Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

danielblues · Joined: 29 Jul 2008 Posts: 4

Hi,

I'm trying to use puppy Linux on an old, 128Mb, PII, dell laptop.
I've downloaded puppy-4.00-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso, and checked the signature. After the initial boot screen, I've pressed enter and when it's

hillside · Posted: Tue 29 Jul 2008, 20:23 Post_subject:

Are you running this from a cd? It sounds like you may have just written the iso to the hard drive. In that case it won't work. You need to burn it to a cd or install it as a frugal install to the hard drive.

rcrsn51 · Posted: Tue 29 Jul 2008, 21:14 Post_subject:

This is a fairly common problem with old optical drives. At bootup, try:

puppy ide=nodma acpi=off

Then read here for some other options.

danielblues · Joined: 29 Jul 2008 Posts: 4

Hi

rcrsn51 · Posted: Wed 30 Jul 2008, 09:24 Post_subject:

Glad to help. You should now edit your original message and add "Solved" to the title.

For future reference, it would be interesting to know if only one of the two options is needed to fix your problem.

danielblues · Joined: 29 Jul 2008 Posts: 4

Hi,

Solved with:

fredthomke · Joined: 22 Aug 2008 Posts: 2

Thanks for the solution. I searched and found this thread which described EXACTLY my problem, and the options

ide=nodma pfix=ram

worked for me. I didn't try the acpi=off, figuring it was a DMA issue.

By the way, in the option menu when booting from the CD, there is nothing listed as "ide=nodma" (PL v4.00 CD), so how would a newbie know to try this? This is my only beef about Linux -- a LOT of tribal knowledge ("Oh, yeah, I've seen that issue before, here is the fix..."). SOME distros do come with very good docs and online forum help -- PL ranks near if not AT the top, in my book! But I realize almost all the the Linux community is purely a grass roots effort, which I guess IS going to be somewhat "tribal" in nature...

Thanks again to all of you tribe members who support all of us newbies!!

- - fred

wportre · Joined: 20 Oct 2008 Posts: 4

I am having this problem persistently (tried all the suggested options here and on other chats) on a newly built high-spec PC. The optical drive is SATA and I'm wondering if that might be contributing. Anything else I can try? I like Puppy and really don't want to put Ubuntu on there.

rcrsn51 · Posted: Mon 20 Oct 2008, 16:59 Post_subject:

It sounds like Puppy cannot see your SATA optical drive. The easiest work-around is to put the four core Puppy files on a flash drive - vmlinuz, initrd.gz, pupxxx.sfs and zdrvxxx.sfs. Then boot off the Live CD again. At the short initial pause, type:

wportre · Joined: 20 Oct 2008 Posts: 4

Wow: thanks for the speedy reply. The boy's now on "The Beast"
(I built it for him) but I'll give it a shot and I WILL post the result. Cheers

wportre · Joined: 20 Oct 2008 Posts: 4

That worked a treat. Thanks. Can't see the EIDE disk that is on there but I'll sort that out. Cheers. wp

wportre · Joined: 20 Oct 2008 Posts: 4

Anyone else having this trouble try setting "sata mode" in bios from "ahci" to "raid".

Béèm · Posted: Thu 23 Oct 2008, 18:10 Post_subject:

jenciso · Joined: 30 Nov 2008 Posts: 5 Location: Uruguay, Montevideo

rcrsn51 · Posted: Sun 30 Nov 2008, 17:44 Post_subject:

You need to recognize that 32 MB of memory is far below the minimum specs for Puppy. To get Puppy running on such a low-end machine you would be better off removing the hard drive and connecting it to a bigger computer. You could then do a conventional full install onto the drive. A swap partition will be essential.