How to install Pupppy alongside Windows XP – Is LICK still a viable way? (Solved)

[venn]

I was on my way to creating a swap partition via Gparted when I came upon an issue with it – it doesn’t want to resize/move around anything in the hard drive, either graphically or by typing in the numeric values cells. In the hunt for a Puppy User Manual to figure out why I can’t change the partition size, I came across this site:
https://discover.hubpages.com/technolog ... -beginners
which mentions that I can install Puppy alongside Windows via the Puppy Linux Windows Installer .exe program inside Windows.

So now I’m wondering if this is a better/easier or a deprecated/defunct way to get Puppy to work alongside Windows XP. I kind of want to do it this “Puppy Linux Windows Installer .exe” way b/c I’m having trouble creating a partition in Gparted with Puppy, so doing it inside Windows might be a good work around, but if it’s not recommended – I won’t.

In trying to find more info on this I did find:
https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=61404
which suggests downloading the current version of LICK works with any Puppy version I like. However, b/c I mostly find old articles when I search “Puppy Linux Windows Installer .exe download” mostly referring to old versions of Puppy AND it wasn’t the 1st suggestion of how to install Puppy alongside Windows (creating a swap partition was the only suggestion I received) – I’m worried this LICK thing is no longer a preferred way of having Puppy play nicely with Windows. So here I am creating this post to gauge opinion on this issue.

[mikeslr]

To specifically answer your question, yes Lick is still a viable way to install Puppys. But, it's not your only option. It's main objective is to provide a means to install Puppys to someone who only has Windows as an operating system. You have two functioning Puppy DVDs, both of which have built-in installers; and into which you could install grub2config and Restart-X to enable their immediate use.

But before doing anything further, I think we should get to the bottom of why you can't resize the hard-drive's partition. IIRC, your computer only has 384 Mbs of RAM. That condition is both the reason why the technique of a 'Full Install' developed and, IIRC, the alternative suggestion of creating a SwapFile or partition was made.
Could you boot-up a Puppy from a DVD, use its gparted examine the hard-drive and then to tell us:
(a) The size of each current partition and
(b) How each is formatted, i.e, Fat, Fat32, NTSF, something else?

By the way, even if possible I wouldn't use gparted to resize a partition being used by Windows unless your intention is to entirely remove Windows; which I don't suggest. Not all Windows programs run under Wine. Until you are familiar with Linux and satisfied that it can provide everything you will ever need having a small Windows Install may be the only means of accomplishing some task. Such as running Lick.

What I would do is boot into Windows than uninstall all programs you know you will never use: such as Web-browsers which are no longer safe.
Then run a program such as ccleaner to remove all the junk, including orphaned files left by uninstall.
Then run defrag to consolidate what's left.
Finally run a Windows program to resize the Windows partition, IIRC, you want to allow the Windows partition to have at least 15% Empty space. Unlike a Frugal Puppy which runs in RAM, Windows constantly reads from and writes to the hard-drive and needs room to work.
To resize the partition you can follow the recipe here, https://www.resize-c.com/howto/partitio ... nload.html. Unfortunately, Partition Magic --which I would have recommended and which that post thought it linked to is no longer available for XP. See here for the reason and alternatives. https://www.geeksdo.com/partion-magic.html
MajorGeeks provides links to EaseUS Partition Master Home Edition, https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/detail ... ition.html. I haven't used it, but it's by the same company whose product I would have recommended.
After resizing, you can quit Windows; boot into a Puppy and use its gparted to format the hard-drive space resizing has made available. It should now appear as "unallocated".

You have 3 choices as to what to do with DataFiles on your Windows partition: (1) Nothing, they can be accessed by any Puppy. (2) Find some place to move them before you resize freeing up more space to become 'unallocated'. (3) Something else: I had a fleeting thought but it was interrupted by my wife's call "Dinner is ready". Maybe I'll be back later.

[bigpup]

Here is the main web site for Lick
https://github.com/noryb009/lick

[bigpup]

Is this your only computer and it needs to keep Windows XP?

You have no other computer that is much better specs and newer Windows OS?

[venn]

After assimilating the info gathered from this forum, more research about LICK, + the various ways of installing in general from
https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/install.html

And this video showing what looks to be the official Puppy website at 1 point in time used to endorse LICK, stating in instructions it was the way to install. Of course IDK why they took those instructions down, maybe just b/c they didn't want it looking like you NEED it to install Puppy, so moved to instructions that only talk about Gparted?

And this site making it seem like if LICK doesn't work, it can simply be uninstalled:
https://www.trishtech.com/2016/09/insta ... indows-10/

I've decided to try LICK to to see how it works out. The extra 15% needed for Windows is a new piece of info that has thrown a fairly large wrench into this installation thing, particularly if I create the partition btw the 2 OS's.

I was just going based off greengeek's recommendation of 2GB for Puppy, which I could've easily swung on the 11.24gb hard drive, of which Windows is currently occupying 8.21gb. But now that I've done the math to give Windows that 15% wiggle room, it'd be a very tight fit for Windows+Tahr. If I create the partition btw the 2, I could
A) only give Puppy 1821.18mb/1.77gb
OR
B) give Puppy the full 2gb, but Windows would only have 984.24mb to play with - an 11% cushion
OR
C) try to split the difference (e.g. give Puppy 1.8-1.9gb) in the hopes each could squeak by, while concurrently risking that neither 1 would have the space it needed
OR
D) remove MS Office 2007 to free up more space for the OS's. But at that point, I might as well remove XP altogether b/c there wouldn't be any apps to use at all - it doesn't even have a PDF reader. Which admittedly, wouldn't be that much of a loss since Tahr has everything I need already.

RE:. Why Gparted won't resize...I sort of know why, but it is a bit odd.

Currently there is only 1 partition housing XP, in NTFS, which Puppy states it supports, per
https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/install.html

When I click on the Mount icon on the desktop, it shows this same info + that I have the option of unmounting the hard drive.

But pulling the drive up to be partitioned in Gparted it has a little golden triangle, w/ an exclamation mark inside, next to it. Clicking that, I get a message saying NTFS is not supported, possibly due to me needing a software package: ntfsprogs/ntfs-3g

So I either need to download this NTFS package/EaseUS Partition to do a bunch more steps to get Tahr installed or LICK. Given that you are saying to not use Gparted to make a partition in Windows (despite Gparted being the official Puppy instructed way to make a partition per the 1st link above) anyways, on top of it just not working right now
+ I'm no longer comfortable creating the partition myself b/c I can't figure out how to split the 11.24gb btw XP vs. Puppy
+ LICK was at some point the officially endorsed way of installing Puppy, which I suspect will be able to calculate whether the 2 OS's will play well together on the 11.24gb - giving some message that it can't continue if they won't
+ LICK seems like it can just be uninstalled if it doesn't work, at which point I could then try the create-the-partition-myself method of installing (IDK if LICK uninstalls Puppy along w/ it, but sounds like Puppy would be stored all in 1 folder on the c:/, or wherever you chose to put it, which sounds easy enough to delete if needed),

I kinda know I'm just going to end up downloading LICK. I'll still try to watch some YouTube videos to see if I can watch the 2 different approaches to installing before commiting (at least the 1 I posted above). But unless I come across something saying LICK corrupts something/should be avoided for some reason, I'll give it a go.

I know what you mean about dinner being called - food has the same effect on me. I was watching a movie w/ family friends 1 Thanksgiving. There was a ~15-20min break for pumpkin pie + ice cream (my fav!). Afterwards, I forgot what was happening where we left off in the movie (no I wasn't that old at the time). Mmmmm pie.

[mikeslr]

Depending on which 32bit Tahrpup you use, its ISO has a download size between 200 and 350 Mbs. The ISO is compressed. A Full install will decompress it. It will need between 2 and 3 times the download size; thus somewhere between 400 and 1050MBs (= 1GB +/-) of hard-drive space. From what you've written, the only thing you'd need not included in Tahrpup's ISO would be a current web-browser. Also decompressed, add another 300 Mbs (+/-).

So you have sufficient space for a Full Install. But you can't do a Full install nor (its alternative) add a swap-partition without resizing the partition Windows uses. On the other hand, a Frugal install could 'co-exist' on the same partition as Window and Lick would install it. A frugal install does not decompress the files, merely relocates them to the hard-drive. [That's the reason the 'full install was developed'. To actually make use of the files, themselves, they have to be decompressed, either in RAM (which happens as you access them under a frugal install); or on the hard-drive which is why a Full Install requires a Linux Formatted partition. With a frugal install, the only file-system which in not compressed is the SaveFile, a block on your hard-drive which is created as a Linux file-system].

But without a swapfile or partition you won't be able to use a current Web-browser. 384 Mbs just won't cut it.

I think you have to 'bite the bullet' and remove Windows. I think you can use gparted to do that. Boot your tarhpup-CD. Start gparted. Select the hard-drive. On gparted's Menu select Device>Create Partition Table. Select msdos and click Apply. And cross you fingers. Or wait for someone to confirm this recipe as I'm working with a flaky memory which also recalls that on a couple of occasions that recipe resulted in 'bricked' Thumb-drives.

Of course, having wiped Xp from the computer, you can't use LICK. But then you won't have to. You just boot up your Tahrpup-CD and use its built in installer.

On the other hand, you have noting (but time and effort) to loose if you (a) use Lick to just do a frugal install of tahrpup to the NTFS partition Windows uses; and (b) (if you've been able to port xenialpup's 'swapfile-creator' module to tahrpup also create as large a swapfile as you can manage. If Windows XP protests --well, you don't really need it. And if browsing the web under tahrpup proves painful, you can 'bite the bullet' later.

P.S., I just revisited your post here, viewtopic.php?p=60687#p60687. If you still have the xenialpup cd, the easiest way to create a swapfile would be:
After doing a frugal install of tahrpup to the hard-drive, boot up the xenialpup using the cd. Use garted to see how much unused space remains on the drive. Then Immediately shut down. Select the smallest SaveFile you can, the largest swapfile you can. You'll delete xenialpup's SaveFile later.

[FYI, actually the preference for SaveFolders is just that, a preference which makes life easier for newbies. SaveFiles existed for a decade before SaveFolders were invented. But as mentioned previously, a SaveFile is a block on your hard-drive which has Linux Formatting. The block has a fixed size: can not be decreased and only be increased by initiating a program which will do so on your next reboot. A SaveFolder has no fixed size: expands and contracts as you put things in/ take things out].

[venn]

Your reply made me want to check the swapfile thing again, now that I had deleted all the extra save-files of all the Puppies I had tried, which got my freespace up to 3gb. Oddly, Xenial now recognized the boot as non-initial - so my settings were there. However, only on the 3rd boot, every boot thereafter was back to being an initial boot. So I think it has trouble reading from the USB over parking the savefile on the hard drive.

I thought I had deleted the swapfile, along with the others during pre-defrag cleanup, which Puppy said there was 0mg of swap next to noting the 365mb of RAM when I got to the create-swapfile screen. But in telling Puppy to create the swapfile again, said it already existed + did I want to replace it!? I said yes + navigated to where it said it was saving it. Lo + behold:. It creates it on the USB drive sitting next to the Xenial savefile + Newmoon files - not the hard drive like I thought it was! Since it doesn't ask you where you want to save the swapfile, I guess it is finding where you keep your savefile/folder then puts the swapfile in the same place.

Since the USB is an 8gb drive, I tried bumping the swapfile to 4gb to see if that would do anything for Newmoon - it didn't. Now that I that I see giving it the biggest swapfile I could doesn't work, onto seeing what a frugal installation does.

HaHa!! I was going to ask for a confirmation on a summary of what it seems to me that LICK is, based on your reply:. It appears LICK is an external-to-puppy frugal-install wizard that walks you thru the steps of doing a (well) frugal install, esp. helpful for newbies like me. I did a web search on the idea + came across: https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=336

Thanks for answering my question 2 yrs in advance!!

As intimated in your last response, the frugal install didn't get Newmoon to work. I just wanted to note some oddities in doing the LICK method + installation in general.

RE: installation via LICK
While installing LICK itself + Tahrpup worked for the most part, there seemed to be an issue with how Tahr booted. The boot loader works fine, but the 1st choice of how Tahr was to boot only gave me a "failed" error message - where the only thing I could do was press the power button to shut the computer off. Only the 2nd option to boot with no savefile worked, forcing me into an "initial" boot everytime. Inconsequential to me, as I could see I wasn't going to keep the installation w/ Newmoon not working, but this is curious nonetheless.

RE: recommendation to not use Gparted
That's fine, since it's not working + I can't find where I'm suppose to download the ntfsprogs/ntfs-3g package it's calling for anyway, but interesting that the official Puppy instructions are to use it in all 3 methods of installation (frugal, USB, or full) on:. https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/install.html

Since I'm moving on to doing a full install, I'll consider this question solved.

[houndstooth]

Marked solved but 2-cents:

The best way to dualboot XP is using the XP bootloader.

http://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.p ... f9a4d4828c