Linux

[Bella]

1.38GB of HD left.

Hacchan's decided to freeze and furthermore "crash"....I dunno what I just saw, but it looked suspiciously like a BSOD....

...and she wonders why I want to run Puppy on her

Now it's running Scandisk...

I wonder if my external HD would work to back the files up...I'm a bit scared to try, as K8's probably going to come back formatted, and I don't want Hacchan screwing up my backup files, XD

**edit**

nevermind, it can't detect the HD

[C-Chan]

That's kinda what I thought,... External HDs appeared LONG after Hacchan was around.  ^^'

How many files do you plan to evac?  I guess it couldn't help to use an army of floppies to assist, no?

Does the Compaq have an ethernet port, or just a modem?

Oh, and I thought 1.38 gigs was what the wholse size of the hard drive was,... can you tell me what the original size of the hard drive is?  (here's hoping its like 4 gigs).

Added after 1 minutes:

It there's no way of evacuating some very HUGE files, all is still not lost.  You just take your chances creating the swap partition, then you use Puppy to evacuate your files to your external HD.  Unlike Hacchan, Puppy is more in touch with modern contrivances.  ^___^

[Bella]

I'll probably try installing in an hour or two.

[C-Chan]

WAH?!!  @o@

Aren't we doing all this to get the LiveCD going?  ^__^
Or are you just using the word "install" loosely?  

Don't scare me like that.  -v-
Wait till we can get a LiveCD environment working and your files evacuated out of Hacchan before we consider HD installation.  ^__^

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On the other hand, if you're feeling particularly self-confident, you can also partition about 400 megs for Puppy-chan to reside in.  In any event, do keep us posted, cause you've had some pretty trippy luck with all this.  ^____^'

Oh and again, do you know how big your ENTIRE hard drive is (including Hacchan's used space)?

Added after 7 minutes:

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FYI, I kinda feel like I'm sticking my snout in this too much, so if you want I can leave you be to experiment.  

Otherwise, I can go over a quick game plan before you begin.  -v-

[Bella]

The entire HD is 6.28 GB.

And I would use a liveCD, in fact I'd prefer that...but I thought the compaq's 64 MB RAM wasn't enough (or would the swap file make up for this?)

And no, you're not interfering at all

So, with 64 MB RAM, how can I use a liveCD running Puppy 2.16?

[Tsubashi]

You're right that 64MB is not enough RAM to comfortably run puppy-chan, but you also tentatively corrected yourself. Yes, it is the opinion of myself, and I do believe C-Chan-senpai, that the swap file should take up the slack and allow you to run puppy-chan! ^v^

I think Senpai's been trying to talk you through the LiveCD route the entire time, so none of the instructions have changed.

The entire HD is 6.28 GB.

Is it a Bigfoot drive? ^__^
Mine was ~7.5 GB, and goodness was that thing huge! (Physical size, not capacity)

[Bella]

Follow these instructions?

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/SwapFile

I'm not going to try it yet, though. I want to make sure I know what I'm doing

[C-Chan]

Fufufu... believe it or not, I'm writing from my own version of Puppy.  ^__^

Had the bright idea of FORCING SAM Linux into my AMD64 machine,... was halfway successful, but could only load up the manager using the Vesa driver.  And after crashing and burning with ATI's nightmarish flgrx proprietary driver, I need Puppy-chan to undo my mess (hopefully I can use the Radeon open source driver).

In any event....

*starts reading*

[Bella]

But it says the instructions are only for 1. Puppy releases, not 2. releases : /

[C-Chan]

The entire HD is 6.28 GB.

WOOHOO AND A HALF!!!  ^V^
See, now THAT'S what I'm talking about!  
And here I thought you were just barely eeking out an existence,... why, with 6 gigs you could (way down the line) install SAM Linux with room to spare and then some!  ^v^

And yes, despite the 64megs of onboard RAM, a healthy 256 megs of swap should more than compensate (though you might as well make it 300, ne)?  ^__^
Bear in mind that half the crashes you've been getting with Hacchan MAY in fact be due to memory leaks, so we want to be able to prevent those at all costs while using Linux (LiveCD or not).  

*keeps typing*

[Tsubashi]

But it says the instructions are only for 1. Puppy releases, not 2. releases : /

note: it says "may only be current"
The implication being that differences between versions may be inconsequential
Just hazarding a guess ^__^

[C-Chan]

Right, as for those instructions, if you already have that Partition CD ready, you won't need to do the Puppy Swap thing anymore.  Here's the game plan I recommend:

*keeps typing*

Added after 4 minutes:

1)  Boot the computer with that Parted CD.  If the floppy works, it should take you into a menu screen.  According to the instructions, select the option for computers with less than 128MB of RAM.

2)  Hopefully this option will let you run GParted somehow -- if so (and hopefully you've rehearsed it like I told you so), resize the primary partition (I'm guessing there's just one) so that you end up with 300MB of free space at the end.  Click Apply.

3)  Create a new primary partition in that 300MB of free space and format it as "Linux-Swap".  Click Apply again.

4)  With your swap file created, reboot with Puppy 2.16 instead.

5)  Modern puppies already autodetect and use preexisting swap files, so you needn't do a thing other than to watch the colorful DOS-like screen work its magic.

6)  If it asks you for a graphics driver (Xorg or XVesa), I'd recommend Vesa just cause it'll give you the least amount of trouble (later on you can experiment with Xorg).  My advise it to choose 1024x768 at 16bit color for optimum performance.  ^__^

7)  And I think I'm getting ahead of myself... let's just make sure this works.  ^^;

Added after 1 minutes:

If you don't mind, I'm gonna disappear for a bit while I restart to either SAM or Xubuntu (my repair job is done).  ^.^

[Bella]

Thanks, I'll try this tomorrow (again, lol).

Added after 9 hours 55 minutes:

Well, I'm running parted magic now. All looks well, except that it's very slow. The pointer freezes on screen, and I can't bring up GParted.

[C-Chan]

Well, at least you're only partially unfortunate today.  ^__^
Naturally it's gonna be slow because you're running a LiveCD with only 64megs of RAM.

(Though I forgot to ask you what your processing speed was, but I assume it's at least a 500MHz...  -v-)

Lesse, did you select the default option or the one for computers with less than 128MB of RAM?



Some more instructions if necessary:

http://partedmagic.com/docs/menus.html

http://partedmagic.com/docs/gparted.html

Worse comes to worse, we'll just try another partitioner.  -v-;

[Bella]

I rebooted, and started it under "lowmem". I'm now running GParted, and I'm seeing three lines on the first page:

(under partition) /dev/hda1 (under filesystem) fat32 (size) 6/30 GiB (used) ... (unused) ... (flags) boot.

next line:

/dev/hd2. Extended. 1.57 GiB. (used) ... (unused) ... (flags) Iba (or maybe lba)

next line:

  /dev/hda5. fat32. 1.57 GiB. (used) 710.88 MiB (unused) 898.54.