Puppy School for Beginners

Booting, installing, newbie
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je_dryst04
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Joined: Tue 13 Apr 2010, 02:55

#31 Post by je_dryst04 »

What can a puppy do? Is there a puppy for Windows XP?

Jasper

#32 Post by Jasper »

Dear Developers, Moderators, Lobster and other supporters and all readers,

After upgrade from 4.0.6 then reinstall of 5.0.0 and just one week of testing I am truly delighted with Lucid Puppy.

My/our unstinting thanks and congratulations go to all contributors. My computing knowledge is poor, but I can appreciate stability, excellence and attention to minute detail.

Lobster, thank you for your introduction in this thread and for your screen background which I have used in the picture below:

Image

I deliberately put my download, data and Windows/Wine folders outside of the Puppy system, but I observed that when I used quickpet to install Java that the Java folder was also placed outside the main system.

I made a frugal install on my hard drive though when I did an automatic upgrade from 4.0.6 (using a 5.0.0 CD) everything apparently worked perfectly, but my free MB dropped to 440 MB - so I did a fresh install and that (for some reason) saved about 300 MB.

I have a few minor queries, but this thread is not the place for asking questions. However, might this be an ideal spot to maintain information or pointers to keep lupu users up-to-date with major developments?

My regards and joyous barks

PS I can easily copy and paste everything (or just my lupusave file) from my Puppy partition to another folder in the same partition or to another partition on the same drive or to another drive. So I can pre-test any "daring for me" changes and/or have a backup/clone.
Last edited by Jasper on Thu 27 May 2010, 09:42, edited 1 time in total.

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enhu
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#33 Post by enhu »

what kernel version is used in puppy5?

cbs
Posts: 14
Joined: Sun 30 May 2010, 06:34

Need drivers for Lupu 501

#34 Post by cbs »

I have a Compaq Armada M300:- 600 MHz, 320 MB Ram, 10GB hdd
I am using a PCMCIA wireless network card: EZ connect SMC2632Wv2
Its has both Windoze XP and a Poor man's install of Puppy Linux 4.3.1. Everything worked fine on my old notebook.
Downloaded Lupu 5.0.1 recently... but it did not detect my wireless card.
Does this mean that 4.3.1 will be the final version of Puppu Linux for this computer?

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01micko
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Re: Need drivers for Lupu 501

#35 Post by 01micko »

cbs wrote:I have a Compaq Armada M300:- 600 MHz, 320 MB Ram, 10GB hdd
I am using a PCMCIA wireless network card: EZ connect SMC2632Wv2
Its has both Windoze XP and a Poor man's install of Puppy Linux 4.3.1. Everything worked fine on my old notebook.
Downloaded Lupu 5.0.1 recently... but it did not detect my wireless card.
Does this mean that 4.3.1 will be the final version of Puppu Linux for this computer?
It is certainly possible that the kernel in Puppy 5 does not support your device.

A solution might be to use "ndiswrapper" which uses the windows wireless driver.

In "SNS" you choose the "Wndows" button and navigate to the windows folder where the driver is stored, OR in Dougal's network wizard you need to click "Load Module" and then "Use ndiswrapper" and again find the windows driver. The "inf" file is the one you want.

HTH
Cheers
Puppy Linux Blog - contact me for access

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bremer
Posts: 71
Joined: Wed 25 Feb 2009, 15:59

I need a new breed of puppy

#36 Post by bremer »

Hi! I like Puppy in many ways, but there's one thing that makes it too annoying to recommend and that makes me even consider switching.

I take my Puppy with me wherever I go and use it to boot various defective Microsoft Windows machines. When I do, Puppy asks me silly questions about what keyboard I want and what timezone and what my monitor's resolution should be and other things that I don't care about. I just want it to use the defaults, no questions, and boot up super-fast so I can get things done.

Is there a fast-boot version of Puppy or other tiny distro that's made for people like me? (Please don't tell me to use Damn Small Linux. I have tried it, and it works, but I don't like the direction they are heading getting rid of the desktop icons.)

Thank you very much.

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smokey01
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#37 Post by smokey01 »

bremer if you choose to save the pupsave file after your initial setup all of your settings will be saved. The first time you shut down puppy you willl be asked to save this file, select yes. Next time you boot, puppy will load your settings automatically.

I am assuming you are using a frugal install which would be the best type for your purpose. You could even have the save file on the original CD/DVD if you like. You just need to ensure you burn it as a multi session when you first burn the iso to DC/DVD.

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bremer
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#38 Post by bremer »

smokey01 wrote:bremer if you choose to save the pupsave file after your initial setup all of your settings will be saved.
Yeah, I knew about that, but for most of the machines I either don't want to or am not allowed to touch the hard disk.
smokey01 wrote:You could even have the save file on the original CD/DVD if you like. You just need to ensure you burn it as a multi session when you first burn the iso to DC/DVD.
Ah! Now that's something I didn't know. That would solve my problem nicely. I'll poke around and see if I can figure it out. Thank you!

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bremer
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#39 Post by bremer »

smokey01 wrote:You could even have the save file on the original CD/DVD if you like. You just need to ensure you burn it as a multi session when you first burn the iso to DC/DVD.
Okay, I tried it and it was surprisingly easy to use (I just clicked on "Save" on the desktop) and it is almost but not quite what I want. The problem is that I need the hardware to be autodetected every time because I'll be using this disk in many different machines. Saving it as multi-session seems to hardcode information (the video driver, at least) and I just want the autodetection scripts to assume the default for everything instead of asking me.

By the way, the save-to-multisession dialog boxes are very bizarrely worded right now. For example, one message was
LucidPuppy wrote: Have saved session to live-DVD
(unless it has not, which is an error).
Remove DVD media if you wish.
Do not press close button on drive.
Press ENTER key to close drive tray
(laptop drive, have to manually close)
What the heck is that message telling me and why? Personally, I'd change it to read simply, "Session successfully saved to Live-DVD".

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bremer
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How much is that doggy in the window?

#40 Post by bremer »

bremer wrote: Okay, I tried it and it was surprisingly easy to use (I just clicked on "Save" on the desktop)
Oops, it wasn't as easy as I thought. I clicked "Save' a second time and got a message that it was time to migrate to a new live-DVD. (Which is crazy since there is plenty of room left on the disk). It gives two options "Blank DVD-R" and "Upgrade DVD-R". I tried both and neither worked. I even tried blanking my Puppy DVD-RW first using "wodim blank=fast dev=/dev/sr0", but that also failed (it didn't even try to write; it just gave me the cryptic "Have saved session to live-DVD... or not" message I mentioned above). So now I've gone and erased my puppy by accident and I'm back where I started.

What breed of Puppy would be best for a person who just wants to boot quickly into a usable system on any random PC they encounter?

nooby
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Re: How much is that doggy in the window?

#41 Post by nooby »

bremer wrote:
bremer wrote: Okay, I tried it and it was surprisingly easy to use (I just clicked on "Save" on the desktop)
Oops, it wasn't as easy as I thought. I clicked "Save' a second time and got a message that it was time to migrate to a new live-DVD. (Which is crazy since there is plenty of room left on the disk). It gives two options "Blank DVD-R" and "Upgrade DVD-R". I tried both and neither worked. I even tried blanking my Puppy DVD-RW first using "wodim blank=fast dev=/dev/sr0", but that also failed (it didn't even try to write; it just gave me the cryptic "Have saved session to live-DVD... or not" message I mentioned above). So now I've gone and erased my puppy by accident and I'm back where I started.

What breed of Puppy would be best for a person who just wants to boot quickly into a usable system on any random PC they encounter?
Bremer this is just my wild guess.

I trust that you get more answers if you post this question as a new question in either Newbie or regular user sections.

I don't trust that enough persons read this thread.

And I think your question is interesting so it would help others too but now get buried under a title that is more about which puppy to use for regular daily use.

Your usage is rather special. Yes many use puppy that way but do they look under this thread for an answer? I don't trust they do :)

I would put rescue in the title.

Working out of the box without asking questions. Lucid Puppy has such versions but realized it is not so easy always.
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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bremer
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Re: How much is that doggy in the window?

#42 Post by bremer »

nooby wrote: I trust that you get more answers if you post this question as a new question in either Newbie or regular user sections. I don't trust that enough persons read this thread. [...] Working out of the box without asking questions. Lucid Puppy has such versions but realized it is not so easy always.
Thanks for the hint, Nooby.

nooby
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Location: SwedenEurope

#43 Post by nooby »

bremer,

here is an important text by Barry K. the dev of Puppy re Lupu.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 331#418331

I remember that playdayz or MickO released what you ask for but not sure how to find it fast. could be one of the Lupu 111 or other such numbering.

These iso did go directly to the desktop but they had only a hidden Seamonkey browser. I don't remember how one did activate it but they told it in the very long thread.

This post by playdayz indicate yo ushould look for the iso for Lupu 111.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 117#413117

The key words to use seems to be auto config.

The problem is that one need a fairly general hardware. If the auto config fails then one end up in prompt.

If you give up on using puppy linux you could try out xPUD Linux

I have this in my menu.lst but don't remember which one that worked best.

But I think it goes straight to the desktop and real fast too. Within 30 seconds or even faster.
title xPUD ( change lang=se to what works for your keyboard )
root=(hd0,0)
kernel /xpud/boot/bzImage noisapnp lang=se
initrd=/xpud/opt/core /xpud/opt/media



title xPUD 0.9.2 iso-boot
root (hd0,0)
kernel /xpud-0.9.2-image noisapnp quiet lang=se screen=1024x786
Me not sure what goes on here

root=(hd0,0)
root (hd0,0)

use the one that you usually use. :)
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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inoxidabile
Posts: 148
Joined: Sat 13 Sep 2008, 12:37

Available RAM

#44 Post by inoxidabile »

Dear All,
I'm a not skilled Puppy user … I apologize for the question, maybe due to my low know-how and please pardon if this is not the right place for the following topic.
I use Puppy since its 3.01 version and thanks to it, I'm still able to work on an old pc (notebook Dell Latitude - 650MHz - 512M RAM).
After some test with the Lucid 5.1 / Live CD , I decided to install it on HD as fresh install (delete all the previous things) as frugal type.

The problem: in a simple Live mode I had (of course) a lot of available RAM, but after the install it becomes about 430M.
Moreover, with just few more packet added (Firefox, Dia, AisleRiot game) and no other activities, it dropped down to 343M.

The version I used before was ChoicePup, with a lot of sfs loaded (Koffice, Opera, FoxitReader and so on), but the amount of available RAM was about 385M.

Could anyone kindly tell me some more info about? Maybe there are some tricks to do or some particular actions.

Oh, an other thing: the chrome browser doesn't run at all, it's not a problem for me because I use Firefox and surely it's yet known, but...

Thanks in advance to everyone for any suggestion (and patience!)

Best Regards,

Inoxidabile

leftfieldnz
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat 21 Aug 2010, 22:29

update to Eldy Noob

#45 Post by leftfieldnz »

Hi
I have updated the Noob Eldy Helper. Tested in Puppy 5.0

HTH

bpopilek
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed 22 Sep 2010, 03:33

xwin video drivers

#46 Post by bpopilek »

I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction. Here is my situation. I have 2 older Gateway Solo 1150 laptops that I decided to try and get a little more life out of. They are mere Celeron 700mhz, 192mb Ram, CD-Rom, 20gb HDD, & USB WiFi adapters. These things are primarily used for web browsing and maybe writing a school paper occasionally. After trying many versions of Linux on them, Puppy Linux is the only one I can get to install. And it works quite well!

My problem is this. I am running v4.3.1 right now, installed to the hard drive. I would however prefer to use the newer v5.1.1 that I downloaded. Unfortunately, I cannot get v5 to boot into the GUI on these laptops. They have the following:

800x600x16 LCD Laptop Display
SMI Lynx 3DM Video Chip w/4megs video ram

Under Puppy v4, I seem to be able to use either the xorg or vesa drivers. However, on v5, I cannot get any graphics to appear. I have tried booting with the "puppy pfix=nox" command in order to stop short of booting right into xwindows. From the command prompt I then run "xorg-setup" and then setup my video settings the same as I have them in v4.3.1. After it completes, it dumps me back to a command prompt where I type in xwin. Now I get a couple of screen flickers and lines across the display as xwindows starts, but that is it and the screen stays black and I am forced to shut the laptop off since it will no longer respond to any input.

Was there a video driver change between v4.3.1 & v5.1.1 that would cause this behavior? Is there a way to copy the video driver from the v4.3.1 CD into the v5.1.1 install CD? Can I just upgrade my hard drive install to v5 without having to boot from the v5 CD?

While I have 15+ years of experience with Windows, I am a very limited beginner with Linux. Does anyone know what I could be doing wrong, or point me to where I can find the info I need. I have tried searching for 2 days, but am lost. I am either looking in the wrong place or with the wrong key words, or I am just blind! Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for reading!

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canbyte
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Location: Hamilton, Canada

#47 Post by canbyte »

Hi. Can the new 5.1 be installed on top of my 4.2.1 ie using the same pup_save file in order to keep the settings? Getting my OKI printer to run was very difficult so if there's no carryover, I probably should just stick to the older version.
Thanks
[color=orange]1. Dell Dimension E521, AMD Athln 64, 2 GHz 1.93GB ram,
Puppy 533 on CD, accesses flash drive only,
FFox Nightly12.0
2. Compaq P3 733Hz 375RAM
Printer: Oki C3400 > LAN [/color]

Barko
Posts: 11
Joined: Tue 22 Jul 2008, 07:50

Easily Recover after a Crash?

#48 Post by Barko »

Lucid Puppy works much better on my old Toshiba Satellite 2590CDT (PII 400, 192MB RAM) than previous versions of Puppy. I have done a full install to the HD. I have no issues with normal operation.

However Lucid Pup does not recover well after an abnormal shutdown or crash (I tested to see what does happen if I suddenly yank the battery).

I know how to fix things up, (boot pfix=ram on CD, copy backup of PuppyPin and use f2sck to repair "missing inodes" etc etc), till everything is all well and good.

But does it need to be that hard, to get things back to normal after a crash?
Thanks.

Duskao
Posts: 13
Joined: Sun 12 Dec 2010, 09:12

5.2 phenomenal

#49 Post by Duskao »

So I have been trying out the 5.2 beta, and so far I have found it to be phenomenal! It looks and feels great. Also lots of the packages and sfs I have been trying have been working great. Very easy through quickpet. At this point I am already going to switch to it. Hope there will be a way to easily upgrade puppy from version to version soon. Great work guys.

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canbyte
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Location: Hamilton, Canada

#50 Post by canbyte »

I tried 511 in a brand spanking new laptop. Since john made this thread a sticky (prematurely imo because 511 is the official latest puppy not 5.2), i'll stick my prelim findings here fyi if interested. It took some doing but finally worked minus my infamous oki printer problem. But since i'm such a nooby nerd, i found a bug..

Me, noob, found a bug. You see I use a Dvorak keyboard and in trying to set that up, found 511 is very difficult compared to 421, which asks right away about keyboard on first bootup. In 511 you have several routes but end up in a non-escapable sequence that wants to set up keyboard and monitor TOGETHER. Mistake, imo. Finding an ok screen setting (i think slightly different/ worse) than puppy default) by trial and error took some doing. There is no reason for lumping keyboard and monitor together - but I can understand i'm probably one of very few that wants to mess with strange keyboards.

The other thing that came out of this was that on exiting from that first bootup a bug appeared in that the key definitions were neither standard qwerty nor dvorak! They seemed quite random/ hard to make a sensible _save file name! No big deal but a bug nonetheless, but not something i need to spend any time fixing. So this is just for puppy developers to consider at some point.

I'm not too sure what I'll do with Puppy in a Win7 machine that has every bell and whistle one could dream of -- with the typical Bill Gates style exception that Win 7 will only network with other Win7 machines - not with any older versions! Go figure, but again, with the ease of exchanging files on usb sticks, this is something i don't need to spend time on.

Puppy 421 has been my mainstay for a year now on my older machines. Will the new laptop displace all this? Dunno but it would help if my 421 were a bit more stable (contamination issue) and/or i could get 511 working with devx & oki printer.

Hope everyone is enjoying the holidays.
[color=orange]1. Dell Dimension E521, AMD Athln 64, 2 GHz 1.93GB ram,
Puppy 533 on CD, accesses flash drive only,
FFox Nightly12.0
2. Compaq P3 733Hz 375RAM
Printer: Oki C3400 > LAN [/color]

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