Getting Puppy Loaded on a Presario 1235?

[thebear8me]

Hello All,

I am looking for some help and advice. I have a compaq presario 1235 Laptop with a 486 and 96 megs of ram. I would like to resurrect this old lappy. I plan to use it only to surf the web and use Gaim. I have been looking for a Distro that would be small enough to keep the Lappy from bogging down to a crawl. I have tried DSl and Puppy and like puppy better. Here is my challenge. I want to be able to load onto my HD and run without the live CD. Also I can not get puppy to recognize my wireless card ( Dlink DWL-G650) in the card slot or the ethernet card (DLINK DFE-690TXD) if it is in the card slot. as a result no internet.
I have Ubuntu 6.06 running via live CD and it autorecognized the wireless card but is bogging down the machine and running very slow

Is there a Distro of Puppy that auotconfig wireless cards? I see there is Ndiswrapper but you need Perl to run and I can't DL Perl.

Also, I am very new to Linux so sorry if these are rookie questions. Any advice or guidance you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry for the Long Rant.

Cheers

Edit: Cahnged the topic as this has turned into getting Puppy loaded on the 1235 plus wifi

[muggins]

what puppy version have you tried? reason i ask is that i thought pup2.01 came with perl, or at least a cut-down version enough to use
for Ndiswrapper.

[thebear8me]

I have 1.9CE. does 2.01 have the drivers for the wireless card as well.

Will it autodetect the card or do I have to go thru alot of setup?

thanks

[r__hughes]

If you're having trouble finding a native Linux driver for the D-Link DWL-G650 Wireless card - you might try wifi-1.0.4-beta-2.pup - see the attached thread, it has the D-Link AirPlus DWL-G650 Wireless Cardbus Adapter(rev.C) card.

http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... rapper+dwl

Good Luck

[thebear8me]

thanks. SInce I cant connect to the internet can i burn this to a cd and then be able to switch the live cd to load the wifi file? sorry if this is very basic but i am not sure what eactly to do.

[muggins]

i don't have wireless so can't comment, but the general community feeling is that barry's is getting better overall hardware recognition with the 2.xxx series. go to a library, or internet cafe, download it & burn it, & give it a go.

[raffy]

go for the barebones 2.01r2, as it is complete wit PERL and the dillo browser (small browser).

[thebear8me]

thanks. Got wireless working on the live CD but now Iwant to install puppy directly to the HD. I am having an issue finding out how to do it. The wiki is for an older version and says to do the following at the boot:

1. Boot from Puppy CD. At Puppy splash-screen "boot:" press 3.
2. At Red Text, type hda1 then Enter (for pup001 default).
3. Choose br-latin1-us keyboard, select mouse, etc.
In Puppy desktop, choose a resolution (800 X 600 is good).

but 2.01 does not recognize the 3 option.

any ideas?

thanks

[Flash]

Have you tried Menu -> Setup -> Puppy universal installer from the live CD?

[thebear8me]

ok I found the puppy installer and I installed to a blank HD. Now when I try to boot without the Cd it says I have an invalid system disk. what am I missing?

I only want Puppy on this laptop with no other OS and I want it to boot from the HD.

thanks again for all the help.

[thebear8me]

well, I tried to boot from Cd and now during boot it locks up. saying that it cant create /pup_rw/etc/rc.d/PUPMODE: Directory nonexistent

plu:
PDEV1
DEV1FS
PUPSFS
PUPSAVE
PMEDIA

it ultimately freezes on

etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 58: /etc/mtab: read only file sytem

When I exited Puppy intially I save to HD. Initially I only had one partion on the drive and when saving puppy created a second that I set at 1 gig.

Ideas?

Thanks again for all who have helped. I greatly appreciate it.

Cheers

[sunburnt]

Hi thebear8me; What size is the HD, & what partitions are there (#1 = 4 GB fat32, #2 = 8GB ext2, etc.).
Run xterm or rvxt (console terminal) & type: probepart
Post the report back here so I can see what you have.

I've never used the Puppy menu installers, so I don't know what they'll do & won't do.
Puppy 1.0.9 should have these 3 files on the CD you have: vmlinuz, image.gz, & usr_cram.fs (I think).
These are the only files that you need from the CD to make Puppy work on the HD.

When I see the HD info I'll have a better idea, meanwhile I'll gather the other needed files.
NOTE: Do you have any DOS experiance? If so, it'll help you understand & work with the boot setup.

[thebear8me]

Thanks sunburnt but I got Puppy 2.01 to load to the Hard Drive on my laptop.

I am a linux noob so I will outline what I did to help my fellow noobs

First I prepared my Hard Drive. I set up 2 partions by using fdisk. the first about 256 megs and the second the remaining 3.5 gigs.

I booted Puppy from the live cd and went into console and ran cfdisk. form here I removed the second partion and created a Primary linux partion and a linux swap partion (done under "type")

This is where I was having trouble for the longest time until I realized I forgot to do a very basic thing.

From console I formated the Primary LInux Drive

Code: Select all

# mke2fs /dev/hda2

and set up my swap partion and

Code: Select all

# mkswap -f /dev/hda3

activated my swap partion

Code: Select all

# swapon  /dev/hda3

Then I went in to setup -> Universal puppy installer and let the installer go. I left all the defaults and choose to install on my Primary Linux drive "hda2". the only thing I did change was at the end I choose to install Grub to the MBR.

Now when I boot the Laptop (NO CD) Grub loads and I choose linux and Puppy loads like a charm.

I have since set up and got my wireless card working and all is great.

the only thing I still neeed to do is figure out how to have

Code: Select all

# modprobe ndiswrapper

load at boot so I do not need to do that everytime. and it would be great to automatically connect to my network as well. Currently I need to also run WaG to activate DHCP to get an IP.

But I degress...

Hopefully, this will help others..

And just a quick thanks to all the folks who have helped me so far. You all are the best. PUPPYLAND IS A GREAT COMMUNITY! THANKS

Cheers,
Bear

[sunburnt]

thebear8me; Put the lines you have to type into the file: /etc/rc.d/rc.local
This is the last file run, so it's where any last minute setup should be done.
Once the network is setup for the first time, it should work after that.
If not... then try adding the line "dhcpcd" to: /etc/rc.d/rc.local
WAG may do other things to make wireless to work, so more may be needed.
So it'd look something like:

modprobe ndiswrapper
dhcpcd -------------------- # only try this line if after network setup you still have to run WAG

[thebear8me]

Sunburnt,

modprobe ndiswrapper in rc.local worked great but I still need to run wag as Dhcpcd is not active.

I added dhcpcd to rc.local and that did not either.

Any ideas?

Cheers

[sunburnt]

Look at the bootup code & see if the dhcpcd is erroring for some reason.
If it's too fast to see, put the line in rc.local like this:
dhcpcd
echo $? > /tmp/dhcpcd-test

Then look in the file: /tmp/dhcpcd-test to see if it errored.

I've never used wireless networking as I have no wireless equipment.

Maybe WAG still must be setup somehow as "dhcpcd" should get an IP add.
Once WAG's setup it shouldn't have to be done again.

Hopefully SOMEONE who knows about WAG will step in here.

[thebear8me]

anyone have any ideas?

thanks