Topic: A Linux for Gill ? Puppy Linux

[Sandra]

This should appeal to Gill I think, being a fellow doggie lover  

Looks a lot nicer than having that silly penguin jumping about  

http://www.goosee.com/puppy/

[Sandra]

When have you seen a penguin fetch its masters or mistresses slippers and newspaper.

When has a penguin licked its balls then come over and washed your face for you  

[GillE]

I want! I want! I want!

Hey, thanks Sandra - that's so very, very cool.  Moreover, the puppy is a chihuahua   !  He looks just like my little Remy before he grew his adult long coat.

I'd love to install it now, almost as a matter of principle.  The only thing is, I've never had two operating systems before; indeed, I've never partitioned a hard drive before.  If you guys are prepared to hold my hand my hand and walk me through the process, I'd love to have a go.  The only thing I'm worried about is my applications that are dependent on Win XP, especially my TV card (I know - I've got square eyes ) - it wouldn't compromise them, would it?

Gill

PS Penguins live on rocky outcrops surrounded by the the South Atlantic ocean and eat raw fish.  Dogs live in front of the fire and have their food prepared for them by humans, often accompanied by little tidbits.  I know which species I regard as being the more intelligent !

[sam]

gill,

you should be able to boot off cd not effecting anything or installing anything just to give it a go!

as for penguins boo!! thats all i am going to say - I am going back to the junior school though of arguing over the best animal! :-)

[Sandra]

Apparently with this one you can set the pc to boot from the CD and you dont have to install it at all, it runs from the CD or from the RAM if you have 128mbs or more available.
Also I think it can run from inside windows too, according to what it says on the main page, it may not be able to if youre on NTFS though as I am not sure if it can see that, in that case just boot from the CD as I said earlier  

It downloads as an ISO so just burn to a cd and give it a try  

[Sandra]

If you want to save anything on the hard drive it sounds like you wil have to do this Gill :

Q: NTFS partition
I have Windows XP installed on my computer, and the hard drive is partitioned with a single NTFS partition. When I boot up with the Puppy live-CD, the "home" file is not created on /root, so I can't have any permanent storage. Why doesn't Puppy work with NTFS?

A:
When the live-CD boots up, Puppy looks for a vfat, ext2/3 or reiserfs partition, in that order, and if found creates a 256M file on it, named "pup001". This file is actually a complete ext2 filesystem, and Puppy mounts this on /root, and it becomes your home folder and keeps all your personal files and settings. This is a very safe technique and is unlikely to mess up your hard drive as no partitions are being created or modified, just a file created.

Anyway, this technique has a problem when it comes to NTFS. Linux support for NTFS is not yet complete, and currently an NTFS partition can be mounted read-only but not written (safely) to. When Puppy boots up, if he can't find a vfat, ext2/3 or reiserfs partition, he gives up and only uses the ramdisk.

HOWEVER, Puppy version 0.9.7+ does have limited NTFS write support. That is, the Linux NTFS driver can safely write to a file if it already exists, but cannot safely create or resize a file.

SOLUTION: bootup Windows XP, download pup001.zip from the Puppy download site, unzip and save it to C:\pup001. Now reboot the Puppy live-CD and Puppy will use the pre-existing pup001 file as your home data file. Simple!

That sounds quite easy and saves having to create another partition.

The above refers to an earlier version of puppy than the current one but the FAQs page was updated this March so this version should work in the same way  

By the way thats got to be the slowest site that I have downloaded from since I got upgraded to 1mb, its taken about an hour and 30 minutes

[Sandra]

Ok cant get it to run inside windows but booted from cd rom, takes a while due to having NTFS but not having that  C:\pup001 created and installed.

Only spent a few minutes looking at it but I cant see any doggies yet Gill, maybe its somewhere in the customising bit  :?
Couldnt connect to the net either so I will have to investigate it  more tomorrow.

It does have a rather nice looking Rubiks Cube puzzle on it, seeing as I havent managed to do a real one yet then I doubt that I can do a cyber version  :roll:

[GillE]

Hi Sandra

I've downloaded the pup001 file and installed it on my C drive.  I'm now downloading puppy-1.0.1-mozilla.iso which is, I presume the main program.  The estimated download time is another 18 minutes, so the server is much quicker today.  I'll let you know how I get on.

Gill

[Sandra]

Its the 1.0.3 mozilla .iso thats the latest one Gill, although the 1.0.1 should be ok.
I sent you a PM this morning about it in case you didnt know how to burn it  

[Sandra]

Theres something strange going on Gill,
I sent you the PM at 2-34am but I have just checked and it was in my out box not sent items, so I sent it again and its again in my out box so I will copy it here as it may be useful for others :

  
If you download it from the FTP link in the download section Gill, its the puppy-1.0.3-mozilla .iso file that you want (the 8th file from the left of 12), as you now have winrar installed it will look like a RAR file but its really an ISO.
Just open Nero and go to the burn image as you did previously and it will burn as a bootable image cd, even though it looks like a rar file  
 

[chorleydave]

Hi, Sam.  Have you tried this?  I'm going to download it later and give it a whirl on an old PC I have in the cupboard.

http://www.goosee.com/puppy/

[sam]

I havent no, I hear it is like debian in the feel. I think Sandra mentioned it to Gill in a previous post though.

It you want a linux installation that is fast off a cd I'd use Linspire or Ubuntu (which I was very impressed with).

Tell me of your results with Puppy - will be interesting to hear your thoughts on it.

[Scrumpy-Jack]

LOL I tried UBUNTU on my old 166's with reasonably speedy CDROM x52 . After 30 Mins it still hadn't reached the DESKTOP screen.  

I then tried it on a 500mhz  AMD.....after 20 mins it hadn't reached the DESKTOP screen either   .  Windows XP runs just fine on the same pc.

So i def couldn't recommend UBUNTU for older hardware . Prob runs just fine on something more speedy.

A nice little one for Dial up Downloaders is... DSL..Damn Small Linux.

DSL

This runs super speedy on my P166's . Conventional LIVE CD though..only 50mbs.


The real GEM is PUPPY LINUX.    An abxolute WHIZZ. It only uses the CD for initial BOOT therafter it runs from a virtual filesystem on HD or in MEM. I use it for my 166's Well recommended , has lots of extra software to install via DOTPUPs. East Peezy almost as easy as installing windows Progs.

Give it a Try...Have Fun  





Cheers      

[chorleydave]

I've prepared the Puppy CD, but my old 200MMX (which I am going to try it on) is in bits at the moment as I was using it last week to show a (non-blond) lass how to put a basic PC together.

I'll have a play with it (the OS before anybody makes a comment) when I get back from camping on Tuesday and report back.

[sam]

how quick these things loads can really depend on your motherboard, graphics card and the type of connection you are using for you hard drive. They all can fail quite badly on one piece of hardware that is incompatible. Saying that both ubuntu and linspire boot on all  my machine quickly, though I havent even bothered with anything under 400mhz.