Problem:
I am trying to install Puppy Linux 2.16 to the hard disk of an old laptop to create a "rapid startup" environment for impromptu notetaking and other light tasks. The ISO disk of the system I have burnt works well as a live CD, but I have hit a problem when trying to install the system to the hard disk. When I log on now, a GRUB text screen gives me a choice of installing to a floppy or the hard disk, but none of the options seems to work. I would like the finished system to boot straight into the operating system with no options and no password. I am a novice with GRUB and the Shell, but would appreciate any advice on getting the setup to as near "instant on" as possible.

Hardware/software:
I am trying to replace an existing, working, Ubuntu 6.10 installation with the Puppy Linux. Compaq Armada E300 notebook, PIII 500MHz, 384Mb memory, 60 Gb hard drive.

Many thanks

David

As far as I know, with Puppy everyone logs in as root and there is no password, so you should get exactly what you want once you get things installed correctly.

I cannot tell from your post, but are you running the live CD and installing via the live desktop? You are less likely to run into problems that way.

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I am trying to install on the hard drive via the live Puppy desktop and I suspect that there is a conflict with the Ubuntu 6.10 which was on there previously.

Would it be a good idea to format the hard drive first and then try again, do you think? Or is there an easier way to do this?

David

I am making a bit of a guess here, but you may need a new partition. Let me explain. If your Ubuntu install took up the entire hard drive, and you told the Puppy installer that you wanted to use the hard drive, Puppy probably thought you wanted to only leave some setup and other configuration information on the hard drive to make startup easier the next time. (Puppy is primarily a live distribution, so overwriting another operating system would be considered bad.) This will result in Puppy saving a file to the hard drive with a name like "pup_save.3fs" (it varies, depending on your setup).

However, you are trying to install Puppy as the only OS. In this situation, Puppy would then be looking for an unused partition (as I recall). If you do not have any unallocated space on your hard drive, you need to resize or delete a partition and create a new one for Puppy. (Be sure you back up anything you might need before starting the process.) Then, when you start the installation (Menu --> Setup --> Puppy universal installer), point it to this unused partition.

Brilliant, thanks for the advice about partitioning. I managed that with the tool inside the live CD.
I set up a 2GB root partition, a similar swap partition and three other partitions, two of which are logical inside an extended. The puppy now boots from the hard drive and will even let me get on the internet!

When I boot from the hard drive, however, I am still presented with a text menu asking me from which partition I wish to run Linux. Is there any way of making /dev/hda1 the default, so that the whole boot process is automatic?

Thanks again for the help.

David

Brilliant, thanks for the advice about partitioning. I managed that with the tool inside the live CD.
I set up a 2GB root partition, a similar swap partition and three other partitions, two of which are logical inside an extended. The puppy now boots from the hard drive and will even let me get on the internet!

When I boot from the hard drive, however, I am still presented with a text menu asking me from which partition I wish to run Linux. Is there any way of making /dev/hda1 the default, so that the whole boot process is automatic?

Thanks again for the help.

David

You are welcome. The list that you are presented with is probably the GRUB menu. Whatever is highlighted is the default. If you wish to change it, you can navigate to /boot/grub and edit the default boot choice in the menu.lst file. For example if it normally booted the third option and you wanted to have it default to the first, you would change it to read something like this:

Note: you will have to do this as root. I would also recommending making a backup copy beforehand just in case something gets messed up. For the record, this command is an easy way to make a quick backup copy of menu.lst named menu.lst-bak:

Regarding the time, GRUB can be set up to boot the default system in a fixed time period or wait until it gets a keystroke command from you. I think the standard Puppy setup uses the latter. Therefore a way around that is to default the time to 0 seconds. This is done by navigating to /boot/grub and editing the timeout line in the menu.lst file to read something like this:

Success again, thank you. I removed the "comment out" from the timeout command and changed the value to zero and "bingo", problem solved.

You can go on tweaking these things for ages, can't you.....

David

LOL. It can get a little addictive.