This post again addresses the easiest way for a first time user to install Puppy Linux on their computer. As I mentioned in a previous post, almost all modern computers sold in the retail market come with a single NTFS partition (there may be a second backup partition, but you don't really want to mess with it). XP or now Vista is the only choice out the door. So how to install Puppy Linux on one of these computers without a lot of effort?
Booting up on a Live CD is fine for many, but the boot time can be an issue. Quick start-up time is one of the things that impresses me about Puppy, but the only way to take full advantage of that speed is to have it loaded on a fast media, such as a hard drive. That usually means a hard drive install. That can be intimidating for a first time user.
I read in a couple of places that the Live CD will boot Puppy on the hard drive if it finds the files there. My test bed computer, an Athlon XP 2400 with 768MB RAM and a 16x DVD writer, had the Puppy 2.14 files on the hard drive (an NTFS partition with XP on it). So as a test, I pushed in the Puppy 2.14 Live CD to see how fast things were. The results were fairly pleasing (Note: I am not counting the time from power-up till the BIOS releases control to the boot loader - that is another five to twenty seconds depending on the computer):
Booting off my homemade version of Wakepup2 takes 30 seconds.
Booting off the Live CD takes 45 seconds.
Only 15 seconds difference. Not bad. Out of curiosity, I edited the .iso image and deleted the pup_214.sfs and zdrv_214.sfs files and burned a new CD. Only 3 Megabytes... too bad, it wouldn't fit on a floppy! It didn't boot too well until I realized I needed to change the PMEDIA=IDECD to PMEDIA=IDEHD in the isolinux.cfg file. I edited the .iso file again and burned another CD. This time it booted up fine. And in only 30 seconds! Apparently the extra fifteen seconds is when Puppy looks on the CD for the files before looking elsewhere, checks if what's elsewhere is the latest version, etc.
Actually, booting the Live CD is pretty fast on a fast computer. With no Puppy files on the hard drive, boot time is about one minute twenty seconds, even doing the Xorg stuff and all. If I move pup_save.2fs back to the c:\ directory, boot time drops to about one minute.
Other comparisons:
On the same computer, booting a full Puppy install on an ext2 partition takes about 22 seconds - eight seconds or so faster than "Frugal Puppy" on a FAT32 or NTFS partition.
On any installation of Puppy, it takes about four seconds to access the Internet for the first time. Subsequent clicking on the Internet icon gets you to the Internet practically instantaneously.
On the same computer, it takes XP about two minutes to boot. Actually, the GUI comes up in about a minute, but it takes an extra minute of disk thrashing before anything useful can be done, like accessing a file on the hard drive. Accessing the Internet is the same four seconds the first time and essentially instantaneous the second time.
My conclusion is as follows:
For modern, fast computers, where you are probably stuck with an NTFS partition, the Live CD is as good as any way to go. If you want to speed booting up slightly, copying pup_214.sfs and zdrv_214.sfs to the c:\ directory will speed up the boot by about fifteen seconds. You can gain another fifteen seconds by making the "custom" .iso boot disk, but for most first time users, that is probably too intimidating to do.
For older, slower computers, you probably have a FAT16 or FAT32 partition that is completely compatible with Puppy's Universal Installer. That is probably the best way to go, although everything in the previous paragraph still applies.
References:
rcrsn51 said:
If the target is a FAT32 or EXT hard drive partition, a generic version of the boot CD will do. However, GRUB cannot see an NTFS partition or a USB flash drive because it has no native support for these devices. We can solve this problem by putting the first two Puppy files, vmlinuz and initrd.gz, on the boot CD itself. Once the kernel is loaded, Puppy's own hardware detection can take over and locate the remaining files on the target.
GuestToo said:
to install Puppy to the hard drive, all you need to do is copy the files on the cd disc to the hard drive
that's it ... Puppy is installed
... (text deleted for clarity) ...
if you do not have a boot manager installed, you can still use the cd to boot Puppy, it will use the files on the hard drive
Puppy adventures in NTFS land - part two
Using applications, configuring, problems
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