Hey guys, I just wanted to know if that's possible.

Currently I've got a ruined copy of Windows98SE, and I want to move to Puppy ASAP, sometime in the next few days, and my friend is burning me the ISO.

I've heard puppy is hard to install to HDD; is that true? Also, does it have a GUI partitioning tool? I plan to shrink this FAT32 partition down to the minimum, and leave the rest for Puppy. Is there a GUI installer, too, or is it all command-lines? They scare me, no joke.

And, if I'm installing, will I still need the 128MB they recommend? Or is that just for loading into RAM? And do I HAVE to load into RAM? It just seems so darn ressource hoggy for a "light" distro to demand 128MB of RAM. I have enough space for a decent swap space, so that's not a problem.

Another thing, is there a "virtual windows" app for puppy? Or even better, is there something that can put music files onto my walkman? It seems to only work with Windows, and SonicStage is VERY ressource-hoggy at times on this old PC. Though I am getting a new one (Eventually ) I'd like to continue using this one as much as possible until then, and not have to wait a month to load stuff onto my music player.

Thanks to whoever can answer these,
Cheers,
Joro, your local idiot.

First part. I never installed so not sure if it does. If not have your friend burn a copy of this http://freshmeat.net/projects/systemrescuecd/
It will have the tools needed to shrink your fat32 partition.

As far as the ram I would guess yes but depends on the gui it uses. If using say gnome or kde on it then yes for 128mb. If something lighter like fluxbox or icewm then about 96meg.

Swap is slow versus the cost of memory today. Just my opinion.

edit: may not be what you are referring to.
You will have to install that. vmware, qemx. vmware is a memory hog, not sure on the other but if the guest OS needs memory then it needs system memory ofr itself and you still need ram for the host OS itself.
edit:

edit:
If the walkman plugs into the USB port then I would say no issue as long as if mounted as a drive is the way SonicStage works.
edit:

What I would do is go over to www.puppylinux.org site and read the docs, faqs, any forums, and any thing else just to become accustomed to linux. Don't stop at puppy for learning. I would just start reading random post here and start putting the pieces together. Best way to learn is try and read, read, and read more. Been in linux 7 years and seem to learn something everyday. Been using computers over 25 years so I have gone from OS to OS and had to relearn it all.

Brian

I think I'll go with Damn Small instead for now. I think I have some extra PC-133 RAM somewhere, and I'll move to something like Zenwalk or Xubuntu, or anything else with XCFE, instead. But for now, I'd feel better with something to work with ASAP and get out of this hell.

Can I make a /home partition that Damn Small can write to? That would be great, as I can just move my files from Winblows (It really does suck enough to get that name) to the /home partition, uninstall some software too (OO.o, Firefox, Opera, MSN Messenger, Audacity, etc. everything cept for blows and a few games) and then shrink it so that there's just 10MB left, incase the game needs to save data. And then I'll install Xubuntu/Zenwalk... Unless there's something I should know about those distros?... My PC isn't powerfull enough to run KDE or GNOME, so forget about them.

Can multiple distros share a /home partition? Is it difficult to get it working, IE, does each distro need a login password, and a password to get into the /home partition? Bit confusing.

Edit: I've been looking at Ubuntulite as well. Is it a better idea than Xubuntu? I'm considering using it with my other PCs, but def. want to take advantage of XFCE with this one. Or is XFCE too bloated to be worth it?

Jorophose, loads of questions, so I'll answer the ones that jump out above.

Yes, Puppy installs to HD and works well when it's there. My vintage Toshiba P2 laptop with 160MB RAM and a frugal install of 2.12 presently has uptime of over 11 days. Every single thing works: wireless, sound, power management, USB, syncing music with my ipod shuffle, etc.

Puppy is easy to install to HDD, I did one last night in about 5 minutes from power on. The desktop menu has an entry for the Puppy Universal Installer: Menu - Setup - Puppy Universal Installer. Read the text that comes up in the windows and click the buttons that fit your choices.

Puppy has Gparted for partitioning included on the liveCD: Menu - Control Panel - Gparted.

The Universal Installer is a GUI tool, yes.

You don't need 128MB RAM, I have run Puppy in 32MB by making a swap partition first. 128MB will let you boot entirely to RAM without a swap partition. A swap partition of 128MB will let you run Puppy with modest RAM.

If RAM is an issue, use 2.12 or 2.13 for preference, they are more memory efficient than earlier 2.xx Puppies. How much do you have?

The liveCD automatically loads to RAM if there is enough, but it also uses swap if it finds it so your swap counts towards the RAM total. The same is true of a frugal install (which is like running the liveCD from your HD).

There is a dotpup package for Wine to run inside Puppy. That may meet your Windows needs. Sorry, I can't help further, having no need for Windows at all (it was one of the notable days of my life when I discovered that :-)

All your other questions can be answered by searching (first) or asking in the forum at http://murga-linux.com/puppy/

I'll be happy to answer questions if and when I can, but you can tap a wider range of expertise there.

I noticed that you mentioned some other distros. They can be fun too, but you should understand that DSL and Puppy are not at all alike. DSL is a standard Linux distro that is based on Knoppix (ultimately Debian) built (or cut down) to a size constraint. It's elegant and excellent, but not a substitute for a full distro.

Puppy is nothing like any other distro, being built from scratch to an original design. It does things very few other distros do (multisession CD/DVD, USB installs that remember and identify hardware configurations so they can be used on multiple machines without reconfiguration) and it can be used as one's sole sufficient distro.

Cheers,
Mark

Thanks Mark! Really helpful!

I've got 64MB, but I can boost it to 192MB at the mo, and upto 320MB without switching out the current one.

Cheers,
Jorophose.

EDIT: Puppy also comes with something like idesk, right? Some distros I've seen with IceWM and JWM don't include it. Having no desktop icons is annyoing.

Jorophose,

Thanks for the positive feedback, it's appreciated.

I double-checked my 128MB claim (see above) earlier today by first disconnecting the hard drive from an old PII I have lying around and then booting Puppy 2.13. It booted and ran OK, which was pretty good considering that the integrated graphics were also stealing a chunk of RAM for themselves.

If you can fit 192MB then you can easily boot entirely to RAM.

Puppy has desktop icons courtesy of the Rox pinboard. My personal preference is the opposite of yours though, I hate having to move windows to find the icons hidden underneath, so I remove all the icons and run everything from the menus. Choice is good!

From here you really just need to try it, I normally use CD-RWs to burn Puppy because there are always new versions and upgrades coming out.

Cheers,
Mark

Thanks for that.

I don't really like the idea of booting into RAM; wouldn't that make loading other stuff slower? Or would it shift around and toss some stuff back onto the HDD to make room?

The idea of running in RAM from a liveCD is that the Cd can be ejected after boot, freeing the drive for normal use (burning discs, playing music etc). A side benfit is that even slow RAM is way faster than a fast hard disk, so apps load very quickly. That assumes you have enough RAM that the system doesn't have to swap a lot.

Puppy can also be installed to disk in one of two ways. A frugal (termed "coexist" in the Universal Installer) install is exactly like running from the liveCD, with the contents of the CD on your hard disk. The advantage is that you don't need the CD with you, and on some laptops that also means you can leave your CD drive behind. Frugal install is what I have on the laptop I'm typing this from. Another advantage is that this type of install can be performed on a Windows-format partition (it's just some files in the C:\ directory) and booted from a boot floppy or USB key, or by using the liveCD to boot (but without having to load the system from the liveCD).

A full hard disk install is also possible from the Universal Installer, by selecting the option termed "normal". In this case, Puppy does NOT run from RAM, and behaves more-or-less like any other Linux installation.

Well Jorophose, are we getting towards answering your questions yet? At this stage I would have to suggest just trying Puppy and seeing how it works.

Cheers,
Mark

Yeah, thanks, that should be all .

I think I'll go with a normal install. My windows partition is in a state of total destruction, so I wouldn't like to see Puppy in there.

Cheers,
Joro.

I'd just like to add that, further to my earlier experiment above, today I booted Puppy 2.13 on a 128MB machine (433MHz PII) with an empty, unpartitioned, hard disk. I was able to use Gparted from the menu to make a 256MB swap partition and a 2GB ext3 partition. I then used MUT ("drives" icon on the desktop) to turn on the swap partition and install using the Universal Installer. Then I used the GRUB installer from the menu to install GRUB to the root of the ext3 partition (which I had flagged as bootable in Gparted). GRUB's menu.lst requires a little tewaking for a frugal install, took a couple minutes (details in a post of mine on the main Puppy forum). Eject, CD, reboot, use the Network Wizard to set up eth0, start Seamonkey ("browse" icon on desktop) and I'm typing this. Took about 20 minutes from tightening the screws on the hard disk to reading linuxquestions.org.

Cheers,
Mark

Depending on your experience, this might take a few hours to understand and set-up but you can have a lot of simple fun if you set-up your hard-drive and live distro hard-drive installs. This will allow you to set-up a nice stable system for everyday use but also allow you to test the new releases quickly and easily whether it is slax, puppy, grafpup, pizzapup, etc.

1. Format hard drive with the following (an easy way is to boot puppy from a cd then use one of the partition apps in puppy to partition your hard-drive)
- small partition for grub
- a bunch of 1Gb partitions for your live distros
- remaining partition is your permanent storage of music, videos, data, etc.

2. Install grub to small partition as per this ...
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/...tro?page=0%2C0

3. Copy contents of your puppy cd to one of your partitions.

4. Then configure grub to point to the relevant files that you just copied over.

All done. You actually dont need to even burn the iso. You can just mount like this ... mount -o loop -t iso9660 filename.iso /mnt/iso. You may need to a mkdir /mnt/iso.

This is what your grub command should look something like ...
default=0
timeout=10
title PIZZAPUP
root (hd0,4)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 nopcmcia
initrd /initrd.gz

Oh and by the way, even though it is still installed to hard-drive, it still runs in ram so it is fast and it is very quick copying to ram each boot-up.