How to add software to Puppy?

Booting, installing, newbie
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Buteman
Posts: 16
Joined: Mon 24 Jul 2006, 11:41
Location: Bute - Scotland

How to add software to Puppy?

#1 Post by Buteman »

Hi,
I'm new to Puppy and I am booting seamonkey from a cd at present.
The Pc I am using for this is an old ( about 1998 ) Fujitsu Lifebook 780Tx laptop with 3Gig hard disc, interchangeable CDRom/Floppy and 64Meg Ram.
I have previously used gpartedLive-Cd to resize the Win98 Fat32 partition down to 1.2Gig. The rest I have tried several distros on, the last being VectorLinux 5. I have had various problems with these other distros and came across Puppy 2 days ago.

At present the wireless card in it doesn't work. This is a fairly new card and so didn't expect it to work 'out of the box'.
I did get it to work fine with vectorlinux but have had other problems.

I would like to use Puppy, it seems very impressive, but I have some questions.

1/ Where can I get software ( .pup files ? )

2/ From the little I have seen it may be possible to download source files and compile them myself, as I did with ndswrapper to get the wlan card to work but do such packages come customised for Puppy or are they plain vanilla ones?

3/ Is there any reason why my wlan card cannot be made to work with Puppy because of some inherent lack in Puppy?

tia,
Norm

kirk
Posts: 1553
Joined: Fri 11 Nov 2005, 19:04
Location: florida

#2 Post by kirk »

1/ Where can I get software ( .pup files ? )
Click on the install icon on the desktop or search this forum.
2/ From the little I have seen it may be possible to download source files and compile them myself, as I did with ndswrapper to get the wlan card to work but do such packages come customised for Puppy or are they plain vanilla ones?
Yes, you can compile source files in puppy if you have the developer module (devx_201.sfs for Puppy 2.01) downloaded to the same location as your pup_save.3fs storage file. Puppy 2.01 includes ndiswrapper, no need to compile it.
3/ Is there any reason why my wlan card cannot be made to work with Puppy because of some inherent lack in Puppy?
You'll have to load the driver for your card. You can use ndiswrapper with a windows driver or use a linux driver see this post:

http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=8488

jus407
Posts: 177
Joined: Mon 26 Jun 2006, 23:42
Location: Texas

#3 Post by jus407 »

and do not forget the dotpup downloader (the icon on your desktop mentioned above) is NOT the only place to get .pup's you can get .pup's from MU's website www.dotpups.de

they pretty much have the exact same thing but there are more .pup's in MU's website (but there not all guaranted to work with puppy flawlessly) the ones that shoudl work without any problems on puppy are available through the install icon on your desktop but if you download from another source you might run into problems with installation or running or something (but usually works just fine) i personally like MU's website it has a bunch

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Buteman
Posts: 16
Joined: Mon 24 Jul 2006, 11:41
Location: Bute - Scotland

#4 Post by Buteman »

Thanks,
Once I get the wireless card working I will explore the system.
I'll let you know how I get on.
Norm,

PaulBx1
Posts: 2312
Joined: Sat 17 Jun 2006, 03:11
Location: Wyoming, USA

#5 Post by PaulBx1 »

Yes, you can compile source files in puppy if you have the developer module (devx_201.sfs for Puppy 2.01) downloaded to the same location as your pup_save.3fs storage file.
Actually, if I'm not mistaken it has to go where pup_201.sfs is (often the same place though).

Good luck with that wireless card. Wireless on Puppy (really, on any linux, AFAIK) is painful to get working. I'm hoping to get an option going with a reasonably-cheap USB stick that works reliably, I will report later if I get it running.

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Buteman
Posts: 16
Joined: Mon 24 Jul 2006, 11:41
Location: Bute - Scotland

#6 Post by Buteman »

I really had no problems with wireless, using an ASUS PCI card in my main machine and an ASUS pcmcia card in the laptop.

I have got to the point on the laptop using Puppy now where the card is recognised and I can ping the wireless card in my main machine.

I need to find out what I need to edit to set up the correct gateway address and DNS addresses and I think it will work fine under Puppy.

If I get it going I will do a step by step guide if that is of any help.

You will have to let me know how and/or where you will want it. ( HTML/Text or whatever else you would like really. )

After this is up and running I plan to put Puppy on the hard drive and set it all up there permanently.

norm

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Buteman
Posts: 16
Joined: Mon 24 Jul 2006, 11:41
Location: Bute - Scotland

#7 Post by Buteman »

Okay,

Wireless card now working. It is an Asus WL-107G Cardbus Card.

My main PC has a wireless card and an ethernet PCI card in it. The PCI card connects to my ADSL router/Modem

The wireless card is configured to act as part of an Ad-hoc network and the Ip address of this card is 192.168.2.30

-------->> With a different distro on the Laptop the wireless lan card was recognised as ra0 rather than wlan0 <<--------

Here is what I did :

booted Puppy, removed boot Cd and put wireless card support Cd in drive.

Changed to the directory which had the WinXP driver and .inf file in it
( Note the .inf file is called Rt2500.inf for this card)
ran the following command :

ndiswrapper -i Rt2500.inf

This installed the driver so ndiswrapper could use it.

As I wanted a static Ip address for the card and was not sure how else I could get it to work I then edited

/etc/rc.d/rc.local

and added the following lines

# get driver to load at boot time
modprobe ndiswrapper

#set the static Ip address I want
ifconfig wlan0 add net 192.168.2.50 netmask 255.255.255.0

#set the route so it can connect to the internet
route add default gw 192.168.2.30

#set the mode the card uses
iwconfig wlan0 mode Ad-hoc

#set the network it connects to
iwconfig wlan0 essid normslan

Then saved it.

Then edited
/etc/resolve.conf
You will need to find the DNS Server addresses from your ISP
to get the correct addresses. The first one should be their Primary DNS Server IP Address

Added 2 lines like these :

nameserver 111.111.111.111
nameserver 222.222.222.222

Rebooted the PC and all worked.

Hope this helps,
Norm

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