Bionicpup32 stopped working after installing apps from PPM

[tucumano88]

Hi guys! I've just recent turn on my desktop and installed some apps from PPM. The weird stuff is that somehow different apps cease to work. Not even the leave button worked. Force a shutdown, and then Puppy turn off, with the main upper icons, and the navbar but with a black desktop image. Can't select anything and can't change anything. Did xwin and xwin -default but can't come back to a previous desktop or God knows what...I'm desperate

[bigpup]

Welcome to installing Linux software!

What specific Bionicpup version?

What specific apps did you install?

What happens if you do a complete power off, let computer sit with no power for at least 1 minute.
Now do power on boot.?

[tucumano88]

Bionicpup 32 bits

Xmpp apps (Dino, gajim and pidgin). An xfce desktop from tahr repositories and an app image

When I do a complete power off and turn on again, open on the same way in a faulty xorg that won't allows me to open nothing

[bigpup]

I hope you have bionicpup32, installed as a frugal install, and have made a good working backup copy of the save.
Yes/no?
If yes.
Do you know how to boot not using the save?

[mikeslr]

You've just installed a Model-T engine into you 2021 Mustang and wonder why it doesn't run.
"Bionicpup 32 bits... An xfce desktop from tahr repositories."

Puppy is not A distro. It is a family of distros. You can't mix & match. Well, sometimes you can. But only carefully after first backing up your Save, just in case things go South.

xfce is the most likely culprit. Hopefully, as bigpup wrote, you did a frugal install. If not, you basically screwed and will have to start from scratch. With a frugal install you are working with file-systems which 'merge in RAM' at boot-up. With the exception of your SaveFile-or-Folder, those file systems are all READ-ONLY. The things you install or change are only written to your SaveFile/Folder. You can boot into a pristine system --the one you had before making ANY changes with the boot-argument 'pfix=ram'.
What boot-loader are you using? If grub4dos, the last boot choice on the initial screen says something about 'Advance Menu'. Select that, and a new GUI will open. The second listing mentions something about "RAM mode". That's the one you want. [Sorry, I've converted to using grub2config so can't be more specific]. If you're not using grub4dos, tell us your boot-loader and we'll tell you how to boot 'pfix=ram'.
If the applications you mentioned are the only ones you installed it's probably faster to delete your current Save and begin again from your pristine system. But if you have a lot of applications installed there may be a way to fix things. No guarantees.

Never mind. I was going to explain how to find the files which xfce wrote to your Save, and how to delete ONLY them. So I downloaded and unpacked the xfce-4.12_tahr.pet. It contains hundreds of files. You'd consume far more time manually deleting them than just starting with a pristine bionicpup and re-installing the applications you want.
But if you saved documents within your Save, you may want to recover them. Let us know, and we'll explain how.