(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Could do, though the 4th post from the top on page 11 gives the details.

But there are loads of distros around even of this size (Slax, Damn small linux, Nimble X) which do install easily so I really can't be bothered to carry on banging my head against a brick wall with Puppy. If you can make it work, fine. I can't.

I look forward to trying it again, sometime in the future, when the installer has been fixed and actually installs it.

Thanks for your input dancingdog, the installer DOES need reworking. When we have the new version for ecopup would you consider helping with the testing?

dancingdog777 wrote:Robert has written out exactly the problem that I'm having. Puppy is a nice little distro, it's such a shame it is a real bitch to install on a hard drive.
At risk of offending you all again, you might like to sample Nimble X which is roughly the same size but installs onto the hard drive really sweetly. It found my sound card, ethernet broadband and graphics card immediately.

Okay, my friend. We have talked about this before, but now I have created that tutorial with screencaps at http://micro-hard.homelinux.net/puppy/installing-puppy and am wondering if you have looked at it?

Not to blow my own bags, but at one time I used to write industrial plant operating manuals, so I've tried hard to look at the subject from the way someone completely cold to the scene would read it, step by step, nothing missed.

While the installation procedure can be lengthy - if you make a wrong choice and need to restart, etc - it is actually straight forward. Put one foot in front of the other.

If you want a fully automated system that makes its own decisions, fair enough. I have used those. I'm sure that there is an humungous amount of code that takes up space and resources during the time it does "if" and "if not" and "while" and other type things...

And some of those fully automated scripts have got it wrong with me, and destroyed data because they make assumptions that they know better than the owner of the box... believe me, you can end up in strife. And other times they do the job very well.

Maybe the installer could be split into several, so that many of the choices have already been made (by you) before you start. But that would then put the choice-making out of the correct sequence... which is important for the end-user - particularly if they are unsure of exactly what they want to do.

I don't know, but in all seriousness, I haven't had any biggie with it, like you seem to have had. And others too, by anecdotal comments. Strange.

So hence the reason I wrote that page, which needs a bit of cleaning up, and maybe there is too much there in the preamble.

Please read it and comment here. I posted reference to it on ecomoney's other thread.

Richad in Australia.

Ok Richard, sounds nice and simple. Trouble occurred though for me because after selecting the hard drive, Puppy Installer came back without finding hda and only offered Super floppy!

You might think that there was something wrong with my hda, yet after several failures to get beyond that point, I rebooted with PCLinuxOS which found hda with no trouble and installed perfectly.

Is there some code in Puppy Universal Installer which only works with certain cpu chips, or perhaps certain hard drives? Might it be worth checking the install program itself in case a small error has accidently crept in?

dancingdog777 wrote:Is there some code in Puppy Universal Installer which only works with certain cpu chips, or perhaps certain hard drives?

I believe so - probably not in the installer, but in the kernel vis-a-vis the computer's BIOS.

I also believe this is the case in the BSD-Unix kernel, because of similar problems to my Linux experience with some boxes.

One should remember the very close relationship between Microsoft, Intel, Phoenix (and other?) BIOS manufacturers, the fact that that MS has actually bought the Phoenix BIOS out, and other possible skulduggery behind the scenes.

I have made a habit of "collecting" all the "poor and lame" of the PC world I can lay my hands on, for free, over several years. I have a photo that I call "five ducks in a row" of what appear to be five identical IBM Aptivas on the article here which from a cursory glance one would assume were mechanically similar. Not so, for linux installation - not just puppy.

Actually I had six Aptivas, and gave one away to a friend, modified as a file (storage) server running NASlite (the previous floppy>RAM version of NASlite was free as in beer).

I've just spent three weeks discovering how to "pretty up" those machines that don't like what I suspect is more recent Linux kernels, and here I include both live and installed versions of Puppy after 2.11, ubuntu after 6, All of Mint, et seq.

I'm putting together a hopefully concise forum thread (as yet not posted) based on my discoveries which are well tabulated on a web page here which you may find interesting. The intent is to provide modern-looking "older dogs" with plenty of life and some renewed internals

Richard
Ozzie retiree - and loving it

dancingdog777 wrote:Could do, though the 4th post from the top on page 11 gives the details.

I know, but I think that this is an important issue that deserves it's own thread.

I always do the manual instalation as I find it very straight forward so I hadn't tried the universal installer for a long time.

I decided to create a virtual and test how "easy" it would be for a new user to install 3.0 using the universal installer

Aghhh, I had the same feeling as you. I wanted to choke the computer.

So, please create a new thread and coordinate. maybe you testing from the user point of view, maybe me creating a better interface to install to HDD, Maybe someone else cleaning the USB part, etc.

Deal?

Good thinking Rarsa (tries frantically to get back on topic)

Installing the computers at the cybercafe was always a bind because we didint have a working wizard. There is only me and one other person (the_mighty_windle) who can install computers up, we have tried training several other people but the learning curve was too steep.

ecomoney wrote:Installing the computers at the cybercafe was always a bind because we didint have a working wizard. There is only me and one other person (the_mighty_windle) who can install computers up, we have tried training several other people but the learning curve was too steep.

Do you have a copy of Norton Ghost? Works wonders.

My Ghost 2003 supports FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, (I think IBM's HPFS also), ext 2 and ext3. Mine does not work with Herr Reiser's filesystem. Later versions may do.

My way to install puppy these days is to boot a machine using the Ghost floppy, that I've already done partition surgery on, having copied the ghost.gho file I'd created originally for puppy whatever version to a different partition from the installing partition. Always keeping a gig or so of spare space on every drive makes this possible.

Then point it at the partition you want to extract it to, and presto!

Ghost comes with the ability to create bootable floppies of its installer. And these floppies can be used to create a ghost file of a non-working system also. The floppy interface is 8-colour (16 colour?) semi-GUI display that supports command line and mouse if detected. Ghost files have two degrees of compression available when creating. They will also save to a bootable CD which could be a plus in your environment.

All you are likely to have to do is to run the Xorgwizard. This sorta works with many other distributions including MS Windows

One small disclaimer. It is a partition clone that while it will go into any size partition (even smaller than the original cloned from) it requires the same boot arrangements as the orignal. So when you restore, bear that in mind.

Re ReiserFS, I always install all linuxes these days into formatted and checked ext2 or ext3 and if the OS gives the option to whether to format or not, I choose "no". That way I can then create a ghost.

I have an 80Gb HDD on my NASlite server half full of ghosts saved from every machine with every OS I've installed (except for those that forced ReiserFS installs). A very convenient way to store them

Happy to talk to you about it, if you would like.

Richard

rarsa wrote:

dancingdog777 wrote:Could do, though the 4th post from the top on page 11 gives the details.

I know, but I think that this is an important issue that deserves it's own thread.

I tend to agree.

Please tell us where you post it, and I'll add some contributions.

I don't think moderators should remove any from here because it is all part of the threads topics, woven into the fabric, so to speak

Richard

richard.a wrote:Do you have a copy of Norton Ghost? Works wonders.

I actually favour partimage as it is open source, it's fast and easy to use.

I use the SystemRescueCD to create and restore the images:

1) Install your distro (puppy) in a HDD with enough space for two partitions. One for the distro, another for the image.

2) Remove any computer specific configuration files (the mouse keyboard, and video)

3) Boot with the SystemRescueCD and create the image

4) Burn the image to CD or DVD

For each computer you want to restore

1) Boot from the rescue CD
2) Create the desired partition(s). The rescueCD includes the usual command line tools to partition but also Gparted
3) Restore the image using partimage
4) Use fsresize or Gparted to resize the file system to the size of the partition

Done!

I make no claim to fame about this but I found it on another site, and having tried it can confirm it works. No need for ghost or any other commercial hard drive copying software.

" I have just installed a bigger hard drive in my main PC at home and have looked at the various options of 'cloning' my old drive to the new. I considered Norton Ghost and even downloaded the trial version. After a LOT of palaver getting it installed I discovered the trial version doesn't allow 'cloning'. I also looked at Ghost for Linux (G4L) but that seemed a bit complicated. Then I was informed about the 'dd' command in Linux, something I had never heard of, far less used. It turns out that one simple line will copy the complete contents of one drive to another! No fancy cloning software, no fancy graphical interfaces and no cost. You can even use this if you don't have Linux installed! Just boot from a Live CD (ANY Live CD) and enter the following command in a terminal:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32768
The above assumes you have (like me) SATA drives, if you have IDE drives you would type:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=32768
If you were copying from an IDE drive to a SATa drive it would be:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda bs=32768
The last part of the command (bs=32768) is not essential but does speed up the transfer by instructing to transfer larger blocks of data at a time.
so the next time you hear someone recomending norton Ghost or the like to clone a disk, just tell them about 'dd'! "

The only problem is that it doesn't look as though the program is running, but be assured, it is. It took my PC about 35 minutes to copy a 40Gb Hard drive to another one.

Thanks to Penguin if he's reading this.

rarsa wrote:

dancingdog777 wrote:Could do, though the 4th post from the top on page 11 gives the details.

I know, but I think that this is an important issue that deserves it's own thread.

I always do the manual instalation as I find it very straight forward so I hadn't tried the universal installer for a long time.

I decided to create a virtual and test how "easy" it would be for a new user to install 3.0 using the universal installer

Aghhh, I had the same feeling as you. I wanted to choke the computer.

So, please create a new thread and coordinate. maybe you testing from the user point of view, maybe me creating a better interface to install to HDD, Maybe someone else cleaning the USB part, etc.

Deal?

Have reposted it in Beginners Help.

double post - sorry!

dancingdog777 wrote:The above assumes you have (like me) SATA drives, if you have IDE drives you would type:
---snip---

Aaaaahhhh

Wonder if your problem is with SATA drives, which from what I've heard are the greatest and bestest....

I've also read repeatedly that there can be problems with SATA rather than IDE with Linux. Not sure what, why, etc. (I don't have any and am unlikely to be getting any in the forseeable future as I tinker with old computers)... But it might pay to look into this.

Richard

Thanks for your suggestions, unfortunately it is the "drive surgery" part which causes the probems, after that it is just a matter of copying/unzipping/downloading the files which is the easy bit. What would be really great would be a script that formatted hda1 to ext2 and installed grub on the MBR, what would be the bash commands for this? Ive recently learned how to remaster barelypup.

Were hopefully going to have an ftp server on the network with a fixed ip that the setup files could be placed on. It would be great to tell the volunteers to "Go plug the computer into that set of wires over there, start with this cd in and go make a cup of coffee". The script in barelypup would handle the rest.

richard.a wrote: Aaaaahhhh

Wonder if your problem is with SATA drives, which from what I've heard are the greatest and bestest....


Richard

Slight misunderstaning, I had copied that post from another forum and saved the text file on my hd. I merely pasted it in without changing the tenses. I do not have a SATA drive, just normal IDEs.

To Eco : If you have the distro installed on a hard drive with the GRUB loader on another partition (but on the same hard drive), the DD will copy those onto the target hard drive. Likewise if you had anything else, say Windows or another O/S also on that drive, the routine will copy everything onto the new drive.
P.S. Sorry for hijacking your thread!

Well Done Girl, Now I also work hard to fit puppy in my environment. but I've try my original office 2003 work very well in puppy. in past I was fail install it in edubuntu 7.04 . would you keep in though with me to established on my cybercafe? my e-mail in ahmadzainul@lycos.com

Hi
I am happy with ecopup. Thought I cant boot it from my dualboot harddisk. I have to boot it from CD

BTW, In puppy linux 2.17, I installed KPPP and qt-3.3.6.pet, by help of that I can connect to internet through my CDMA mobile phone. It recognise it in the booting process and on pressing dmesg command, it displays that modem is connected through prolific cable on port usbtty0.

But it ecopup, I can't find the modem on pressing the dmesg command. I have installed the KPPP and qt-3.3.6.pet.

Plz help.