Fatdog is quite brilliant

[rebbi1]

This is just a little love for the developers of Fatdog, which I had the occasion to try for the first time a couple of days ago.

I have an ongoing, personal charity project in which I collect old, unused laptops from friends and neighbors and rehabilitate them. I put some form of linux on them. I then get them to students or elderly folks who can't afford a computer. I either give them away or I ask for a donation to cover the cost of parts (which, given how easy it is to get used parts on eBay, is usually minimal).

Anyway, I was given a Dell Vostro 1000 with an AMD Athlon Dual Core CPU. It shipped with XP but by the time you put a virus checker on a machine like that it runs at a crawl.

Cutting to the chase, I tried a number of distros on the machine (including my old favorite, Bodhi, and Precise Puppy) but then stumbled upon Fatdog.

Wow!

It ships with great software, is unbelievably responsive, looks polished and manifests so much good thinking on the part of the developers, including the consolidated control center and a very nice package management system. I am so impressed that I almost don't want to give this machine away (although I will)!

Thanks, guys!

PS: The version of get_libreoffice in the repository is outdated and no longer works. You need to upload version 0.29, available here:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=65918

[zaivala]

I downloaded and tried the latest version of Fatdog64. It kinda loaded, then went to a black screen with a largish Fatdog logo. No apps, no menus, no nothing. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

[fatdog]

rebbi1, thanks for your kind words. I'm going to update the pet with the newest one.

zaivala, what you see is probably the boot-up screen from grub/isolinux. You should see some menus on the screen too, which allows you to select which operation mode/workaround you want to use. If all that you see is a black screen with a big dog logo, no menus, that means the system fails at bootloader stage. What kind of hardware do you have?

[zaivala]

I have an ASUS X550CA notebook. As I've posted elsewhere, I followed the ASUS technician's advice on getting the machine to boot from my CD drive, and then installed LinuxMint Olivia 64... only to find that my hard drive would not read GRUB, so I had to continue booting from the livedisk. After trying to get around that with a possible Ubuntu install -- where, without actually going all the way through the installation, Ubuntu totally wiped and reformatted my hard disk, removing my Windows partition and data... So now, I have a computer which will only boot from disk, so I'm using Puppy which works great.

[zaivala]

OK. More information.

I get a statement "No secure boot" (might be a paraphrase)
I get the white bootscreen. Booting in 5 seconds and the logo
I get a black screen with some processes listed and the logo
I get a black screen with a set of choices (boot, multiuser, etc) and the logo.
I select the first option.
I get a black screen with only the logo. No icons, no menus.
Hardware listed in previous menu.

[zaivala]

OK, I read that Fatdog64 is supposed to run with Secure Boot enabled. I enabled that. My machine rebooted and got some other error messages... would have to run it a few times to remember what it said but it didn't "just work". I found Puppy would NOT run with Secure Boot enabled, so I turned it off...

And rebooted back to Setup. Setup automatically turned off CSM Boot when I shut off Secure Boot. I went crazy for a while, with several reboots, before I figured that out.

Think I'll stick with Puppy. It works. So I'm running a 32-bit system. So what?

Alternatively, WHAT AM I DOING WRONG??? No responses for a few days.

[gcmartin]

Expect some Christmas-NewYear releases for several "fully" functional 64bit distro developers. And, expect a new not-see-before 64bit PUP which "may" be also fully functional for PCs built since 2007. These can be thought of as gifts by those distro contributors to the rest of us. We hwlp and return assistance when we, BOTH, test and report our findings and successes of what they produce.

Puppyland is on the move.

@Rebbi1 Cheers! ... to what you do for your community by helping to put functional systems in the hands of those in need! I believe that if we solicit, we may find neighbors who have PCs that they want to just get rid of. Most/Many can easily, OOTB, run community PUPs directly from CD/DVD without ever changing the PC's HDD. This allows a donation package merely by just inserting a multi-session CD/DVD and changing the BIOS to boot from DVD. Thus, to redistribute, little to nothing is done to put the PC in the hands of a new user, excepting to show new owner how to start.

Peace be with you

[zaivala]

I'm all for helping to test Puppies... if I know that's what I'm doing. You'll get the results a relative newbie with a relatively new machine (2013 ASUS). Just let me know where to go to get the distro.

[rebbi2]

rebbi1, thanks for your kind words. I'm going to update the pet with the newest one.

fatdog,

You are most welcome. Fatdog absolutely screams on this Dell Vostro 1000 (AMD Athlon X2 @ 1.6 gHz.

[jamesbond]

OK. More information.

I get a statement "No secure boot" (might be a paraphrase)

This means you're booting with UEFI, but with secure boot disabled - the message is informative only and harmless.

I get the white bootscreen. Booting in 5 seconds and the logo
I get a black screen with some processes listed and the logo
I get a black screen with a set of choices (boot, multiuser, etc) and the logo.

This means the bootloader works - which is good.

I select the first option.

There are some other choices for "computer with graphics problem". Have you tried that? It may or may not work, but worth trying.

I get a black screen with only the logo. No icons, no menus.
Hardware listed in previous menu.

Is that the same logo you saw when you got to choose the menu? or is that another logo?

My only guess at the moment is that your laptop is *too new* for Fatdog (or linux in general) at the moment and the driver/hardware support is not up to it ...

OK, I read that Fatdog64 is supposed to run with Secure Boot enabled

Fatdog can run with either. It can run with UEFI with Secure Boot, UEFI without Secure Boot, or with BIOS (Legacy CSM-enabled). You can choose any of these.

You can try booting Fatdog with the CSM and see if improves the situation - sometimes using different boot method configures the hardware slightly differently that may enable the driver to work.

No responses for a few days.

Yes, sorry, got other things to attend to ... have been (and still is) out of town for a few days.

rebbi2, I'm glad you find Fatdog useful

[zaivala]

I select the first option.

There are some other choices for "computer with graphics problem". Have you tried that? It may or may not work, but worth trying.

The other options do not make sense, especially as I'm quite successfully running Precise Puppy 5.7.1 without any additional options.

I get a black screen with only the logo. No icons, no menus.
Hardware listed in previous menu.

Is that the same logo you saw when you got to choose the menu? or is that another logo?

My only guess at the moment is that your laptop is *too new* for Fatdog (or linux in general) at the moment and the driver/hardware support is not up to it ...

Interesting. Well, the notebook is too new to run Lucid Puppy 5.2.x, which is why I went with Precise Puppy. (I haven't tried MacPup yet on here... am thinking about trying 5.5 which appears to be the latest). And the logo looks the same to me, other than the black background.

I know that PrePu 5.7.x is 32-bit, that's why I wanted to try Fatdog on my 64-bit machine.

As for fiddling any more with Setup... well, that's what got me in the pickle I'm in. AMI BIOS Setup for ASUS UEFI (not sure how much of that description is necessary so I included it all) is a big batch of suck compared to previos ASUS AMI BIOSes I've worked with, and I don't understand half of what they are saying. Other companies' AMI BIOSes seem to have a way to set it to "Legacy Boot", this one either does not have that option or calls it something else quite unrecognizable.

Thanks for getting back. Forgive my impatience. I know how much you guys are getting paid to do this (LOL).

[jamesbond]

And the logo looks the same to me, other than the black background.

Thank you. I can now confirm that that there is a problem with the EFI framebuffer. I'll let you know when I can get this fixed.

EDIT: Solution found, and it will be fixed on next release (ie 630 rc2).

[zaivala]

Looking forward to it. If you care to send it to me to test, feel free to... (Newbie Reminder: send me a link to download the whole thing, Fatdog including the fix, or detailed instructions for the stupid and ignorant on how to include the fix)

[jamesbond]

Looking forward to it. If you care to send it to me to test, feel free to... (Newbie Reminder: send me a link to download the whole thing, Fatdog including the fix, or detailed instructions for the stupid and ignorant on how to include the fix)

It's cooking. The update involves replacing the kernel, not exactly an easy stuff unless you're already familiar with it. May as well wait for the rc2 release. Thanks for your interest, though. Hang on - it won't be much longer.

[fatdog]

It's cooking. The update involves replacing the kernel, not exactly an easy stuff unless you're already familiar with it. May as well wait for the rc2 release. Thanks for your interest, though. Hang on - it won't be much longer.

630rc2 is released.

[zaivala]

Downloading it now. I'll let you know how it works. I'm sure you love hearing it when things get fixed.

[Ted Dog]

let me know how it goes. I do not have Free Internet available until tomorrow when I visit family and friends for Holiday Plans... So I'm debating using my phones mobile data or just arrive half a day early for the get together to download it for free..

[zaivala]

Exactly the same as before. Everything appears to be loading well, and when it goes to the desktop screen, it is blank except for the Fatdog logo.

[jamesbond]

Exactly the same as before. Everything appears to be loading well, and when it goes to the desktop screen, it is blank except for the Fatdog logo.

Please boot chosing the "without graphical desktop" then press "e" and add text "loglevel=7 showerr" after /vmlinux keyword. See whether you've got any output at all. Alternatively try the menu "for machines with severe video problems" and boot with that.

[Ted Dog]

rebbi1, thanks for your kind words. I'm going to update the pet with the newest one.

fatdog,

You are most welcome. Fatdog absolutely screams on this Dell Vostro 1000 (AMD Athlon X2 @ 1.6 gHz.

did you try expand to base option? That really screams.. on the boot line add expand2ram=yes that uncompresses all files in one pass before finishing boot and the machine will BLOW your socks off.. needs 2G memory to play good..

Finally get to download today...