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A Linux for Gill ? Puppy Linux

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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  
 :)

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