What advantage is provided by the full installation?
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The advantages of the embedded version are obvious. I've been running it for a few months and it's great.
It's also been stated that many packages, including squid, should not be run on an embedded platform because the increased disk writes can prematurely kill embedded flash media.
Nevertheless, when I look at availabe packages on my embedded (nanobsd) install, they all appear to be available. I tried installing squid as a test, and it began installing. I interrupted it before it finished because I don't want it on my CF-booting firewall.
Would squid have fully installed on an embedded platform? And if so, this raises an important question: supposing I had a boot drive that doesn't mind the heavy write cycles of something like squid, why would I bother using the full install? Sure, my media can take the writes, but if I can install the embedded version and all the packages I want, all with less writes to disk, then why wouldn't I? Or is there some limitation to the embedded version that the full version will help me to overcome?
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Some packages require constant rw mounts, ntop is one, Squid is generally one though it can be used without any caching. You can't gitsync on embedded as the git packages won't install, you'll overrun /var, though that's mostly a concern for developers. RRD graphs and DHCP leases are not written to CF immediately (scheduled task does so) so you lose some data there if you lose power. Main limits are packages, there are a few missing from embedded.
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It also appears that the 64-bit builds are not available in an embedded flavour at this point.