(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hey Puppy is hanging when "Searching for Puppy files in computer disk drives" at boot. I removed my hard drive and it still hangs. Any suggestions. I tried booting parted magic but I am having trouble there also. Thanks Oh its the newest version of Puppy

Ok computer doesn't hang just takes forever. After about 8 minutes or so of searching for Puppy files, it returns saying "pup_421.sfs not found. Drop ping out to initial-ramdisk console...
can't access tty; job control turned off
Then it boots me to a command prompt. I am somewhat familiar with linux commands, mount, ls, cd, etc. Root is mounted. I am also familiar with the file system hiearchy.

I want to do a hard drive install since there is no OS on this computer. This laptop is old and it looks like the cd rom isn't up to the task anymore. I loaded the live cd on my desktop flawlessly. Is there an installation cd or is there boot options to install on HD with out loading Puppy or the GUI? Thanks

I have thinkpad 600e too and found that Puppy Linux seems to be the best one. Try booting option acpi=force from the custom boot page (F2)

It worked! Thank you. Some questions about your thinkpad. What is you video resoultion, and hows that treating you? Are you using Xvesa or Xorg Xwindow system, and how is that treating you? I am using this laptop for school, I need to take notes and do calculations (lots of math). Maybe even pull up diagrams for electrical equipment! I would also possibly like throw a wireless card in it. Can this laptop handle this as old as the equipment is? Not so worried about the speeds as I am the actual age. Just bought it and the cmos battery needed replacing and probably the backlight. Is there anything other part I should buy (besides hard drive) as a backup device? Thanks again a million Puppy loaded flawlessly and fast!

good to know that you got it working!
I'm using Xorg server with native LCD resolution 1024 x 768 and 24 bits color depth. Have not found big different in speed between 16 and 24 bits.

Actually, you need just one boot option acpi=force

I think I can't help you with your questions about particular applications - I'm newbie in Puppy. Very probably it has Gnumeric in the package manager as a spreadshit app.

Previously I've used Ubuntu on this laptop, it's perfect but too heavy for such an old hw. Puppy fits much better - installed in to the HDD as a main OS.

Right now I'm trying to get to work my wireless A-link pcmcia card and sound. Guess you do have problems with sound as well - a known issue of 600e

[quote="durant125"][/quote]
Hi! Did you get any PCMCIA card working with your Thinkpad 600e? In my case Puppy can't detect anything

Hi there,

I found this thread a week or so ago when Puppy got hung up on booting on my Thinkpad 600x. I tried the acpi=force and it booted up just fine.

But I'm also having a problem getting Puppy 4.2.1 to recognize or use my cardbus / pcmcia wireless adapter. It finds 'wlan0' but it never detects any wireless networks, even though I have the b43 drivers in the /lib/firmware directory. (It's a linksys / broadcom 4318 adapter.) When I finally found the info. on b43 drivers for my somewhat newly installed Fedora 7 and got them into the /lib/firmware folder -- the adapter found wireless networks right away, (after trying and failing with ndiswrapper). No reboot required, even.

I did notice that when I use the acpi=force option in Puppy, it disables IRQ 10 and 11. I did some research on acpi and IRQ's, and then on my F7 set up, I've looked at various things like lspci -v and cat /proc/interrupts and dmesg, and I think the issue is that the cardbus slot and the usb slot (and other things) are using IRQ 11. So if it's disabled, no amount of drivers are going to make it work! Here's the output from the cat /proc/interrupts for IRQ 9 and 11 (10 doesn't show up) in F7:
<-- Note b43, in use by IRQ11.

Also, from the lspci -v command, note:
(CardBus= pcmcia slot)

I'm going to try a couple of other acpi commands, instead of the acpi=force to see if it helps; since I can't boot to Puppy 4.2.1 on it's own. If I use the retro version, I get a kernel panic, regardless of any acpi commands. Is there a place to file a bug report?

vitasam, did you get your pcmcia working? Does yours also disable IRQ 10 and 11? I'd guess that it does, but just thought I'd ask...

Hi CiaW,

no I did not managed to get my PCMCIA working. I think you are right about acpi=force and IRQ

Did you find something instead of acpi=force?

Try Deltapup and/or Slaxer Pup, one of those should be more adaptable to your hardware. However, if neither works then try Muppy Pup.

techtype wrote:Try Deltapup and/or Slaxer Pup, one of those should be more adaptable to your hardware. However, if neither works then try Muppy Pup.

Are those distros different from original Puppy? Just would like to be in the 'mainstream'

vitasam wrote:

techtype wrote:Try Deltapup and/or Slaxer Pup, one of those should be more adaptable to your hardware. However, if neither works then try Muppy Pup.

Are those distros different from original Puppy? Just would like to be in the 'mainstream'

DeltaPup has a newer and very capable kernel. Likewise slaxer pup is built to be very friendly to old and new hardware. Muppy is older but in many ways was the best pup ever and is always worth a try.

In your case, I would try Slaxer first.

vitasam,

I tried a few different things instead of the acpi=force option, (about 5 of them I don't have the paper in front of me...) and on all except 1 of them it got hung up on recognizing media devices. One of them that I tried (acpi=force acpi_irq_balance <--both together) did result in getting it booted without the IRQ's 10 and 11 being disabled, but my excitement was very short-lived when I saw that the power to the wireless adapter didn't come on during the boot. I removed and re-inserted it and still no power. Very odd.

I'm off to look for Slaxer and possibly Delta pup -- I'm going to have to put blank CD's on my shopping list! Thanks for the suggestion techtype.

With what I've gone through installing F7, and getting everything working; then trying twice to upgrade to F11 and having to again go back to F7 (which thankfully is working fine!); and then wanting to get rid of the LVM from my more recent F7 install to install Puppy to find it can't get the wireless working -- it may be be just a few hours or maybe a few days before I report back; because I've about hit my limit, and my blog and other things are suffering from neglect.

Just so it's here after searching various places -- here's a link to the SlaxerPup topic with a link to the iso -- I'm downloading it now.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 04&t=41298

Apparently it focuses on hardware detection -- sounds good to me!

CiaW wrote:vitasam,

I tried a few different things instead of the acpi=force option, ...One of them that I tried (acpi=force acpi_irq_balance <--both together) did result in getting it booted without the IRQ's 10 and 11 being disabled, !

I was able to boot 4.2.1 with pfix=ram and acpi=force, and I can say at least the pcmcia works -- I use a 2wire pcmcia wireless (orinoco gold) card. I was able to get online, no problem.

I'll get all the hardware specs on my machine and post them. It seems very capricious -- sometimes it hangs on boot, other times it goes through no problem. I seem to be using the same video specs as other people here. It's why I have trouble determining if it's a bad disk or a bad boot.

I am wondering though if there is something wrong with my saved file because it really seems to go better if I use pfix=ram. I have been wanting to reformat the hard drive anyways, and set up a swap partition, I've been using linux and unix for years now, but I am still udgy about partitioning drives! And I am not exactly sure how to go about making a swap partition. I had considered that I would want to do a hard drive install, but i haven't found the perfect puppy yet. So no rush.

Just to post an update, I downloaded the Slax-Pup 4.12 and burned to CD and booted, and it detected my linksys / broadcom 4318 wireless adapter, loaded the broadcom drivers and everything! I'm using it know to type this. I just asked it to look for wireless networks, it found 2, selected mine, then selected the dhcp option and it connected. Configuration of wlan0 successful!

I didn't have to use acpi=force or anything, I wanted to try it on it's own before I tried any other commands.

And on the swap file question, since I'm also running F7 I already have a (625mb) swap partition set up, but Puppy sees it and uses it. If you're using parted or gparted -- then you just select 'mount point' as 'swap' -- no need to give it a file system type (i.e. ext2 or 3 -- my other partitions are ext3). Of course all the usual caveats apply on backing up your data, etc. before-hand.

I also noticed that the disk / partition icons on Slaxer use HDA 2 and 4, etc. rather than SDA 2, I hope that doesn't confuse my grub and/or /etc/fstab which I plan to add the Puppy partition /dev/sda4 in F7. For now I'll just work with a _save file and head to the Slaxer thread to make sure.

I'm just thrilled to have the wireless working, yay!

Hi durant125:

I also have a Thinkpad 600e. Ran into the same problems trying to use Turbopup, which is a striped version of 4.2. As 4.12 (both standard or retro) was fully functional, I simply reverted. Basically, I now run a 4.12 with Ezpup installed. The latter gives me the icewm windows manager, which enabled me to easily modify the Toolbar to create a popup menu of the most used apps.

Regarding your need from an application which handles Math formulas, Playdaz made an sfs of Koffice. It only takes up 36 megs hard drive and has many applications including a formula editor, spreadsheet, presentation program, and both bitmap and vector drawing apps. It runs fine on my Thinkpad.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=29856

Just change 400 to 412 (or whichever version of Puppy you decide to run) and place the sfs at the top (NOT in a directory) of the same drive as your puppy save file.

Keep Abiword, as Kwriter isn't as functional.

Mike

Hi,
I've installed Slax-Pup 4.12 (full installation to HDD).
Everything went smoothly, with default options only (no any acpi=force).

It found PCMCIA and module correctly (RaLink RT2561/RT61). But, for some reason I can't connect to the internet, even DHCP seems to get correct IP address.
Anyway, it is a good progress!

Just a curiosity - Slax-Pup 4.12, what are the relations to the original Puppy? What is a difference between those distros?

I said I would post specs for my Thinkpad 600 -- here they are:

It's yur basik Pent II Thinkpad 600 running just a hair below 300mhz. 158 mb ram. It has pcmcia slots, usb, a CD ROM -- and apparently also IR! And i think is has the CS4232 sound card.

From the stickers on the case, it was running XP when it shipped, but I am at least it's second owner. When I got it, it had a bad ram chip in it, and a blown hard drive. I originally tried to install a version of SUSE on it, because I had those disks. But then someone gave me a Ubuntu live cd, and then I found puppy, and that's pretty much all I have used on it since. I had a slax disk, and DSL, they might have booted, but they weren't really functional. So I went back to puppy.

I just got locked up in SlaxerPup while using SeaMonkey to read yahoo news. So I rebooted with 4.2.1, and it was happy again. But no sound, Duh, I need to look up the sound fix again.

pooklaroux wrote:I just got locked up in SlaxerPup while using SeaMonkey to read yahoo news. So I rebooted with 4.2.1, and it was happy again

By 4.2.1 do you mean PuppyLinux or SlaxPup?

vitasam wrote:

pooklaroux wrote:I just got locked up in SlaxerPup while using SeaMonkey to read yahoo news. So I rebooted with 4.2.1, and it was happy again

By 4.2.1 do you mean PuppyLinux or SlaxPup?

The SlaxerPup I have is version 4.1.2 -- the Offical Puppy version I have is 4.2.1. Oy very confusing.

I am having some bios/boot problems with the Thinkpad. I might be losing a cmos battery.

pooklaroux wrote:

CiaW wrote:vitasam,

I tried a few different things instead of the acpi=force option, ...One of them that I tried (acpi=force acpi_irq_balance <--both together) did result in getting it booted without the IRQ's 10 and 11 being disabled, !

I was able to boot 4.2.1 with pfix=ram and acpi=force, and I can say at least the pcmcia works -- I use a 2wire pcmcia wireless (orinoco gold) card. I was able to get online, no problem.

I was trying Puppy 4.2.1 with pfix=ram acpi=force options together now. But Pupppy does not detect pcmcia. I have A-link WL54PC pcmcia card, which works well e.g. under Ubuntu on my 600e