Puppy CD boots...Ubuntu? On a Mac?

[boettiger]

Newbie to Linux. Having problems with install. I downloaded the ISO, burned it to a CD, rebooted from the CD and Linux Ubuntu booted up. Is this what it's supposed to be doing?

I moved the file from the CD to my IOMEGA 128 MB flash ram drive, then rebooted from the flash ram drive. Same thing. Booted to Linux Ubuntu.

I have several questions:

1. Is Linux Ubuntu the default flavor of Puppy, or are others (like Debian/Sarge) available?

2. I've used Linux Ubuntu before but it has been a while. It prompted me for user ID and password and I have no idea what to put in.

3. Do I need to partition the flash drive if I want to use a portion of it for Puppy and another portion for file storage? If yes, what is an appropriate partition size for Puppy and is it unix format?

Stuck.

Thanks for any help.

Mac PowerBook G4
Powermac processor
1 GHz RAM

Adam Boettiger

[Ian]

Starting at the top, when you downloaded and burnt the CD did you:

1. Download the md5sum text file and check the download for errors.

2. Burn the downloaded iso as an image and not a straight copy to CD.

3. Did you check to see if your BIOS is set to boot CD before hard drive.

You must have or had Ubuntu installed on your hard drive as the MBR (Master Boot Record still has the bootloader for Ubuntu in it.

Check the above 3 starting at No.3 and see what you can discover.

[boettiger]

Ian - Thanks for taking your time to help me.

I am using Mac OS X Disk Utility program to burn the CD. It has a checksum feature that checks for UDIF-MD5. Is this what you mean or will this work to check the ISO file?

If this won't work, someone's going to have to tell me how to use ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributio ... ckages.txt to check the download file for errors.

I have no idea. I've never done this before.

Also in Disk Utility I can find nowhere that it allows you to choose between burning it as an image or a CD.

I can boot to CD or USB or anything by restarting the Powerbook and holding down the Option key.

/AB

[boettiger]

I guess also my other question would be this:

I'm using an IOMEGA 128MB USB flash drive. If at all possible I'd like to also use it for file storage (even if it's only 5MB of space).

1. Can and should the flash drive be partitioned before installing Puppy?

2. If yes and yes, what partitions are needed?

Puppy (size?)
Swap (size?)
Files (remainder)

3. when reformatting the USB flash drive, what format does it need to be in for Puppy?

[PaulR]

boettiger: What boots when no CD is in the drive, Ubuntu? If so then your CD is probably not bootable as Ian suggested - maybe your 'disk utility' has just copied the Puppy ISO file to a CD rather than burning it as a bootable image. If you have access to Windows PC you could get a copy of the tiny (and free) BurnCDCC program that is designed to do just that...

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/utilities.html

Sorry i don't know much about Macs to suggest an alternative but googling seems to throw up a few likely candidates!

AFAIK you can use your USB stick for storage without doing anything to it - most sticks come ready FAT formatted. I boot and use Puppy off a FAT formatted USB stick. I can't think why you'd want to partition it to be honest.

Let us know how you get on!

[Ian]

Have a look at the contents of the CD, it should have a series of files on it:

boot.cat, boot.msg, goofy.16, image.gz, isolinux, isolinux.cfg, usr_cram.fs, vmlinuz.

If there is only one file on the CD, the Puppyxxxxx.iso file, that means that you have not burnt it as an image. I don't know anything about the Mac Disk utility so I'm afraid I can't help you there.

There is a lot of information on the main Puppy site about installing to a flash drive. You do not have to create a swap partition unless you do not have enough RAM and you only need partitions if you do not intend to use the whole flash drive.
The flash drive comes preformatted so you don't have to do anything.

You can run Puppy from the CD and save data & settings to a file, Pup001, on a hard drive or flash drive.

If you have accesss to the Nero CD burning program it has an option to burn an image or there is another Windows based burning program that will allow you to create the Puppy CD.

There is a lot of info on the wiki regarding burning the image and also a section on Macs.

[dvw86]

Puppy will not run on a G4 Mac without an X86 emulator such as virtual PC. Are you using virtual PC? If not than my guess is that you burned the PPC version of Ubuntu to CD. For information on running Puppy on a Mac wtih Virtual PC check out my wiki page here
As far as burning an iso image, in Disk Utility on the left hand side is a list of the availiable iso images to burn. If Puppy is not listed than drag the downloaded image into the lower portion of the window. Select it and click burn in the menu bar.

[rarsa]

Please disregard all the previous advice from the people that responded before. they read your post too fast.

Regarding your original question: Is Ubuntu a flavour of Puppy.

The answer is NO.

Ubuntu, Debian, Puppy, etc, are all Linux distributions.

If Ubuntu is booting up, that means that puppy is not booting up. Your computer is finding the Ubuntu installation.

The reason is clear:
Puppy is a distribution that only runs on Intel processors (x86 familly). Your computer is a Mac (PowerPC processor) which means that even a properlly burned Puppy CD won't boot in that computer.

Ubuntu has an image to install on Intel (x86) and another image to install on Power PC. Check this link http://us.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/5.10/


Sorry, you won't be able to use puppy on your Mac.

[Ian]

This might be worth having a look at.

http://www.goosee.com/puppy/wikka/DansPuppyPage

[Guest]

Hey Guys -

Thanks for all the suggestions. It's a shame that there isn't a PowerPC version of Puppy. Maybe call it PowerPuppy or something...

I don't think I can run Ubuntu from a flash drive.

In any case I refuse to run Virtual PC on my computer until they fix the sluggishness of it. Using it is like traveling back in time to 500MHz and 56K baud.

So what I decided to do was to just dual-partition my 80G hard drive. Initially I was going to install Debian Sarge, but the instructions appear to be only for very advanced Linux users. That's too bad because I'd like the advanced functionality that Debian has so I can learn it.

So ultimately tonight I am installing Fedora Core 4 dual-partitioned with OS X, doing OS X first, then Linux. Fedora's documentation is a tad better methinks.

Anywho, would have loved to have Linux on a flash usb drive. What a cool idea!

Keep on innovating!

Adam Boettiger
Digital Ocean Online
http://www.digitaloceanonline.com/subscribe.html

[PaulR]

Good call rarsa, sometimes folks are falling over each other to help they miss the obvious and jump right in. Silly me.

[peppyy]

There are a few linux distros that might be small enough to run from a flash drive on PPC. FrozenTech has a really nice list of live cd's that can be sorted many different ways. I see 3 or 4 flavors that might fit the bill.

http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

Best of luck on your quest.

[dvw86]

It won't be long before we can run Puppy on Macs without Virtual PC, since Apple is going to start using X86 chips.