DebianDog - Jessie (21 June 2017)

[saintless]

Ignore, please...

[mcewanw]

and if you do need to have grub4dos on the usb just have its menu.lst pointing to the harddrive installation - that would certainly work.

Did I fail to mention that I used Rufus flash installer to install DD directly from the iso to the flash card? Nooooo - it's right at the very top of my previous post. Is this one of the "details" you missed? There's no grub on the flash card or on my hdd.

Hmmm. Oh well, glad I could help.

As for Rufus, it seems, from the Rufus webpage, to be a Windows utility for creating bootable usb drives that uses... grub4dos...

System Requirements:

Windows XP or later, 32 or 64 bit doesn't matter.
...
Changelog
...
Version 2.2 (2015.05.31)
Fix an USB detection issue and add support for ASUS UASP "Turbo Mode"
Fix prevention of Windows shutdown when Rufus is idle
...
Update Grub4DOS to 0.4.6a [2015.05.18]

Maybe otropogo would have had more success using a Puppy/Linux alternative such as ISObooter by puppy forum member rcrsn51:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=67235

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 727#858727

Very nice. MintPup boots easily from ISObooter.

ISObooter flash drives can even be created from Windows:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 226#751226

However, that is probably too much documentation for you now but insufficient help. No answer to that dilemma, sorry.

[otropogo]

Not recommended for testing from the forum member otropogo.
Added to the first post and I will add it in MintPup and all DebianDog threads.
Lets hope the documentation is OK for you now.

It seems you only want to hear from users for whom your favourite distros work out of the box.

How do you expect the program to work reliably if you only test the parts they interest you and discourage those who report problems with the rest?

OTOH, having just installed and booted Mintpup, I find your documentation apt, if misleading. Mintpup is similarly flawed, and utterly useless to me.

Don't worry, I won't be back in this quasi-debian territory again.

But I do wonder how you or the documentation guru can really believe that installation with Rufus caused the boot menu issues I described. These are typical of rehashed menus that have been neglected and gotten corrupted over the revisions because nobody working on them cared enough to even test them. I've seen it many times before, already in Puppy versions 2.x and 3.x

[mcewanw]

You come across as a mischievous rude troll otropogo. That's why no-one probably wants to help you. How you interact with others is up to yourself but, as in the rest of life, so are the consequencies. I wouldn't myself award you the honour of being mentioned at the top of every DD-related thread though! But congratulations anyway :-)

William

EDIT: The reason no precise help could be given is maybe that no-one here has much experience (if any) of using 'Rufus' (I never have) so can't give you much help with that installation method. If you had listed actual text configurations (even Rufus menu.lst contents, or whatever similar boot config it uses), rather than just making snide/angry/rude/impatient comments perhaps the outcome would be very different in terms of what help you could have been freely given. Personally, I'm not interested in this discussion any more though.

[otropogo]

You come across as a mischievous rude troll otropogo. That's why no-one probably wants to help you. How you interact with others is up to yourself but, as in the rest of life, so are the consequencies. I wouldn't myself award you the honour of being mentioned at the top of every DD-related thread though! But congratulations anyway
William

Lots of people have helped me in these forums. I'm neither a troll nor am I mischievous. Someone who blows as hard and as long as you do should devote some time to improving his vocabulary.

And I'm only rude when provoked. I don't pretend to be an expert, but I've got a good nose for rubbish. And your pretense that you meant to help me with your pompous rant about copious documentation stinks to high heaven.

EDIT: The reason no precise help could be given is maybe that no-one here has much experience (if any) of using 'Rufus' (I never have) so can't give you much help with that installation method. If you had listed actual text configurations (even Rufus menu.lst contents, or whatever similar boot config it uses), rather than just making snide/angry/rude/impatient comments perhaps the outcome would be very different in terms of what help you could have been freely given. Personally, I'm not interested in this discussion any more though.

I've used Rufus to install five diferent linux versions in the past two days. The installer doesn't create the boot menu. These were distinctly different in every one of these distros, even as between MintPup and DebianDog.

There's absolutely no reason to believe that the installer had any part in the malfunction of the distro once the boot menus for sulu, mint, lighthouse64, DebianDog, or Mintpup displayed. And the issues described in those last two never surfaced with sulu4, where I was easily able to create a save file on hdd, and save my configuration settings.

Other than the intial boot menu, the defects in MintPup and Debian were remarkably similar, so it's not the installer that's at fault. I booted with a a save option in Mintpup too, with reference to a casper-rw save file. But there was never any prompt at shutdown to create such a file.

My guess is that it's a corrupted remnant of some earlier version of puppy that hasn't worked for a while, was never fixed and never removed. And you're welcome to it.

[saintless]

Ignore, please...

[otropogo]

I had a good reason to use Rufus to do the flash installs of Mint and four puppies or pseudo-puppies - it was recommended by a member of this forum whom I have trusted for some years. That recommendation arrived before the isobooter suggestion, and I used it successfully on two installs.

Having now read the description of Isobooter's running requirements, I have additional reasons:

1. it requires me to repartition the hard drives o my Windows machine - something I have no intention of doing

2. the instructions are quite complicated

Rufus, on the other hand, requires me only to make sure I have the right target drive and the right iso entered in the approriately labeled fields. It suggests the optimal install method (with only two alternatives), and it is non-intrusive (ie. does not require any permanent changes to my filesystem configuration) and portable.

I investigated this in an attempt to be fair by comparing the results. But I don't have any old junker PCs around anymore to use as expendable guinea pigs. Nor do I think the time and effort involved is justified by the reasonably anticipated results, given my experience so far.

I note that no-one has reported replicating my efforts by installing MintPup or DebianDog to usbflash using Rufus, and doing a trial boot - a procedure that requires perhaps 15 minutes, including downloading the iso and Rufus (unless one wants to test the DD boot menus...), a $5 flash card, a free usb port, and a $10 USB card reader.

I think that says something about the sincerity of the participants in this discussion so far.

Far more time has been dedicated to picking apart my posts, faulting my studiousness and meticulousness, and laying blame for all of the reported problems on me and/or the flash installer employed, than just replicating my methodology would have taken.

re: Grub on the Rufus installs - Despite what the documentation seems to say, there's no sign of any grub module on my two remaining Rufus flash installations, sulu4 and Mintpup. Nor has any Grub boot menu appeared on any of the dozen+ boots of Rufus installed linux distros I've witnessed over the past three days.

None of these USBflash boots have offered any alternative OS to boot, they simply present the initial boot menus of the distro installed to the usbflash card placed in #1 boot priority on the PC's Bios.

Maybe Grub has now transformed into something entirely new. But when I last used it , some years ago, it was a boot manager designed to offer a menu of alternative operating systems to boot at start up.


@ saintless

I'll happily stop posting here when there are no more new posts disparaging me or my previous posts. Until then, I reserve the right to correct misleading statements and counter defamatory posts.

[saintless]

Ignore, please...

[otropogo]

@ saintless

I'll happily stop posting here when there are no more new posts disparaging me or my previous posts. Until then, I reserve the right to correct misleading statements and counter defamatory posts.

Feel youself at home. The thread is yours now:

otropogo is in charge of this thread now. Any questions you may have contact him here or otropogo@gmail.com facebook.com/otropogo:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 442#859442
I'm going to take some fresh air till he is gone.

Have the rules changed that much? The forum lists John Murga and Flash as the moderators. They're "in charge", and the initiator of a thread has no control over that.

That said, I have no problem answering reasonable posts here, by PM, or via e-mail. It seems a shame to try to kill your own viable thread because (it seems) you must have the right to contradict or disparage someone without any risk of correction. I have no interest at all in taking over, much less killing this thread.

But I guess if people are posting and reading here just because of the presence of saintless, it's probably no great loss.

[fredx181]

Dear otropogo,

Please write a how-to about using DebianDog, I've read every single line of the links to documentation by this saintless guy on first post but I'm probably to stupid.
I'm counting on you, help!!

[mcewanw]

Well, call me overly kind but I'm so curious now that I'm going to download Rufus and give it a try. I should be doing other stuff that I'm behind with at home but I'm sick with a fever for the past few days so don't feel like doing much anyway. Only problem is I don't have Windows on my own machine so I hope I don't accidentally break my partners...

If I get anywhere, I'll report back. Main issue will be having to put save file on windows ntfs partition - I'm not familiar with using save files with DebianDog since I only use Porteus boot method, which saves changes to a directory (which doesn't work to ntfs partition). Anyway, someone other than otropogo may find any results useful so I'll let them know if it worked for me.

William

PS. I hope otropogo doesn't mind me using this thread for this now that he is in charge of it.

[rcrsn51]

For the benefit of other community members reading this thread, let me clarify some misconceptions about ISObooter.

ISObooter does NOT install GRUB on your hard drive. It installs Grub4Dos on your USB device in the same way that Rufus uses syslinux.

ISObooter does NOT require you to repartition your hard drive. All it requires is a clean FAT32 partition on your USB device, which you probably already have. As an OPTION, you can make some additional partitions on your USB device.

An ISObooter drive is no more or less portable than a Rufus drive.

The ability of an OS to have persistent storage is not a function of the bootloader - it is determined by the OS. The OS may require that certain options be added to the bootloader's config file. With ISObooter, that would be menu.lst. With Rufus, it would be syslinux.cfg.

The ability to put your persistent storage on an NTFS partition has absolutely nothing to do with the bootloader.

ISObooter has a Windows installer, but it is untested in Win8. If you are making your bootable USB device from a Windows platform, Rufus/Unetbootin/Pendrivelinux will be easier.

ISObooter lets you make a multi-boot device simply by dropping several ISOs onto the drive.

[otropogo]

....

PS. I hope otropogo doesn't mind me using this thread for this now that he is in charge of it.

I hope no one reading this assinine nonsense about this now being my thread is inexperienced enough to believe it.

Just in case, I'd point out that only the originator of a thread can change the wording of the first post, which also affects the index listing. And so far as I know, that ability cannot be transferred by the originator (saintless, in this case) to me, or to anyone else.

Saintless's statement is bogus, as is mcewanw's sarcastic and puerile comment above.

If I were truly in charge of this thread, I would immediately change the title page, and then ask the moderators to hand control over to someone who truly cares about this thread and can be trusted to handle it responsibly (ie. neither of the above mentioned jokers).

As it is, I would suggest to the moderators that using a thread's opening post as a permanent and highly visible ad hominem attack is not appropriate for this forum and does not reflect well on either Puppy or Linux.

[otropogo]

For the benefit of other community members reading this thread, let me clarify some misconceptions about ISObooter.....

Thanks for your clarification of ISObooter's functions and requirements.

[mcewanw]

For anyone pleasantly requesting help re: booting a system like this, with savefile persistence, using 'Rufus' windows utility, I have posted an example using MintPup iso:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 512#859512

Basically, it just works...

William

[saintless]

Ignore please...

[mcewanw]

Well said, Toni, I begin to feel similarly.

Truth is we can continue to develop DebianDog and MintPup for our own uses only - if that turns to be the only way to avoid the ugly smear commenting of otropogo and similar. In opensource, all development work for any and all distributions is an honourable effort with little or any reward ever asked for. The majority of users are genuinely helpful with their suggestions.

Alas, there are a few people, such as otropogo, who feel they have some inflated importance, in some twisted sense, such that they can make ugly, angrily written demands for help and hysterically furious responses to their not being satisfied - away and build your own Linux distribution otropogo, or pay the money, stick with your Windows, and complain to Bill Gates (and I say that even though I personally admire some aspects of Windows itself - though I do prefer opensource freedoms if only for the intellectual stimulus and liberty involved therein).

William

[dancytron]

The thing about ungrateful, loud mouth jerks is that all they really want is attention.

Ignore him and he will go away.

Dan

[otropogo]

....
My time is too precious to waste it trying to avoid people like you.

promises, promises...

I'll ignore the abusive name-calling and cut to the chase.

It seems I've been spoiled by many years of Puppy use to expect it to have have available in the liveCD/DVD all the instructions needed to install and run more or less functionally.

You burn the disc, take it to your buddy's place, stick it into the drive, boot, and he/she's off and running. Easier and faster than Knoppix. This is, or has been, the Puppy experience.

Now I'm confronted with a Puppyish monstrosity that requires the reading of "copious documentation", not only of the distro itself, but also of the debian original it's based on, to become minimally useable (or so I'm told).

I don't see how this mess relates to the Puppy concept at all.

A doggy face has been pasted on something that combines all the worst features of early Linux - misleading or just plain broken menus and shoddily assembled and presented "documentation" for what are normally termed "kludges".

[saintless]

Ignore please...