Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hello forum and good day.
I have been gifted a dell 64bit laptop with windows 10 preinstalled.I have been an avid user of puppy linux for the past 4 years so naturally i have no intentions of using windows and Awould like to install fossapup solely on this laptop.
It has an ssd drive which is a first for me,
what is the procedure for either giving fossapup the entire drive or dual booting as this is unfamiliar ground for me and i dont want to balls it up.

any pointers or advice would be very much appreciated.

Take a look here, you should find most of your answers. Look at the reading guide, then if you need more help ask again.
viewforum.php?f=184
wizard

xenial wrote: ↑Mon Dec 05, 2022 9:56 pm

Hello forum and good day.
I have been gifted a dell 64bit laptop with windows 10 preinstalled.I have been an avid user of puppy linux for the past 4 years so naturally i have no intentions of using windows and Awould like to install fossapup solely on this laptop.
It has an ssd drive which is a first for me,
what is the procedure for either giving fossapup the entire drive or dual booting as this is unfamiliar ground for me and i dont want to balls it up.

any pointers or advice would be very much appreciated.

for an entire drive setup, 4 basic steps in a nutshell

1. boot your laptop from your usb puppy
2. repartition your ssd
3. copy files to your ssd
4. install a bootloader on your ssd

If computer has UEFI bios
Disable secure boot in the UEFI setup.
Also disable fast boot, but that may not be needed.

If you are going to keep Windows 10.
Have or make Windows recovery USB or CD just to have it if something goes wrong.

Then use the Lick installer to do an install of Fossapup64 9.5
Lick will do a frugal install of Fossapup64 and make a boot loader that will give you the choice of which OS to boot.
Lick:
https://github.com/noryb009/lick

If you are going to remove and delete Windows 10
Boot the computer with Fossapup64 installed on a USB stick or CD ( which ever one it can boot from)
Now running the computer with Fossapup64.

Use Gparted program
Make a new partition table (msdos type) on the internal SSD drive. (this will delete Windows 10)
Partition the drive with two partitions.
1st partition a small 300MB size, formatted fat 32, flagged boot. esp.
2nd partition the rest of the drive, formatted ext 3 or 4.

Use the Frugalpup Installer program.
Install Fossapup64 on the 2nd partition.
Install the boot loader on the 1st partition.
when asked what type boot loader to install, choose both.

Fossapu64 9.5 has Frugalpup Installer v20, it will work OK for this process.
Frugalpup Installer is now v38
If you want to use the newer version download and install it before using to do the install.
viewtopic.php?t=337

Shutdown and power off computer.
Remove the Fossapup64 USB or CD.

Power up computer.
If you changed the boot device order in the UEFI setup, change it to 1st device the internal SSD.
Should see the boot menu where you can select normal boot of Fossapup64.

bigpup wrote: ↑Mon Dec 05, 2022 11:54 pm

If you are going to keep Windows 10.
First use Windows 10 defrag program and defrag partition C

DO NOT defrag the SSD, it is not required and can be harmful to it.

xenial wrote: ↑Mon Dec 05, 2022 9:56 pm

It has an ssd drive which is a first for me,

I have two laptops with SSD drives, and I had no problem formatting them ext4, one large partition, copying puppy files to it and running grub4dos. I did change my bios setting to legacy boot, or legacy enabled, as the case may be.

When I did the reformatting I rewrote the partition table in msdos format using gparted, then added the ext4 partiton and boot flag. Running smoothly, booting several different puppy-forum OS's.

@amethyst mentioned in this topic: viewtopic.php?p=74516#p74516 that grub4dos can't be installed on ext4, but @mikeslr informed us that it can if formatted with a puppy gparted, I believe is what he said.

TerryH wrote: ↑Tue Dec 06, 2022 1:48 am

bigpup wrote: ↑Mon Dec 05, 2022 11:54 pm

If you are going to keep Windows 10.
First use Windows 10 defrag program and defrag partition C

DO NOT defrag the SSD, it is not required and can be harmful to it.

Kind of misleading statement.
I guess I should explain this better.
It will actually trim the SSD.

The good news is that Windows 10 does a very good job of identifying the different types of storage and scheduling the proper optimization for each one. You don't need to perform any special steps to enable TRIM support either.

To check the status of all currently available drives, type defrag in the search box and then click Defragment and Optimize Drives from the results list.

The list of volumes displayed in the Optimize Drives window clearly indicates the media type for each one. Conventional hard disks are still defragmented (sorry, there's no Tetris-style progress map). If you click the Optimize button for an SSD, you'll see a brief status message as it trims the current drive, an operation that should complete in a few seconds.

But to not get confused about what to do, I will just remove the statement from my earlier post.
hopefully the SSD is in good shape.
.

TerryH wrote: ↑Tue Dec 06, 2022 1:48 am

bigpup wrote: ↑Mon Dec 05, 2022 11:54 pm

If you are going to keep Windows 10.
First use Windows 10 defrag program and defrag partition C

DO NOT defrag the SSD, it is not required and can be harmful to it.

^^^ +1!!

Aye; agreed. But you DO need to T.R.I.M them on a regular basis......this is the SSD-specific "rubbish-collection-and-tidy-up" routine intentionally developed for solid state drives.

Nobody's asked yet, so I will; what's the machine in question? Specs, please? My recent purchase - a refurb'd, "new-to-me" Dell Latitude D630 (Core2Duo, 4GB RAM, 120GB SSD, Nvidia Quadro graphics) - also came with Win 10. Yeah, RIGHT. That promptly got nuked, and Fossapup64 runs like a dream on there....along with Xenialpup64 and Tahrpup64.

It's a nice machine.

Mike.

Just an update on my situation,
I am currently within windows 10 and have fossapup iso downloaded,I have a 1.9 terabyte usb drive plugged in but i have never installed puppy in this fashion.
Within puppy itself its easy but i have no idea how to prepare the usb and how to install fossapup to the usb from within windows.My intention is to leave the c drive alone altogether and install my selection of pups to the usb and i also have an external hdd.

this machine is a 64bit dell latitude with i5 processor and 8gb of ram.

@xenial :-

Employ some lateral thinking, mate..! Make life easy for yourself, and don't try to do stuff from within Windows. Not until you're comfortable with it, and actually KNOW what you're doing with it.

The Win 10 on MY Latitude never even got booted. I fired it up for the first time with a Puppy-on-a-stick, and 2 minutes later the abortion was history.....nuked with extreme prejudice. I have nowt against MyCrudSoft, OR Windoze, but I simply have no need for it, or any interest in running it. As far as I was concerned, it was just a massive waste of disk space.

-----------------------------------------------------

I assume you've still got your other Puppy machine, yes? If that was me, I'd partition the external drive under that machine, set-up a sub-directory - if you use 'em - or else simply 'install' your chosen Puppy to the entire partition by copying the contents of the ISO over. And don't forget to set the boot-flag IF you're going to install the boot-loader to the external drive, 'kay?

The new Puppy won't begin to set-up any hardware-specific settings until you've booted it for the first time and you've created a save-file/folder. So it won't matter about doing the install itself on a different machine to that which you're going to run it from.

That's what I would do, but.....I'm probably NOT making this very clear.

Mike.

What I usually do, if not wanting to remove ms windows, is shrink the windows partition size. I always use MS windows itself for doing that since its disk admin utility can be trusted best to do that properly. Then I boot a linux distro via usb to allow me to format the after shrinking available space to Linux ext4 format. I then use that for my Linux installations be they a full and/or multiple frugal installs. Main difficulty is how to boot the now also installed linux distros... That can be tricky and 'dangerous' to arrange and more so if secure boot is involved... Simplest solution even then is simply to make a small usb stick that only has grub2 installed on it and use that to boot the actual internal drive installed Linux distros.

One easy way to make such a usb stick is to use Boot menu item of frugalpup installer, which is a utility provided in fossapup. Of course, if you have already installed fossapup to a usb stick such that it boots via grub you can always then use its grub config to boot any and all internal drive Linux installs (even ones put on windows ntfs partitions tho these would need savefiles rather than my preferred save folders for persistence).

Another alternative, which I tend not to use, is the likes of Ventoy or SG2D or Isobooter on usb stick, but you want on internal SSD hence above method.

I am currently within windows 10 and have fossapup iso downloaded,I have a 1.9 terabyte usb drive plugged in but i have never installed puppy in this fashion.

For this big a drive and the fact that all the USB installer programs for Windows will do an install, but not partition and format correctly.
They will boot OK, but the ones that format the drive, usually do a ISO9660 format that will not allow making a save on the drive.

Take a much smaller USB stick and put Fossapup64 9.5 on it.
Boot the computer with it so you are running Fossapup64.
Use the programs in Fossapup64 to setup and do installs on this 1.9TB drive.

Here are some installer programs you can run in Windows:
viewtopic.php?t=157

I suggest using Unetbootin program.
It wants the USB stick formatted fat32 and does not do formatting.
So if new USB stick, it is already fat 32 format.
If not fat 32 format, make it that format, before using it.

Now with the computer booted using the Fossapup64 USB stick.

Partition and format the 1.9TB USB drive, whatever you want to, using Gparted program, running in Fossapup64.
Only requirement.
Make the 1st partition a small 300MB size, formatted fat 32, flagged boot, esp
This will be used for location of the boot loader files and be used as the boot partition.

The rest of the drive partition and format as you want to.
If Windows 10 is ever going to access it.
Make one partition formatted ntfs, so Windows 10 can see it and use it.

Use Frugalpup Installer to do the installs to the 1.9TB USB drive.
Frugalpup Installer program is already in Fossapup64.
It does frugal installs and also installs the boot loader to boot them.

From the main window of Frugalpup installer.
Puppy button does the installs.
After doing an install.
Boot button installs the boot loader to boot it.

Do the frugal installs on any partition, but not the first small one.
Place the boot loader on the 1st partition and only the boot loader.

If you want to install more frugal installed Puppies.
Just do the complete process over with Frugalpup Installer and the new Puppy version.
The new Puppy version will be a separate frugal install from any already on the drive.
When you do the boot loader install again.
It will find all the frugal installs on the drive and setup the boot menu, with entries for all it finds.

Note:
Here are some more detailed steps for using Frugalpup installer:
viewtopic.php?p=1887#p1887
It talks about installing to a USB stick, but process is the same for any type drive.

Frugalpup Installer is now at version 38 and has some added features that the version 20 in Fossapup64 does not have.
You can download and install it from here:
http://www.fishprogs.software/puppy/fru ... index.html
May want to do this update before using it.

I used this procedure to have 15 different Puppy versions installed on a USB hard drive.
I can boot it and choose which one to boot.
Using it right now .