lucid puppy on a sony
 

I just installed lucid puppy on a sony lap top that has 256 ram
it seems great but when i shutdown it hangs and won't shutdown unless i do it with the power switch and it seems that puppy doesn't like that.
and wants to do a f.s. check.
How do i get this thing to shutdown properly is there a shutdown script problem???? I have no idea what i am talking about here. too new to all this.

Bump

There is a shutdown script, and I have hno idea why it's not working properly on your laptop. You might try asking in the official Puppy Linux Forum.

Try adding this

acpi=force

or

acpi=off

to the end of the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst

Then reboot and at the next shutdown it "should" work.

Powerdown and other problems
 

At last I have managed to install Lucid Puppy on my Sony laptop. I really like Puppy! I have a similar difficulty with powerdown, but that's only one of a number of problems:
1. I have installed as dual boot with Windows XP but seem to have either damaged the MBR or not installed GRUB. I can only boot Puppy from live CD and can't get into Windows at all. I think I can install GRUB while running Puppy, but don't know what to put in the box when asked for the location of the partition to save GRUB to.
2. When I try to install other web browsers apart from the default browser the sytem hangs - blank screen with pointer cursor near to left of screen.
3. The touch pad on the Sony now acts like a mouse, e.g. the tap to select has gone and I need to use the left button instead.
4. And lastly a rather different problem. I registered on the Puppy Linux Forum but have forgotten my username and password. A search of the usernames doesn't help, but when I tried to re-register the syestem told me my email address was already on the system but for another username. I only have one email address so cannot re-register. Many of the FAQs say contact the administrator, but this requires a username and password. Any ideas how I might contact the administrator?
Help with any of the above would be much appreciated. Bill

A thought on #4 - have you tried sorting the Puppy forum membership list by email address, then looking for your address?

That would result from install Grub to the root partition of Puppy rather than the mbr. Boot Puppy and open a terminal, log in as root and get partition information with command: fdisk -l (lower case Letter L in the command) and post it here. Someone should then be able to give you specific instructions on how to install Grub to the mbr.

Partition data
 

Many thanks for the help.
Here's the the result of the fdisk -l command, without the first few lines of cylinder data.

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1/ 1 4883 39216944+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition does not end on cylinder boundary
/dev/sda2/ 4884 9729 38925495 83 Linux

I hope this helps.
Bill

PS I'm not sure what happened to the spacing in the table, but it seems to have vanished when I posted the reply!

Touchpad sorted
 

Item 3 in my list (touchpad) is sorted. Puppy has options for doing this in the Setup menus.

Puppy Linux forum sorted
 

Item 4 on my list is now sorted. I found my username among the 800+ pages of users and worked out what my password is.

Grub still not sorted
 

As you can see from one of my previous posts in this thread, the fdisk -l command gives /dev/sda2 as a Linux partition. But when I use the Puppy Grub bootloader config applet and put in /dev/sda2 I get an error message that says /dev/sda2 is not Linux. Am I making a simple mistake or is this a sign of something more seriously wrong?

I don't have Puppy installed so I can't check that, not really sure what you are referring to? To see how Grub views partitions, boot the Puppy system, log in to a terminal (you should be root) and go to a grub prompt by typing grub in the terminal. You should see this prompt grub> and there type: geometry (hd0), you should see info similar to fdisk output including filesystem type.

If you can boot into the Puppy on the hard drive using the CD, check your /boot and /boot/grub directories to see if you have all the files you need. If you're not sure which files should be there, run the commands:
ls /boot as well as ls /boot/grub and post here.

Have you tried installing Grub to the mbr? You do want to use Grub to boot both systems? If your Puppy install is on sda2 you can install Grub to the mbr with this at a grub prompt:

root (hd0,1)
setup (hd0)
quit

Before doing the above command, make sure the files need are available using the ls command.

Grub files seem to be missing
 

The geometry (hd0) command produced:
drive 0x80: C/H/S= 9729/255/63, The number of sectors = 156301488, /dev/sda
Partition num: 0, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
Partition num: 1, Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

The ls /grub command produced:
ls: cannot access /boot: No such file or directory.

I would like Grub to boot both Puppy and Windows XP.

Many thanks for the help sofar. What do I need to do now?
And why are the grub files missing if that is the case? Are they missing from my installation of Puppy because they have to be deliberately installed using, for example, the Grub install applet?

Your output from the geometry command shows the same as fdisk, windows partition on sda1 and Linux on sda2 (Puppy).

What's this? Is that how you entered it? You do ls /boot to see what is in the /boot directory. Grub is in the boot directory so you should do: ls /boot/grub as I suggested in my last post. If you don't have any grub files there you will need to install grub.

Typo in post
 

Yes, Yancek, I did put in /boot and /boot/grub, but I got the typing wrong in my previous post; sorry. But I think the problem still remains - I need to install grub but when I try to install grub to Sda2 I get the message: Sda2 is not Linux. Could this be because Sda2 is read only rather than read-write? How can I change this?
Bill