(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hi all. After spending a lot of time working on the intricacies of a problem this morning only to find a super simple solution, I thought it'd be fun to share some of the dumb mistakes we have all made over the years while trying to set up Puppy, or other PC or tech related things.

This morning I was trying to share my Puppy's printer with my girlfriend's Win7 laptop. I made the necessary changes to SMB.conf and then setup the printer on her lappy.

I clicked print, and the printer spat out an error page instead of what I wanted.

Anyway, a few pages later, and all I was getting was errors. I tried changing to HP-PS drivers on win7 as suggest by rcrsn1 on his sambatng thread and nothing at all was happening. I tried the Samsung drivers (samsung printer), nothing happened. I googled lots of CUPS errors etc, and nothing would make this printer ever fire up.

Then, I looked into the paper tray, and found it empty! Grrr!! As soon as I put paper in, it spat out plenty of pages of tests etc. Turns out I got it working with the right driver about an hour ago.

I have recently had some issues connecting wirelessly to my network. After fiddling with the settings in Frisbee to no avail, I find my modem doesn't like the heat we have been having, and switches off the wifi.

1/2 hour of puppy based fiddling with no results, less than a minute to reboot the modem and its fixed.

I once spent about a week doing all kinds of stuff, up to and including reinstalling the OS and the drivers, trying to get the speakers to work, only to discover I had plugged them into the microphone jack.

Haha Flash, almost the same, I spent ages trying to get audio to work in ubuntu after an upgrade only to discover it started with the volume turned down!

I've done a couple of doozies that I can think of... here's my best two...

(1) messing with Ubuntu (early linux experiences back in probably 2007 or 08 )... said to myself, "Hey, what's this 'system bus' thing that it's talking about? What happens if I turn that off?" Uncheck the box, get told to reboot, I reboot and all of a sudden the HAL doesn't work. System won't boot. Oops! (I reinstalled and kept going...)

(2) my main system still runs WinXP 'nuff said, right? (particularly given that I've been on this forum for ~2yrs!)

@p310don:

Just out of curiosity, what Win7 printer driver ended up working for you?

rcrsn51 - the HP laserjet PS driver (standard in windows) worked. The one you recommended HP colourlaser PS or something like that, gave me a setpagedevice error.

So many times I've saved files to sda2 or sdc2 (whatever) and never been able to find them again because I had not mounted the destination partition first...

You'd think an important job of the OS, or the program that's doing the saving, would be to check that the destination it's being told to save to exists and is ready.

I just had a frustrating experience with a system I had carefully backed up before experimenting. (I used Acronis True Image, which knows all kinds of useful things about Windows systems I would rather not know. If there had been no Windows system on the machine I would not have needed this tool.)

What never even occurred to me was that it might not assign the same partitions the same entries in the partition table on the restored system. At some point I had deleted a partition, then reused the free space. The result was that partition sda1 was actually the second physical partition on the disk. I can't tell you how much time I wasted, fooling with my multi-boot setup, before I thought to check on why it kept giving me errors about partitions where I had just edited menu.lst. I was editing the wrong file in another partition.

I didn't figure it out until I was running Gparted, and preparing to trash all my data by reformatting the drive.

-----hot and bothered-----

Having unburdened myself of my own error, I feel I can now warn others of a possible naive computer user problem without being obnoxious. (You can think of these people for whom I maintain computers as customers, although I am not doing this for money.)

We had a series of mysterious failures on one machine, which certainly sounded like overheating. I did replace a power supply and a video card. (Added: I forgot to mention two motherboards.) I also did the usual business of vacuuming out the places where the case and fans accumulated dust. I had the machine working perfectly on my bench before I returned it.

It began the same sequence of mysterious problems as soon as I left. I made another "service call" to check it on-site, finding nothing wrong. When I left, I found I had left my car keys on the table next to the computer, and went back.

While I was standing there with my keys in my hand, looking at the machine, something in the back of my mind started telling me it looked different than it had when I first walked out. It wasn't much of a change, but the alcove in the desk where it sat now had a binder I had not seen when I came to work on the machine.

A little more thought, and I realized this case had a vent on the side with a duct bringing outside air directly to the processor. When the binder was in place, it blocked that duct.

My friend had helpfully removed all extraneous material before I arrived, so I would not need to move her things to work on the machine. Every time I left that file folder immediately went back, and the problem returned.

Imagine a technician who did not come to the house trying to find this problem. This probably wouldn't bother GeekSquad, since it would likely enable BestBuy to sell a new machine.

The most recent dumb thing I have done is deleting the ringtone directory on an Android phone. This will cause the phone to use one extremely annoying ringy-sound for everything. Fortunately I had all the files backed up, but it took me hours before I remembered that I had a backup.

When logged in as root on my Pentium 100 running Basic Linux, I tried to erase a directory using the rm command and wiped the whole drive instead. I make full backups to USB drive and DVD now (I didn't then).

A couple of years ago I was rearranging the living room, so had to power down and disconnect the PCs, router, and modem. Got everything hooked back together again and powered on, and no internet. Went through the usual bit of checking all the connections, plugging and unplugging modem and router, rebooting, etc. Still no internet. Finally called the cable company system status line and found out the internet service had gone down while I was moving stuff around.

thane's story fits a whole class of problems I would describe as "oh, we don't need to test that!" It helps to start debugging from some point you can confirm is working before you test anything suspect. This may also verify that test equipment is working.

I learned the hard way that people who call for outside expertise have already tried the things they consider likely causes, while steadfastly ignoring others. It took me a while to learn to ask "how do you know it's working?"

A subset of this is the claim "it was working fine before we started debugging, and we haven't touched a thing." What I was expecting in his story about rearranging the livingroom was a different change nobody considered, not a coincidence.

In one case where people had a real rat's nest of wiring, I asked for a light I did not have to hold while I rerouted cables. This brought me a lamp plugged into a wall socket. At a much later time, I reached a box which had been working fine, but was now dead as a doornail.

It seems the lamp had been unplugged from another wall outlet with two sockets. The person who unplugged it had used a wall switch controlling that outlet to turn off the lamp before he unplugged it. He never considered things plugged into the other socket, including the cable box.

----

I just pulled a good one concerning a machine with a rather old Intel desktop board (D201GYL). Convinced I knew the standard arrangement of Intel front panel connectors, I had failed to get any signs of life after I set it up. I couldn't read labels silk-screened onto the board. Intel's site has stopped interactive support. Eventually, I found a technical information sheet showing that this board was an exception to Intel practice. Even then I couldn't get it to work.

As it turned out, at some time in the past I had shoved two wires into a shell borrowed from a defunct machine with a "turbo" switch. (Don't ask me why.) All I had to do was to put the "turbo" switch wires on the pins I originally considered HDD led pins, but now knew to be power switch pins. Before I did this I used an ohm meter to check that those wires were really connected to the power button on the front panel.

Labels may not mean what they say even if you are responsible for them. Even Jove nods.

I picked up some RAM at a yard sale it was about 4GB, I wasn't sure what it was for but he wasn't asking much, I go home take out my old sticks and try to fit the new ones, they did not match, no big deal I put my orginal RAM sticks back in, close up the computer get everything set back up, press the power button and nothing, but a little smoke comming from my motherboard.

Turns out I dropped something in the RAM slot and did not think to check over everthing to see if it was clean.

Lesson learned I clean and check over everything before setting back up again.

The same sale I got a 200GB harddrive it was full of Linux partitions, nothing that I could access, I used Puppy+G-parted to clean it.

I had a PC motherboard given to me that would just shut down after a period of time. That was in the summer.
I hooked up it in the winter and the PC seemed to work fine.
When the warm weather came, the PC again would shut down after a short period of time.
So I went to investigate at that point.
I found that the Processor was rated at 3.3volt and the power jumper for it was set to 5 volt.
I changed the jumper to 3.3 volt and the shutdown problem disappeared.

I also was trying to clone one drive to another of the same manufacturer and specs and had both drives go to junk.
During the backup, I kept hearing a high pitched noise.
That noise turned out to be the bearings in one drive on their way to a major failure.
What got written to the other drive evidently took it out in possibly the attempted write of corrupted data and sectors.

Yesterday's example, don't assume murga-linux will always be up when troubleshooting a network problem. I was using it because it was convenient to access from my home page.

I started off when murga-linux was up, using Puppy on one machine. After trying changes I would go back to the one machine where "nothing had changed" and see if the network was working.

I found my mistake when I wondered if Puppy was doing something that other OSes did differently. I booted Linux Mint 14 on yet another machine, and had no trouble accessing the home page. Different home page, different site. No problem in the network I was troubleshooting.

---

Someday I'll write up my experiences with "the network problem from hell" and Windows 7. It goes by the name "unknown network". The main problem can be traced to timing issues. Even testing every component in another location is not enough -- I did that. The problem did not appear under XP, yet M$ blames everything except W7 as a possible cause.

Some people have "solved" this problem by limiting the speed of their gigabit ethernet ports. Others have installed lower speed network adapters. Still others have replaced routers, power-line adapters and switches. It helps to disable every damn program which tries to gain access to the Internet first. If none of these things works you might change your Cisco router to disable the spanning tree algorithm, or set the "spanning tree portfast" option. (Don't have an industrial Cisco router? Too bad.)

My dumb mistake here was to trust M$. Their preferred solution is to upgrade every component, (death to XP!) remove all non-M$ software and use their servers. Just getting a clear explanation from them of what is happening probably involves signing a non-disclosure agreement which makes you a wholly-owned subsidiary.

Flash wrote:I once spent about a week doing all kinds of stuff, up to and including reinstalling the OS and the drivers, trying to get the speakers to work, only to discover I had plugged them into the microphone jack.

This is an example of a perennial dumb mistake to check for on "service calls" about sound. I just committed another version of the same yesterday, while checking out a newly built machine.

As detailed elsewhere, this is a close to state-of-the-art machine ( Asus F2A85-M pro mainboard and an AMD A10 5800K quad-core processor ) built for someone who persists in running Windoze, not necessarily a Puppy machine.

After some thrills in bringing it up to the point where I could see the BIOS screen, I immediately turned to Puppy for testing. All good, except no sound. Try Fatdog 611, in case there is some difference requiring 64-bit software. No sound. Try Linux Mint 14. Same.

In between these tests, I went over the wiring, in case I had plugged it into the wrong audio jack. (There are 6, plus SPDIF.) Also checked for muting at multiple places in software, or via the mute switch on the amplified speakers themselves. Also saw that speaker light was on, indicating power to speakers.

Now, I'm going to shock people by saying something good about Windoze. While I was installing W7 Home Premium, (to see if there was something on the ASUS installation disk or site which would fix the problem,) I had plenty of time to think. (Experienced installers will know just what I mean.) Sitting there, and looking around, I noticed that the physical volume knob on the speakers had no marking to indicate position. Turned volume up. Surprise! Sound has been working all along.

I'll keep a dumb mistake, made while connecting the mainboard, to myself, only noting that I did not let the magic smoke which makes computers work out of any chips.

Hint: just because a connector will fit a plug does not mean it belongs there.

This hint is right up there on my list next to the reminder that most cables have two ends.

I'd say I've made my mistakes. Actually I made a pretty major one probably near this date a few years back. I won't go into much detail, but I will admit the time between then and me joining the kennels was a time of wisdom for me, and I learned much, and gained much maturity.

But hardware, I did buy a 2GB stick of RAM, and realized my desktop already had all it's slots filled with 2GB sticks. But I may as well keep em, I may need them if one of my sticks begins to fail.