Why is PL so horribly unreliable?

[jacatone]

I installed the latest version of PL onto two older P4 WinXP machines and it hasn't even been a week and things are starting to fail. Optical disks and flash drives aren't being recognized. I change settings and they're not implemented and other annoyances.

I'm looking for a Linux alternative for WinXP that isn't a pain to use.

[Semme]

If you haven't yet given the popular 528 a try, it's been reincarnated.

[ally]

hey jaca

you haven't really provided any information for anybody to help

we need to know which puppy build you have (latest what? slacko, precise, etc.etc)

also details of your machine, where you got the downloads from (are they corrupt?), how you installed them? (frugal or full, hdd or usb etc. etc.) and better details of what you are doing and what is failing

it's like me saying windows is shite fix it for me!!

give us a chance and we'll be able to sort it out

linux is very stable, I have been running nothing but puppy on 5-6 machines all day every day with nothing but the occaisional browser crash when I'm thrashing it to death

[Flash]

Jacatone, it might be that Puppy doesn't "recognize" your optical disk drive because there is no disk in it. Puppy "sees" filesystems. If there's no disk, or a blank disk, in your optical disk drive, there's no filesystem to see.

[jacatone]

I'm using v528. They're older Dell P4 desktop computers. The usual hardware configuration. 1 GB of RAM, AGP video, etc. PL installed and runs fine. Just don't understand why things start failing. I'll just wipe the drives and re-install XP. It may be at end of life, but at least it's reliable.

[Semme]

On similar hw <notwithstanding the occasional hiccup> my 528 frugal install's are rock solid.

Pup I've always considered a rescue disk, not a distro suited for installation.

Runs great frugal. Easy recovery's an added bonus..

XP? ZERO permission to the internet.

Mmm, her last boot???

[bigpup]

They're older Dell P4 desktop computers.

Sure seems like a good chance for hardware going bad.
Those are old computers.
Could be a lot of things causing your issues, that are not Puppy related.

[Semme]

Dat's fer dern toot'N!

[James C]

I've been running both full and frugal installs of 528 since the day it was released....same original installs so must be pretty reliable.

[rufwoof]

On similar hw <notwithstanding the occasional hiccup> my 528 frugal install's are rock solid.

Pup I've always considered a rescue disk, not a distro suited for installation.

Runs great frugal. Easy recovery's an added bonus..

XP? ZERO permission to the internet.

Mmm, her last boot???

Rather than a Frugal (poor man's) Install, I'm even poorer - as I've just set the PC BIOS to check for CD/DVD first and just leave the puppy DVD in that all of the time. No Grub or whatever. That boots a very slim puppy desktop with no browser, abiword, gnumeric (nor a load of other progs). I've included a script on that boot DVD that wget's the latest firefox, so I can puppy pfix=ram boot that, run the wget script and have a factory fresh versions of the op system, desktop GUI and firefox browser, all running in memory (great for online banking).

I also however have a savefile, together with loads of other SFS's/PET's that I use more often/daily. So again boot from DVD, but just let it load the savefile etc. All of those SFS/PET and Savefile(s) are in their own partition (formatted to ext2). On another partition that's formatted to NTFS, I store all data, music, pictures ...etc (in my case the two partitions are actually two hard disks and the NTFS one also contains XP - which I can boot to if needed simply by removing the DVD).

I don't touch /root other than for the config changes that are stored there. So mostly once initially configured that stays much the same.

I load nvidia drivers, thunderbird ...etc type apps all as SFS's. For firefox I'm using portable firefox, such that all cache etc are outside of the core puppy savefile space/area. I've also other SFS's for Blender (3D animation), OpenShot (video editing), Audacity (sound editing), xvidcap (screen casting) Libre (office), Samba, Wine, VirtualBox ...etc. and I just load/unload whichever I need at the time. Keep backup copies of those and if any one trashes then you can recover to a fresh version.

Banking, boot using DVD using pix=ram
Everyday usage boot to DVD (that loads savefile)
Need to do something in XP (increasingly rarer) then removed DVD and boot.

If the DVD trashes, then just burn another.
If puppy trashes then just load in another version/image or copy from backup.
If data trashes then reinstall from backup.

Works fine for me that way, and keeps things nicely segmented.

[dogle]

Just a thought, jacatone - how old is your CMOS backup battery?

(They don't last for ever, I just had to replace one - very old - when problems with drive recognition emerged ...... impeccable Puppy reliability restored at once!).

[Flash]

I think Jacatone went back to his reliable old Windows XP.