What are your recommendations for installing Puppy?

[Hetejas]

I have an Acer Aspire netbook with:
1gb ram
160 gb HDD

This PC will be dedicated to running XBMC and this what I have done so far and why I think I want to change.

In order of tries:
2 partitions,
SDA1 1.8gb contained the OS boot
SDA2 the balance Linux-swap
All installs were done "full"

1) Ubuntu with XBMC
I took whatever the defaults were.
Went very smoothly including XBMC but I detested the desktop so upon some recommendations here, I went shopping for a smaller, quicker distro.

2) Lucid Puppy,
I really liked it but try as I might, I cannot get XBMC working.

3) Precise Puppy
I really like it but same as Lucid re Xbmc. I had read that there was a .pet for XBMC so I found it and installed it. However running it from the terminal window I get an error, cannot find libbluetooth.so.3...
And now I can't locate that.

4) I tried installing Precise on to an 8gb Micro-SD card, but the install stops right in the middle and never gets to the part about grub, etc.

Additionally, whenever I try to install another package I bump up against a disk space limit.

So, should I do the partitions differently and what distr to continue with ?

I read the notes/instructions about editing some files so as to be able to use the package from precise Ubuntu which has XBMC but that is beyond my skill level for now.

So, I would like a recommendation about partioning, what distr, where to locate it, live/frugal vs full.
Do I understand it correctly in that a frugal install means that the cd/DVD needs to be present in order to run ?

I am going to take these recommendations and see how far I can get.

And thanks

[starhawk]

If you're using Precise Puppy 55, this *should* work for you. Right-click, rename to remove the ".gz" end, leave the ".deb" end. Double-click (or single-click if you haven't changed that yet) to install it, as if it were a dotPET.

If it doesn't create the symlink to libbluetooth.so.3, you'll have to make it yourself.

Right-click on the lib file (should be in /lib IIRC but it might dump itself somewhere else and make you go hunting for it) and select "Make Link". You want a relative link, with the filename libbluetooth.so.3 -- that should do it.

Think of symlinks (short for "symbolic link") like a Windoze shortcut they're similar.

Hope I've helped.

[Flash]

If I understand right, you've partitioned your 160 GB hard disk with a 1.8 GB (unspecified filesystem) for a LInux installation and the rest is Linux swap. That's wasteful. With a GB of RAM you probably don't need any swap at all. Certainly you'll never use more than 2 GB of swap no matter what you're doing.

You couldn't get XBMC to work in Puppy. How far along did you get? (What did you try and what was the result?)

[666philb]

hi Hetejas,

there's a xbmc.sfs for precise puppy that works well, i use it all the time. it even has some extra repo's added such as icefilms and 1channel ..... you can get it from quickpet_precise
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=83642

[Hetejas]

If I understand right, you've partitioned your 160 GB hard disk with a 1.8 GB (unspecified filesystem) for a LInux installation and the rest is Linux swap. That's wasteful. With a GB of RAM you probably don't need any swap at all. Certainly you'll never use more than 2 GB of swap no matter what you're doing.

You couldn't get XBMC to work in Puppy. How far along did you get? (What did you try and what was the result?)

Thank you Flash.
SDA1 is ext2.
I got these partition sizes from another post and I can't remember where.
Before I spend a lot of time on trying to figure out what else I need to do, I would like to get an optimal disk configuration.
It sounds like you are recommending SDA1 to be EX2 at a size of about 155 gb and 3 gb for the swap partition.

The version I have of XBMC is: XBMC-11.0-xvba (XBMC 11 for Eden for ati and intel cards) from this thread.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=77354
I am fumbling through XBMC having it tell me what libraries are missing then going out to try and find them.
Starhawk got me to libbluetooth and I have found liccdio, and am hunting for libhal.
I have no idea how many more there are nor if XBMC will work after all these installs.

666philb, I will give that sfs a try though I will need to read up on what to do with it. If I am lucky I can just click on it. The .pet is wonderful.

And thanks for all this great help. After I get this all figured out, where is the tip jar

[Hetejas]

hi Hetejas,

there's a xbmc.sfs for precise puppy that works well, i use it all the time. it even has some extra repo's added such as icefilms and 1channel ..... you can get it from quickpet_precise
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=83642

Whoa, this looks promising 666 and I am into it now.
Exactly what I was looking for and I hope it works.
I unloaded the prior version of XBMC that I was struggling with so as to give this a better chance.

thanks

[Hetejas]

!!!! YIPPEE !!!
The quickpet_precise version of XBMC works a charm.
Ok, time to back up, get the disk drive set up correctly and start over.

I will check back in as I progress.

Thanks again and seriously, is there a tip jar ?

[Flash]

Here's Barry's tip jar. You should probably scan through the whole thread first.

As for the optimum way to partition your hard disk, that depends on lots of things, principally what you'll be using the computer for and how you'll be using Puppy (full install, frugal, etc.) Your proposed partition scheme sounds fine. certainly it's better than what you have now.

I've never ran Puppy from a hard disk, but I think most forum members would probably recommend a frugal install over a full install. It makes upgrading and troubleshooting easier.

[Hetejas]

Well, I have it like I like it now, though your statements re a full vs frugal has me wondering.
It seems like I still have a lot of space left even with a full install and XMBC with all its addons.

SDA1 = 3gb used, unused=137+ gb

Next I would like to make a bootable USB drive with all my customizations in the event SDA1 crashes.
Hopefully it won't be too hard and I will give it a try.
Do you have any suggestions in that something might be already built in ?

After that I am going to attempt something others say can't be done within XBMC. That is download videos to a hard drive. Apparently it can only be done to a network share, and I think Samba might help.

Thanks again.
Should be fun.

[666philb]

The icefilms plugin lets you download. Lots of HD stuff as well