Puppy Problems

[complete]

I expected the installation of "Lucid Puppy" to be something like my experience with Ubuntu and Debian. With those previous linux distributions after I ran the installation from a CD, I could remove the CD and reboot.

This was not the case with Lucid Puppy. After I ran (what I thought was) the installation, it seemed that the whole Operating System was in RAM and when I rebooted I found that the previous installed OS on the hard drive came up.

The next thing I did was this. After I installed Lucid Puppy, I ran a suggested setup routine called "Puppy Universal Installer" which seemed to be successful. This, I was told, was to make sure that the OS resided on my hard drive. The final screen said this:

GRUB INSTALL SUCCESS
==================
GRUB was successfully installed on the MBR of
/dev/sda. You should check and edit the
'/boot/grub/menu.lst' file on 'dev/sda1', if
needed. You may want to change the
location 'boot/umlinuz', and/or options
passed to any Linux kernal listed there.

What should I do and how do I do it?

Should I choose to run Puppy from the command line and then edit a file?

Now when I reboot (without hitting F2 -- a feature the OS offers to select specific boot methods) I get a blue menu that looks like this:

Linux (on /dev/sda1)
Install GRUB to floppy disk (on /dev/fd0)
Install GRUB to Linux partition (on /dev/sda1)
- For help press 'c', then type: 'help'
- For usage examples, type: 'cat /boot/grub/usage.txt

At the bottm of the screen there are suggestions how to edit files. Unix and Linux is new to me. I hope I can get some direction here with better experienced people.

I would think that installing any software would cause that installation to be placed on the users hard drive. I would expect that that would be the defaut option and doing otherwise might be diffiicult or impossible.

According to this link:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=42876
What I should do is do a new installation from scratch but this time use the option "puppy pfix=ram" and when I get to the point in the Puppy Universal Installer where the it is insatlling GRUB, I cancel it and everything will work. Is that right? I have tried this. When I get to the X-Window, now the Puppy Universal Installer does not go far, it presents a window saying that now running this routine is no longer necessary. I think I should format the hard drive and start over. How would I do that? The other option would be to hand edit some files. How would I do that? What do you suggest I do?

There is an option when I start the Puppy OS that is described as "commandline only". If I choose this option, how do I get to the root directory? Is it done by typing "su -"? Sorry, I am not savvy about linux.

Now, when I start my computer I am given this menu:

Linux (on /dev/sda1)
Install GRUB to floppy disk (on /dev/fd0)
Install GRUB to Linux partition (on /dev/sda1)
- For help press 'c', then type: 'help'
- For usage examples, type: 'cat /boot/grub/usage.txt

But, when I select the "Linux" option, the screen goes blank and, after waiting an hour or so, I am convinced that my installation is broken.

So, formating my hard drive I think is a good next step and then reinstalling.

By the way, I have noticed that when I do manage to get the graphic user interface of the OS going again by doing a fresh installation, I an not able to run the Puppy Universal Installer anymore. So I think I need to go to the command line and wipe the hard drive clean.

[mmettin]

Maybe one of the linux guru's will chime in

But as far as I know Puppy only runs as a "live cd"...Not capable of being mounted/installed

[jsc1973]

Puppy can be installed on a hard disk, although the people who make it don't recommend it. It runs just as well from the CD, with just the essential files copied to the disk. When set up in that manner, you can remove the CD after boot-up and use it for other purposes.

I can tell you that Lucid Puppy, in my experience, is crap. The best Puppy is the 4.1.2 version that came out in December of 2008. It's the only version that I've been able to make run properly on any hardware I've tried.

[laithmeister]

I puppy linux installed on an old sony vaio vgn-s150 laptop that max ram is 1gig. I installed the os on HD and via the univeral installer provided by puppy and yes everytime I boot up a little blue window appears and all I have is push enter and the os loads.
It as you stated just choose the 1st choice to boot puppy from sd drive. Then once you are on your desktop choose the install icon and begin to install your applications like chrome etc... also look into the package manager and get all the restricted goodies and gstreamer ugly etc.... otherwise it runs quick and best of all its FREE.

[Poci]

Yeah puppy is meant to run from RAM. It was ok when I tried it but did not like the filesystem, got errors from simply trying to copy to external drives or pen drives.

What you could do and this is what they devs recommend is using a DVD-RW and puppy will ask you upon shutdown if you want to save to disk. Although it does descrease security since a DVD-RW can be written to, but I wouldn't worry about it.

In any case I think lucid is slackware based which is more complex from what I heard, I liked precise a little better which is Ubuntu based.