HP dc7600, SATA disk, USB keyboard - Puppy 1.0.8 no good

[jeffrey]

I tried booting Puppy on this current HP/Compaq machine but had the following problems:
1. No suitable drive was found. It's a SATA drive on which a default Fedora Core 5 was installed, so there's a 100MB ext3 boot partition and a 75GB LVM ext3 partition. With Puppy loaded MUT showed no hard drives - I had hoped to see the boot partition at least.
2. The USB keyboard was detected at the boot menu but not thereafter. Sounds like this is a common and historic Compaq problem for Puppy. A PS/2 keyboard worked fine.
3. The sound card test went into a "no codecs initialized" loop.
4. The Xorg video detection failed, but Xvesa worked.
5. On booting there was a 25s delay at the "SCSI subsysterm driver Revision: 1.00" message.

In comparison, Knoppix 3.8 detected the Keyboard, mouse, video, and disk (although it couldn't open the FC5-created LV filesystem).

Having said all this Pupy is really great on an older PC where it's more appropriate anyway. It's speed for word processing or spreadsheets on a 500MHz machine with slow disk is pretty close to the speed of Open Office on this 3GHz machine.

Jeffrey

[Lobster]

In comparison, Knoppix 3.8 detected the Keyboard, mouse, video, and disk
Jeffrey

hope to fully autodetect mouse and keyboard at every boot -- in the not too distant future.

Barry April 4 2006

Knoppix has better recognition BUT we are improving
No doubt Puppy can be made to work on more hardware
and if people have tips or success from their tweaking please report back . . .

Could Puppy be recompiled for old Macs or is that just too much?
. . . just a thought . . .

[BarryK]

jeffrey,
Can you test the latest puppy2 alpha snapshot (March 29)?
It is supposed to have some SATA support.

Announcement and download link on Developer News page:
http://www.puppyos.com/news.htm

[jeffrey]

I was afraid that you'd ask me to try Puppy 2! Observations are below, which may not be important because it's only an alpha release - I'll leave you to decide what's worth following up...

Puppy 2 alpha detected the keyboard and SATA drive correctly. Only one of the 2 partitions was visible, doubtless because Fedora Core 2 has formatted the second as an enormous volume group containing one ext3 logical volume. At some point in the future it may be worth considering supporting that too, because other Linux vendors may well go that way too.

I see that the version of Puppy displayed on the boot screen is 0.0.0, but you propably left that there for the alpha version. (Just a reminder!)

Are the boot messages stored in a file somewhere or just sent to the screen? They go past so quickly and it would be reassuring to read them more carefully as well as making it easier to report problems.

While booting it pauses for several seconds in a couple of places making it slower than Puppy 1.
20s delay on "usb.c: USB device 3 (vend/prod 0x46d/0xc016) is not claimed by any active driver" which comes a couple of lines after "USB Mass Storage support registered" and immediately before "kjournald starting". Note that a previous similar message for USB device 2 (0x3f0/0x24) did not have any such delay. I am using a USB keyboard and mouse.
20s delay immediately after "Mounting devpts: done" and before the keyboard selection window is displayed.

Comparing the new 3GHz HP dc7600 (above) with an old 500MHz Acer 4100 with PS/2 keyboard and mouse I get a 20s delay booting Puppy 2 between "USB Mass Storage support registered" and "Loading swap partition /dev/hda3". Apart from that Puppy 2 boots fine. I see that that delay disappeared on the next reboot once I had saved the Puppy session to disk. However, all reboots after that failed to load X, displaying "Interface eth0 has not been configured." (correct), "Either /dev/mixer isn't there"... (correct), "0: old priority 0, new priority 19", "305: old priority 0, new priority 19", a blank line, and "#". Typing xwin loaded X correctly.

Comparing Puppy boot times (from boot menu to Puppy desktop) I get:
45s for 1.0.8 on Acer 4100
30s for 2alpha on Acer 4100
Well done - an impressive speed improvement running against the tide where most software upgrades run slower than the older versions!

[jeffrey]

I created an ext3 partition on the SATA drive but Puppy 2 failed to find it, causing the boot process to hang forever (or at least for 10 minutes until my patience wore out).
It showed the following messages (among many others):

ls: *_003.sfs: No such file or directory
mkdir: Cannot create directory '/pup_rw/etc': Read-only file system
/sbin/init: 700: cannot create /pup_rw/etc/rc.d/PUPMODE: Directory nonexistent

etc
It hangs after the Mounting devpts message.
My guess is that you are not searching for the sfs file on a SATA drive, which is probably /dev/sda3 in my case.

[BarryK]

Note that puppy2 takes longer to boot on the first boot only.
On subsequent boots,when there is a pup_save.3fs file (saved sessions file),
then booting is much faster.

Try the new puppy2 alpha snapshot 11th April, see News page.

[jeffrey]

The Puppy Linux 2 alpha snapshot from 11 Apr does resolve the hang on subsequent boot problem. Well done.
It still shows the same "ls: *_003.sfs: No such file or directory" message but the mkdir failure has been fixed.

It still sits for several seconds after the devpts message. In total it takes 80s for subsequent reboots on a new HP dc7600 3GHz machine, which is remarkably slower than the 35s it takes to boot on an old Acer 4100 500MHz box. Isn't that strange? This may put off users with newer equipment...

On the HP it detected the USB mouse and keyboard correctly. It detected but failed to set up my sound card. Output is below:

Loading driver...
Starting sound driver: snd-azx /lib/modules/2.4.31/sound/pci/azx/snd-azx.o: init_module: No such device
Hint: insmod errors can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters.
You may find more information in syslog or the output from dmesg
/lib/modules/2.4.31/sound/pci/azx/snd-azx.o: insmod /lib/modules/2.4.31/sound/pci/azx/snd-azx.o failed
/lib/modules/2.4.31/sound/pci/azx/snd-azx.o: insmod snd-azx failed
done
ERROR: Could not load ALSA drivers
Setting default volumes...

Finally, I see that MUT displays its window much faster than with Puppy 1, giving it a more positive feel. O my Acer machine it detects my USB flash drive on pressing the refresh button, just like with Puppy 1. However on my new HP it does not detect the USB drive unless I press the refresh button twice, detracting from the positive feel. Perhaps this is an HP-specific problem - after all they've absorbed Compaq with all of it's non-standard PC quirks. Then again it may be worth testing Puppy 2 on a current Dell machine with a SATA hard drive just to see if the problems I've found are general or not.

Best wishes for the future. Have a pleasant (and hopefully restful) Easter.
Jeffrey.