Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

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

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.?

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

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?

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.