[SOLVED] Which Puppy for this tiny computer?

Booting, installing, newbie
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starhawk
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#61 Post by starhawk »

Memtest ran ~4h 20m, four complete tests, no problems.

That antiX/MEPIS thing can't find MEPIS on the CD so it won't boot. Dead end.

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#62 Post by starhawk »

Got a "boot failed" message, that the cd drive I was using had basically given out. (Probably just needs its lens cleaned...)

With a known good drive (should've done this from the start) -- 431 says, main sfs not found, dropping out to ramdisk, blah blah BS junk.

Different.

I wonder if I've a bad IDE cable somehow...

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#63 Post by starhawk »

CF card in the onboard connector, does the same.

Not a cable issue.

Umm ...just a hunch... does Puppy historically have issues with PCI graphics cards?

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#64 Post by greengeek »

Man, this things really putting you through the mill...

Does that 431 cd work perfectly on other PCs? So far I can't remember ever finding a machine that 431 couldn't boot (except really weird old stuff).

Thats good news that the RAM is trustworthy. I wonder if there is some peculiarity with acpi functionality. Might be worth trying to boot with acpi disabled maybe?

And do you have any usb sticks with bootable puppies on them? Does the bios allow boot from usb? Maybe plopping it might give some clues? (EDIT- damn it, looks like the floppy interface has a tricky cable type).
Also - does the bios have a setting to allow boot from network? (If so you could boot my server puppy on a different machine and it will automatically allow your commell to boot across the network:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 0&start=13

One last thought - i've seen weird stuff happen due to hdd and CD jumper settings (cable sel, master/slave etc). Might be worth trying some options there. (wrong jumper settings can stuff up dma/pio settings etc, and maybe that's upsetting CD accesses or something????)

Ok, one other last thought - the manual shows a pic of an IDE cable which is 40 pin at mobo end and 44 pin at the drives (EDIT: No - it's the other way around isn't it?). Is that a normal cable? Also, in the specs section it talks about IDE1 supporting a DOM solid state "Disk on Module" disk. Maybe there's something odd about configuring that IDE bus? (just stabbing in the dark here...)
Last edited by greengeek on Sun 03 Mar 2013, 09:09, edited 2 times in total.

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#65 Post by greengeek »

Looks like the CF card is secondary IDE only - does that mean it will struggle to find the sfs? Would it work to try a different menu.lst syntax? - maybe it keeps looking for the sfs on the wrong hdx/sdx
(sorry...I've always got more questions than answers...)

Also - interesting comment here re having to leave turned off for 15 mins before the board resets itself:
http://www.mp3car.com/general-hardware- ... blems.html

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#66 Post by starhawk »

The only USB on the board is via pin header. It's a (slightly) nonstandard header -- most pin headers on motherboards are 0.1"/2.54mm center-to-center spacing (it's called "pitch") on the pins. This board has a 2mm pitch header for USB. It's standard in every other way... I've someone making me a cable but it hasn't arrived yet...

Until that happens, I'm USBless.

PXE (network) boot DOES work on this board, but I'm too severely lacking in network know-how to make it happen. (The tech shop wizard dude is not lacking in this knowledge, and he's therefore how I know it works.)

Cable is 40pin at drive end. There are different standards ;) 40 pins for desktop, at a 0.1"/2.54mm pitch, but laptops are 2mm pitch 44pins. The extra 4 pins are for power -- laptop hard drives are ~2-2.5w devices. (Desktop hard drives are much more electrically thirsty.)

"Normal" depends on the age of the system in addition to the rest -- at least for desktops. Historically the cable was a 40 wire cable. On anything faster than ATA33 (which IIRC my 386 hobby system uses, and nothing newer in the house does) you need a 40 pin 80 wire cable. Every other wire is tied to the signal ground (negative terminal) to eliminate the problem of "crosstalk" -- even a single strand of wire can be an electromagnet, and its next door neighbor will gladly turn that field into current if the field movements (fluctuations) are fast enough...

Most 44pin<->40pin cables are 40 wire (or 44 wire) because it's dirt cheap. That limits you to ATA33 speeds, but the eBay sellers who retail this junk really don't give a hoot. BTW there's no such thing as a 44 pin 88wire IDE cable... at least that I can find.

DoM (DiskOnModule) is a solid state IDE drive, like an SSD, only I've never seen one that's more than 256mb in size. Those are for thin client applications where you're basically running a browser on top of some sort of "go find a server to plug into" networking system such as Cytrix ("SIT-ricks").

Primary vs. secondary IDE means nothing. I tend to put hard drives on primary, opticals on secondary -- when I'm putting a desktop together. There are a LOT of optical drives that will make a system refuse to boot when they're on the same cable as a hard drive. No, it's not the jumpers, it's something in the drive's firmware that makes it rude like that. Besides... I got the same symptoms from the CF card as I did from the optical drive...

I have some photos (can't take screenshots when the thing's booting!) of the various errors I'm getting; I'm going to PM technosaurus with a link to this thread, and see if he's willing to look at them and tell me what I'm seeing. He seems to know a lot about the really technical stuff.

EDIT: and the guy with the 15min reset problem very likely has a defective board. There is NO WAY that anything on this board could still be doing anything after removing power for that long -- with the one small exception of the RTC (Real Time Clock chip) that keeps the system time accurate. But that is ALWAYS going in a motherboard... unless the "BIOS battery" (as it's called) dies out ;)

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#67 Post by greengeek »

starhawk wrote:PXE (network) boot DOES work on this board, but I'm too severely lacking in network know-how to make it happen.
In case you want to give it a try, here is the easy way to boot via PXE:

1) Connect a working PC to your home network and boot it from my pupserver iso I mentioned above (which has a PXE version of ThinSlacko already built in...)
2) Go into the main menu (network tab) and turn on the netboot server (ie: just tick the box - nothing else to configure)
3) Plug your target machine into your home network, turn it on and boot it by selecting PXE network boot in the bios.

Thats it. Once the target machine is booted you can turn off the PXE`server machine if you want - the target machine runs on ThinSlacko in it's own RAM.

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#68 Post by starhawk »

My "home network" is a wifi-only network, because of Verizon. We have a MiFi "hotspot" acting as the access point. There is NO WAY to get ethernet out of that little piece of junk.

I'd have to rig up two computers with a router in between, and I'd really rather not bother with it.

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#69 Post by greengeek »

starhawk wrote:I'd have to rig up two computers with a router in between
It also works if you use a crossover cable instead of a router. Just have to set the server PC to a static IP address. I usually use 192.168.1.2

Handy as a last resort if IDE or CD probs prevent anything else. Also great for a PC that has no disk or CD at all.

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#70 Post by starhawk »

Don't have a crossover cable.

It also avoids the problem that I want this system (eventually) to have a booting hard drive in it ;)

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#71 Post by zenn »

A little confused after reading the thread... So right now are you facing issues booting from the CF or from a Live CD without any storage devices attached?

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#72 Post by starhawk »

Mostly correct.

I'm having trouble booting from LiveCD or (alternately) from a fresh install to onboard bootable CF (installed using a different machine, but similar specs) with no other storage devices attached. Meaning, it will not boot.

I have additional error screens that I've not put up, but I'd like to get technosaurus (or someone else who is really really knowledgeable about Puppy) in here before I start posting them -- I'd like to transition soon here from "this might work" to "this is what's going on and here's what to do about it" (note that "buy another board" is not acceptable advice in this particular case... yet). Would be AMAZING to get BK in on this, see if he can tell me, but I know he's not got the time (and that's OK, I understand) so that's a little bit of a pipe dream there.

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#73 Post by greengeek »

starhawk wrote:from a fresh install to onboard bootable CF (installed using a different machine, but similar specs)
It might be necessary to change the menu.lst entry to reflect that the CF adapter is on secondary IDE. (ie maybe the sfs will therefore be not be found on hdd0)

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#74 Post by starhawk »

I use grub4dos, and the menu.lst file says "sda1" -- which should be correct for Puplite 5.0.

Primary vs. secondary IDE is purely hardware -- it will not affect how drives are dealt with in Puppy. (I did mention that!) It has to do with letting you have more than 2 IDE drives in the computer. That's all. Puppy will detect SATA before IDE (I've heard) but that doesn't matter here.

To be more specific -- at bootup, the system BIOS polls both (usually there's only two) IDE channels, to see what's attached to what where. This, in my case, will pull up (at most, on this board) one IDE optical drive OR one IDE hard drive (as the CF card will be detected). Note that the BIOS is far too simple-minded to tell the difference between a CF card on an IDE channel and a mechanical hard drive! The BIOS reports that drive config information to the OS as a later part of the boot process.

In other words, Puppy itself does essentially no IDE drive detection. This works because IDE is not hotpluggable -- you cannot remove an IDE drive while the computer is powered on without risking damage to the drive itself as well as anything connected to it (not to mention the major screwups it will produce on the software end of things!).

Therefore, I think it's safe to say that the problem is not related to IDE drive detection.

One other point -- if that were what was happening, I'd get either grub4dos saying "files not found" (or something like that) or Puppy would refuse to find the SFS and drop out to the initial ramdisk console. On the rare occasions when Puppy doesn't just puke a wall of text at me, it kernel panics. That's indicative of a different problem entirely -- especially since the problem doesn't go away with the LiveCD, AND because the CD drive is unplugged (with power off!) before the CF card gets put in. There is exactly ONE bootable device in this system at any given time.

Oh -- and all of this is irrelevant because I've abandoned the CF approach for now -- it's much easier to burn/erase/reburn a CD-RW as needed than to boot Puppy, install to CF, put the card in the slot, and boot the LE-370Z board.

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#75 Post by starhawk »

Couple of updates.

Tried booting a copy of SimplePup 031 that I have. Booted fine. This particular puplet is based on Puppy 107 -- and therefore has a 2.4.x.x kernel. It's oooooooooooooold :lol:

USB cable arrived today.

Booting Wary 53 from CD, using an IDE-to-USB adapter and an IDE DVD Burner (actually a Super Multi drive)... Wary can't find its SFS and drops out to init-ramdisk console. Whoopsie.

Booting from USB flash drive -- frugal install of Wary 53 with grub4dos bootloader -- results in the same 'wall of text' mess as before.

My tech shop wizard dude keeps telling me it's an aufs incompatibility. Racy 53 uses UnionFS instead, but has PAE -- which is incompatible with my processor. Anyone know of a non-PAE version of Racy 53?

Racy 55 may have UnionFS (I don't know -- unlike Racy 53 it's not mentioned in the release notes) but it does NOT have PAE. Downloading now, we'll see what happens ;)

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#76 Post by starhawk »

OK, this is [SOLVED]. I will update the thread title shortly.

- Racy 5.5 has problems with nVIDIA graphics cards. Sage is sending me a non-nVIDIA card all the way from the UK. (Thank you SO MUCH man! Someday, somehow, I'll make it up to you...)

- Slacko 5.5 has a few minor quirks with graphics on this setup, solvable easily with xorgwizard.

- Downloading Upup Precise 382 for a try of that, now. I'll report how it performs, later. It'll be probably an hour from now at least before that post goes up.

Bottom line: I've got this thing beat, no matter what. I like Racy's typical speed... but I don't like its graphics problems. That will be solved with time and Sage's generosity. For now... Slacko.

Next thing, for me... finding a CompactFlash card I can stuff in there. I've got a couple, but they're either in use, too small, or microdrives that physically won't fit because Commell is a bunch of dunderheads who put chips right under the CF slot...

No need for y'all folk to worry 'bout the CF card, I'll get that elsewhere ;) while I do appreciate folks being generous, I'm not going to be a moocher!

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