Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[ken geometrics]

I just tried 511 there is an issue with gparted

I started from the LiveCD for the 1st time.

I plugged in a USB 1T byte Seagate external hard drive
I then clicked on the gparted in the menu.

It took so long to start that I looked at the disk and the CD lights to see if anything was happening. No lights were blinking. I tried it again, thinking perhaps I had not actually clicked on it. Still nothing.

I popped out the CD and put in the 4.31 CD. I went to the shutdown menu entry and was about to reboot when up came 2 copies of gparted at the same time ( didn't see one then the other both
suddenly appeared)

I shut down and started 431, On 431, gparted starts instantly.

[willem1940NLD]

Locale and keyboard: a bit confusing in setup, yes. I found that ALWAYS, at any change, the whole multi-stage keyboard input in "setup" icon must be rerun, else will not obey.

So, I use Netherlands-Euro for locale and USA keyboard VAR-alt-int, first screen select USA, save, open other pictogram and add VAR-alt-int. This one has all the accents/diacritics for west-european languages, except the cedille which (in Linux) is deformed, constructed by using 'c but resulting as ć.
Again: both stages must be gone through to perform any change.

In distros other than Puppy, I used to use USA-int which gave cedille correctly, but in Puppy USA-int remains plain USA without the accents, which I consider a bug.

In these USA-(alt)-int settings, accent after 1 touch stays hidden till next a suitable character is typed ... if unfit, beeps.

à ñ ã é è ë ä ï ó ò ỳ ê ć ..... etc..

If the accent is not meant to mount a character, blank space counts as "suitable" so showing the sole accent for any purpose.

` ' ^ " ~ ...... etc..

Once used to the use of extra blank spaces, I can use USA-alt-int for the handful of languages I need, without changing keyboards.

[wabbit]

IBM X30 Thinkpad laptop - Test results

Every time I tried to boot the Puppy v511 cd, It would hang just at the point of displaying the initial screen. While displaying an empty (black) screen, the screen backlight would brighten, then dim, then brighten again and just sit there. The keyboard was completly dead ... even ctrl-alt-del wouldn't work. Had to manually power down by holding down the power on-off button.

Next step was booting with the pfix=ram,nox option. At the prompt, I typed in xorgwizard twice, selected 1024x768 (also tried 800x600 both known-to-work resolutions, and on one attempt, I even selected Xvesa instead of probe). X did not start, so I typed in xwin as instructed, and the laptop hung as described above.

There's more, but at this point, here are how things stand in relation to the above problem ONLY:

Quirky v120 works as expected. No problem in highly limited testing.
Puppy v215CE final hangs as above.
Puppy v431 gets to initial puppy screen, but then hangs as above when you try to use it.
Puppy v510 hangs as above.
Puppy v511 hangs as above.

So, I figured ... let's see if we can break it.

Started 511 again with pfix=ram,nox. Typed in xorgwizard twice, and selected 1280x1024x16 as my resolution (1024x768 is max for the screen display). X did not start. Typed in xwin, and my puppy screen came up. The bottom of the screen was missing (menu button, tray, etc.), but the blue plasma wallpaper and all the desktop icons were there.

Before going any further, I established the wifi with WPA. No problem except that my wifi scan detected 2 wifi networks. Mine, and one that appeared to be an odd collection of letters I had never seen before. What's odd is that scans from two Ubuntu wireless laptops showed my network as the only one in existence. In any case the wifi was established and the firewall successfully started.

At this point did a right click on the desktop and selected system/system status and config/hardinfo hardware information/summary and sure enough the display was set at 1280x1024.

Did a right click/setup/Xorg video wizard, and selected edit xorg.conf file, Scolled down to the resolution and changed it to 1024x768, saved, closed the file, and quit.

Did a right click/shutdown/restart X server.

After the server restart, My screen was just as it should be for 1024x768. The bottom of the screen was just as it should be, and a hardware info display showed the correct resolution. One interesting point. My wifi info was dropped during the restart.

During reconnection, when it scanned for wireless networks, it found only one ... mine. Reconnection went okay, and I am currently moving on in the information and testing.

More later. Have a great day, and thanks for such a wonderful operating system.


Wudy

[8-bit]

It sounds to me that by selecting the higher resolution, you got a video frequency that worked with your display.
Different resolution frequencies appear to have caused the problem.
I will have to try that on a laptop that I have been unable to get Puppy 510 to work with.

[acrocosm]

[lugligino]

[willem1940NLD]

@acrocosm: did you use the icon "setup" and run all pocedures offered there?

Maybe it shows more resolutions than those which one immediately sees by other entries to the system.

I have the lot on old desktop 1GHz, 786RAM, 2xHD80GB (IDE) and several Puppies, including 511 which I am using now, do well on it. I found I needed the 1280 setting, but scrolling down the very long list to ... the range meant for old cathode ray displays, although my EIZO screen is LCD (17 in).

By the way, on this old machine all I use is Puppy 511 and I used very old "trick in the book" taught to me by first hour IT workers some 20 years ago: have a swap partition as first one on each disk .... so obtaining the ultimate speed the old hardware can render.

[rjbrewer]

[willem1940NLD]

Just changed screen, old 1280 down to 1024. As usual, the keyboard setting (USA-alt-int) went lost but settings via icon "setup" this time seemed reluctant, I had to repeat steps and restart X-server several times before it finally stuck.

[acrocosm]

[rjbrewer]

[rcrsn51]

When you run the GRUB configuration program as part of an install, it asks you to pick a video resolution. This is not a setting for GRUB per se - it's for the system's video output before X loads. If you make the wrong choice, you get a black screen.

You can see the setting in your menu.lst file in the folder /boot/grub. The safest setting is "vga=normal".

[rjbrewer]

[acrocosm]

[willem1940NLD]