Installed Puppy Linux - does not boot

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edward
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat 07 Jan 2006, 00:38

Installed Puppy Linux - does not boot

#1 Post by edward »

I installed PL on a Pentium system and after all was said and done, it doesn't boot.

Upon a reboot of the system after installation, the GRUB menu appears and the default /hda2 (where I chose to install it) was selected, the GRUB menu disappeared, there was about 1 second of hard drive activity, then it stopped. Video was blank after the GRUB menu disappeared.

System configuration:

RAM: 196 Mb (PC 100)
CPU: Intel Pentium (1) with MMX, 166 MHz*
Video card: Has an nVIDIA RIVA TNT2 32 Mb

* Yes, it's slow and I thought Puppy would be good for it.

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rcrsn51
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Location: Stratford, Ontario

#2 Post by rcrsn51 »

Does the Live CD work properly on this machine? Which install method did you use - frugal or full?

edward
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Joined: Sat 07 Jan 2006, 00:38

#3 Post by edward »

The Live CD had worked fine and used Full install.

I decided to give up on it because after I attempted to install it a second time, the graphical system would not load in automatically after this second installation (x.org wouldn't work, had to use the other one) and once I managed to get it to load in, it took too long for anything to load in. For example, SeaMonkey took five minutes before the main browser screen appeared.

I'm trying something else on it.

waldo
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Joined: Wed 07 Nov 2007, 19:54

#4 Post by waldo »

Really don't remember puppy full install!

Aren't vmlinuz and initrd.gz in / ?

Doesn't the GRUB installer suggest /boot/vmlinuz and /boot/initrd.gz (to be confirmed)?

About your 2nd post: you could boot puppy after installation (without the cd in the tray)?

Strange!

edward
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Joined: Sat 07 Jan 2006, 00:38

#5 Post by edward »

It is very strange.

X.org wouldn't load in even after it was installed to the hard drive (and CD removed), that is why I used the other (Xvesa?).

I really expected it to be able to run well on such a slow system. :(

If it matters at this point, the ISO I used was puppy-3.01-seamonkey.iso

waldo
Posts: 42
Joined: Wed 07 Nov 2007, 19:54

#6 Post by waldo »

Oh well!

In my opinion it isn't a "slow" machine. With a 366Mhz Pentium I thought "never a new computer in my live".

Suggestion: Try to find John Murga's Puppy2.02, or try that flavour until puppy 216.

Much Luck

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rcrsn51
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Location: Stratford, Ontario

#7 Post by rcrsn51 »

Are you saying that apps like Seamonkey run OK off the Live CD but are too slow off the full install? In that case, you should do a frugal install instead. You have lots of memory.

edward
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat 07 Jan 2006, 00:38

#8 Post by edward »

At this point in time, it's a little late to try Puppy again. I was successful installing another Linux distro using the Gnome desktop and it is currently installing the updates since the release. Based on my own experiences with both KDE and Gnome, Gnome was better with CPU resources, it was not as slow as KDE.

Running Linux with a KDE desktop on this particular machine, the startup audio would constantly break up. With Gnome, it's default startup audio file played perfectly.

edward
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat 07 Jan 2006, 00:38

#9 Post by edward »

I tried installing Puppy one last time, using Frugal instead. It didn't even install a bootloader. PC reboots, PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT.

I don't know... :roll:

edward
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat 07 Jan 2006, 00:38

WASTE OF TIME

#10 Post by edward »

I'm sorry, but trying to use this has now become a total waste of time.

It finally installed successfully, however on the first and subsequent reboots, it hangs.

I get the screen where the information scrolls down (penguin is at top of screen), it gets as far as

Detecting keyboard: ps/2 Mouse: ps/2 done

then it hangs, does nothing else, just sits there, end of story.

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RobertB
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#11 Post by RobertB »

Unlike the previous poster, I've had great experiences with Puppy, so I'm committed to it. But I'm having strange problems since doing a full install of 3.01 on a reasonably new box -- a Celeron, I think, though I don't know if that's a PII or PIII equivalent.

When I first installed Puppy (to the HD -- full install), I had the same issues. Black screen with a mouse pointer and a 1- or 2-pixel box in the lower right corner. It took several minutes for the GUI to appear, and then it was only the taskbar at first, followed a good while later by the rest of the desktop. And applications like SeaMonkey (and Opera) would take forever to load.

Fortunately, this behavior went away after a few reboot cycles, though the kids report that it happened a few times after that when I wasn't watching. I was left guessing why it would act this way -- I wondered if maybe there was a problem with the swap partition. I have 300-some MB of RAM, but my swap is 1GB, and from what I've read (belatedly) I may either have too large a swap partition, or I hosed myself by putting it at the end of the HD instead of in the middle, closer to the action.

But this morning, it started acting up again. This PC is used largely by the kids, so when it stayed at the black screen for a minute or so, they assumed it needed rebooting and hit the power switch. This apparently caused some HD corruption -- the boot process went into an endless loop because of a bad "oldinputdevice" file (if I'm remembering the filename correctly). I booted from the CD and ran fsck on /dev/hda1 -- it generated a ton of errors, including one in whatever-that-file-was. (Note: I'm a Linux newbie, so I don't know if I was supposed to do anything special when running fsck, except to blush at the almost off-color command name :oops: )

That took care of it, kinda. When I booted up, I had to re-run xorg, and the box booted up to the black screen with a mouse pointer (responsive to mouse) and pixel in the corner. The kids said that's just what it was doing before. After several minutes, the taskbar appeared, followed a minute later by the rest of the desktop. And just like before, it took forever for any significant app like Opera to come up.

This was never a problem before 3.x, so I wonder if there's some odd situation that I and the previous poster are running into? I'd be happy to dump whatever files might be helpful to help debug the problem. I don't want potential Puppy converts getting turned off by this bug! I've been installing Puppy exclusively since 1.09 worked on a machine that Knoppix brought to its knees, and I want everyone to try it!

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RobertB
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#12 Post by RobertB »

Hmm, I just saw this tidbit in a Slashdot discussion and I wonder if my problem is the Swap partition:
Another example: a local LinuxMagazine review a couple of years ago found out that in a Hwlet Packard low end desktop system pre-configured with GNU/Linux (indeed!), OpenOficce would take a full 3 minutes to start!! Because they had configured a 128MB system with a 1GB Swap.
I think I'll get rid of the swap partition altogether and see what happens.

If that turns out to be the problem, I wonder if there's anything Puppy can do to prevent an oversized swap partition from causing performance problems -- or is the situation endemic to all Linux distros?

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