I'd say that a fast SD card (provided it is faster than NAND) could improve web browsing. In practice there are numerous other factors affecting browsing speed, so I don't know if the gain would be significant.


Anyone with some actual experience care to share?
 
Dave1234s SD Installer gives the option to make a Swap partition during the SD install and that certainly gives better performance with Firefox/Chromium in allowing more pages to be open at once before it gets crash happy. The same may well be the case for Swap Files PND by slaeshjag http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=swaptools-0.1-slaeshjag which makes a swap file on either SD card, so thats a way to test. I don't think there's much speed difference using class10 cards though. Boot up IS slightly slower via SD imo though.
 
Cheers guys I have set up a swap file on a 2nd memory card I'll see how that goes with firefox.
 
Cheers guys I have set up a swap file on a 2nd memory card I'll see how that goes with firefox.
midori is still the best rated webbrowser on pandora, might wonna give that a try. i prefer 0.4.2 instead of 0.4.3 though
 
Yep, a swap is recommended for firefox.


You can have a SD card for work, a SD card for gaming, one for P2P, etc. and keep your NAND as a rescue.
 
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