Bionic Puppy Suddenly Broke?

Please post any bugs you have found
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XiaoSpence
Posts: 17
Joined: Fri 21 Feb 2020, 18:02

Bionic Puppy Suddenly Broke?

#1 Post by XiaoSpence »

I'm confused to what is going on to my BionicPup installation. Last time I booted, everything was fine, but then the system appears to be corrupt and unable to load its own icons after I installed coolreader. Static is coming out of my PC and the desktop icons won't load. When I tried using an image viewer, things would not load properly.

Even my wifi broke. What could be going on? Can I fix this installation or am I forced to just reinstall?

Any tips?

EDIT: This was a Bionic32 Pup
Last edited by XiaoSpence on Sat 29 Feb 2020, 18:12, edited 1 time in total.

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nic007
Posts: 3408
Joined: Sun 13 Nov 2011, 12:31
Location: Cradle of Humankind

#2 Post by nic007 »

You don't say how you installed Puppy but a full install is not recommended. If you have a frugal install (the preferred and recommended way to install) the base sfs stays intact, is in read-only format and is almost impossible to corrupt. Most users use a savefile/folder (which is read/write) with a frugal install to record personal savings (be it installation of addiditional applications, personal configurations or whatever) and this is where potential problems may occur almost certainly due to user operation/input. If you use a read/write system like a savefile to record your changes, frequent backups are essential as fallback should anything go wrong. There are ways to operate Puppy without the use of a savefile. Personally, I don't use a savefile but save my system changes to an adrv or ydrv which is read-only like the base sfs.
So - if you haven't before, do a frugal install instead (this is highly recommended). If you then decide to save your changes to a savefile/folder, do frequent backups or use an alternative method like mentioned above to save your changes.

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bigpup
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Joined: Sun 11 Oct 2009, 18:15
Location: S.C. USA

#3 Post by bigpup »

Which Bionicpup?
There are several versions.
If nothing else, tell use the exact name of it's iso file you downloaded.

Does this still happen after you do a completely power off, wait 1 minute, power on, and boot to Bionicpup?
The things they do not tell you, are usually the clue to solving the problem.
When I was a kid I wanted to be older.... This is not what I expected :shock:
YaPI(any iso installer)

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Mike Walsh
Posts: 6351
Joined: Sat 28 Jun 2014, 12:42
Location: King's Lynn, UK.

#4 Post by Mike Walsh »

@ XiaoSpence:-

I'd try a 'power-cycle'.

Shutdown. Unplug the computer (if a laptop, remove the battery, too). Press & hold the power button for at least 30 seconds - 60 is better. This ensures the power capacitors are completely drained, and not holding any residual 'juice'.

Re-connect everything. Now; power-on, and boot back into Puppy.

What happens?

(BTW, I have to agree with Nic. 'Full' installs are definitely not the norm for Puppy; they're usually reserved as a last-ditch attempt if you're grimly determined to install Pup to elderly, low-spec hardware....)


Mike. :)

LateAdopter
Posts: 361
Joined: Fri 27 May 2011, 17:21
Location: Reading UK

#5 Post by LateAdopter »

Funny - my Bionicpup64 desktop was similarly broken when I booted up yesterday, but there were ext4-fs errors during the text part of boot (size mismatch, directory overrun...) on loop2. The menus and task bar still worked but the desktop was grey with a lot of warning triangles. So an unmountable savefile can break the desktop.

I just deleted the savefile and copied a backup.

More relevant to you, since you had just installed a package. I installed pcmanfm-qt a few weeks ago. That broke the desktop in a similar way. I expect it installed an xdg-data package, of some kind, as a dependency, which overrode the Puppy one.

In that case I went into the package manager and, from the uninstall page, I selected the pcmanfm package plus all of the dependencies that went with it, and uninstalled them.

Having done that the desktop went back to normal.

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