Discussion, talk and tips
https://forum.puppylinux.com/
Hi,
I have a computer Pentium 4 3ghz with 1.5 GB ram . I want to install Puppy Linux on it .I came to know Puppy Linux no more supports 32bit computers , which kind of defeats its purpose imho . Puppy Bionic 32bit has reached end of life will I be able to install apps from repos if I install it ..?
I am open to suggestions .
Thank you
You could try the Slackware 15 Puppy which has a 32 bit version https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/
And I noticed Peabee has been making 32 bit variants: https://github.com/peabee/releases/releases/ Click Assets to see iso file. However, I have not yet tried them.
Puppy is designed to run from a USB stick and it works fine with that. You can also do a frugal or a full install to a hard drive and I recommend a frugal install. It is not difficult to have multiple Puppies with frugal installs.
With regard to updates and adding new programmes on Bionic I think that you will find that the programmes you want to add from the Ubuntu Bionic Repositories will not work as Ubuntu have moved them to an archive repository and Puppy Bionic doesn't have the correct address. In any event I still happily use Bionic 32 for some activity and it works great on old computers but if you are working from a USB stick install it may hiccup on newer hardware - for instance it does not recognise my touchpad on some laptops and I have to use a mouse. Other than that it is OK.
Vanilla Dpup has 32-bit releases,
https://vanilla-dpup.github.io/
https://github.com/vanilla-dpup/release ... up-x86-9.3
https://github.com/vanilla-dpup/release ... p-x86-10.0
They're big, mostly because they include extras you can remove later, like multi-language support. RAM and CPU consumption should be relatively low, despite the big size.
@asifnaz :-
Do you know for a FACT that your 3GHz P4 is only 32-bit? There were so many variants, and different architectures of this CPU made, that we really need a bit more info on this point.
3 GHz "Northwood" and "Prescott" P4s were 32-bit. But with the final architecture release, "Cedar Mill", the 3 GHz model was 64-bit.....and sported Hyper-Threading, too (which effectively made it a dual-core), along with SSE3 instructions for better reponse.
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Dimkr's suggestion is a good one, if you're concerned about keeping everything bang up-to-date. But as peterw also says above, Bionicpup32 will still do mostly everything you want.....and the PPM 'archive' business ought not to be a problem, because as far as software installation is concerned, we don't tend to use stuff from the PPM that much.
Everything from the PPM is designed to work with the 'parent' Ubuntu release. But Puppy is NOT Ubuntu, and many things are done that little bit differently.......sufficiently different enough that a lot of things installed direct from the PPM won't work OOTB.
The usual recommendation is to use stuff from the "Additional Software" section of the forum, because anything posted here is built to work properly with whatever version of Puppy the author has packaged it for. And in all honesty, as far as Puppy itself is concerned, you need to get out of the mindset of "Must have the newest of everything all the time". Puppy's NOT perfect - nothing in life ever is! - but by design it's a darned sight more secure than most other Linux distros due to the read-only nature of its filesystem at boot-time.
No point updating purely for the sake of updating. Does yr Puppy still do everything you want it to do? If "Yes".....and it ain't "broken".....where's the point in trying to "fix" it? Updates can themselves end up breaking processes which previously worked fine.
I know there's many who can't understand this viewpoint, having had it drummed into them for years that for safety's sake, you "must run the very newest version of everything ALL THE TIME." No doubt I'll get chastised for my somewhat cavalier recommendations, but I'm used to it! 
Mike. 
@dimkr "Vanilla Dpup has 32-bit releases," Can you please elaborate as to what is in the "retro" iso's
of both the 32b and 64b 10.0.23 versions? Thanks for any info.
peterw wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2023 7:37 amAnd I noticed Peabee has been making 32 bit variants: https://github.com/peabee/releases/releases/ Click Assets to see iso file. However, I have not yet tried them.
Puppy is designed to run from a USB stick and it works fine with that. You can also do a frugal or a full install to a hard drive and I recommend a frugal install. It is not difficult to have multiple Puppies with frugal installs.
With regard to updates and adding new programmes on Bionic I think that you will find that the programmes you want to add from the Ubuntu Bionic Repositories will not work as Ubuntu have moved them to an archive repository and Puppy Bionic doesn't have the correct address. In any event I still happily use Bionic 32 for some activity and it works great on old computers but if you are working from a USB stick install it may hiccup on newer hardware - for instance it does not recognise my touchpad on some laptops and I have to use a mouse. Other than that it is OK.
I am looking to install full puppy Bionic on hard drive .Can you please tell me how can i add archived repos . I will install some basic programmes like vlc , gimp and retro gaming emulators .
@asifnaz :-
In all honesty, if you're determined to install Puppy in the same manner as any other distro, i.e., a "full" install in its own partition, then take a word or two of advice from someone who's been running Puppy for many years.
By deploying a "full" install of Puppy, you will be willfully denying yourself the best possible Puppy experience. It may be what you understand, but it is NOT the way that Puppy was intended to work.
I'll re-iterate; the "frugal" install is NOT a cut-down, 'poor-man's' version of Puppy. It is very much the real thing.......except that the "frugal" install is a special way of installing, which uses highly-compressed, read-only files that are decompressed into a virtual RAM-disk at boot. Much Puppy software is built to work with this type of install; some won't work at all with the traditional, "full" install. Or if it does, then it can't be easily uninstalled. Quirks of that nature, etc....
The Puppy way of doing things means that some stuff works in complete reverse to what you would expect. Since Puppy is designed to run fully in RAM, it stands to reason that you need a reasonably well-spec'd machine. The traditional "full" install is only recommended for those with extremely limited resources. And even then, ONLY as a last resort.
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You will also find that Puppy does not usually install stuff from secured repositories; only one or two of the very newest Debian-based Puppies are being built to function more like a mainstream distro. The usual recommendation is to install packages from the "Additional Software" section of this forum, because everything here is specifically built to work with Puppy's slightly oddball way of doing things, and is packaged appropriately.
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It is of course entirely your decision.....but a "full" install does not showcase Puppy in the best possible light.
Mike.
To be able to do an install to the internal drive.
You need to pick a Puppy version and do an ISO image install to a USB stick or burn the ISO image to a CD/DVD.
Boot the computer with this and have Puppy running the computer.
The Puppy version you pick may not be the best one to use.
So may want to try this with several different Puppy versions.
You may like one better than others.
Installing to the internal drive is best done using installer programs that are in a Running Puppy version.
I have a computer Pentium 4 3ghz with 1.5 GB ram .
Are you going to only have Puppy on the internal drive?
No other operating system (OS)?
If some other OS is going to be also on the internal drive.
What other OS?
This can affect how to do the Puppy install to internal drive.
It will help you a lot to understand Puppy Linux if you read some of the topics posted here:
viewforum.php?f=184
If Puppy is the only OS that will be on internal drive.
How to do an install to the internal drive of your computer:
viewtopic.php?t=5241
"Can you please tell me how can i add archived repos"
Sorry, had a quick search of the Ubuntu repositories and decided I was not sure where they have moved them to and what they had done with them. If you do identify them then you can add repositories in the Puppy Package Manager (PPM). Getting the new repositories to work for you will be trial and error and likely to be a frustrating experience.
However, in my experience with Puppy going back to the early days it is best to just use the latest version of Puppy that may meet your needs and work with that. There are 32 bit Puppies that will meet your needs and it is a case of finding the one you like rather than struggle with an old end of life one that is no longer maintained.
Coming in on the full versus frugal install argument. One advantage of frugal is that you can have multiple copies of Puppy on the hard drive for you to try. What you do is have a Puppy on a USB stick, boot the computer with it, use gparted to format the hard drive to ext4 and set the boot flag, create directories with names such as bionic32 and slacko32 and whatever else you want, download respective iso's for the Puppies and open them up and copy the contents into the respective directories and finally run the grub4dos bootloader. Reboot and you should get a list of the Puppies for you to select from. On each on the first shutdown you will get the option to create a save file of about 500 MB but you can go for more if you want. And you can have multiple save files with encryption if you want. You will find that Puppy boots fast from a hard drive using frugal installs and to the user it operationally works the same as a full install so that the user is not aware. If you examine the directory containing the Puppy files you will see an extra file with a save designation.
As bigpup wrote here, https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewto ... p=816#p816 but no one has yet mentioned, if you want to get accurate and pinpoint advice from us, you have to tell us about your computer.
Puppys can do amazing things, run rings around most other operating systems and/or provide the most secure operating system available. But to get your 'there' we have to know where 'here' is.
What a 'frugal install' really means is that it frugally uses your hardware. All it needs is a folder and to be recognized by a boot-manager. That folder can be anywhere --on a partition shared with any other operating system, a USB-Key, or its own partition. It is recommended that any Puppy first be burnt to a CD or USB-key (later recommended, at least by me). No reason to spend time trying to deploy an operating system to your hard-drive if it will never work or provide everything you want from an operating system.
And because of how Puppys are designed to function, not every application or program for deploying Linux Operating Systems work properly with Puppys. Tell us what operating systems you have at your disposal.
Every Puppy could, when first published, perform the most commonly desired tasks such as process words or surf the web. But 32-bit web-browsers capable of handling today's graphic rich and malware infested internet are becoming scarce. And if you have a special interest in some activity it's best that we know so that we can direct you to the right Puppy.
Hello @asifnaz and "woof"!
My experience: I run uPupBB32 on a DELL 8600 laptop. CPU is Pentium "M" running at 1.6GHz.
For anyone reading this - you will need to patch menu-list to get the Pentium "M" running. You'll find that patch here - on the Puppy Forum. Somewhere.
Memory: 2GiB SoDIMM. Will resolve YouTube videos, although the initial download time is noticably slower.
I run an external (USB) kdb and mouse.
Suggest 'Friendly' Puppy - with inbuilt FireFox browser is worth considering.
I particularly like the operation of bash/terminal with 32-bit Puppy (if you use the terminal).
Implementation is better than on uPupBB64.
That's my 2 cent's worth.
собака
cobaka, "You'll find that patch here - on the Puppy Forum. Somewhere."
On the boot "Stanza" there'll be a line beginning with either the word 'linux' or 'kernel'. You'll have to add the forcepae argument to it, so that, for example using grub2's grub.cfg your stanza will read something like this:
menuentry 'Bionicpup 8.0 (sda3/bionic)'{
search --no-floppy --set=root --fs-uuid 39ff128d-806e-45a0-9c0c-4013859ec05d
linux /bionic/vmlinuz psubdir=/bionic pmedia=ataflash pfix=fsck forcepae
initrd /bionic/initrd.gz
}
After the Title (1st line) the stanza on grub4dos's menu.lst would be identical, except the line beginning with linux above would begin with kernel. You boot-installer will have written everything needed except the forcepae argument. So ignore anything else above unless you want to know why the following arguments are on my system: psubdir=/bionic pmedia=ataflash
As I mentioned each Puppy only needs its own folder and can share a partition with other operating systems. Consequently, you could have two Puppys: a new version for accessing the Web and a 2nd Puppy for doing almost everything else, for example TeenPup-Legacy, https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/teenpup.html
The decision on which to install depends on which socket your motherboard has.
If it’s socket 478 then you do not have a 64 bit pc.
If it’s socket 775 then you can get or already have a 64 bit pc.
Generally true.....but not totally 100% correct. It's a little-known fact that Intel manufactured a few special "steppings" of the Pentium 4 'Prescott' in the 64-bit architecture exclusively for IBM. And equally little-known is that there were very few motherboards, again manufactured exclusively for IBM, that would in fact support these 'special' CPUs.
So, don't get any ideas about tracking one of these down for your average Socket mPGA478 mobo. The chipsets won't support the architecture, unfortunately. To all intents & purposes, for your average Joe, the above statement holds true.
Mike.
mikewalsh wrote: ↑Thu Oct 12, 2023 1:26 amGenerally true.....but not totally 100% correct. It's a little-known fact that Intel manufactured a few special "steppings" of the Pentium 4 'Prescott' in the 64-bit architecture exclusively for IBM. And equally little-known is that there were very few motherboards, again manufactured exclusively for IBM, that would in fact support these 'special' CPUs.
So, don't get any ideas about tracking one of these down for your average Socket mPGA478 mobo. The chipsets won't support the architecture, unfortunately. To all intents & purposes, for your average Joe, the above statement holds true.
Mike.
Looks like I’m not 100% correct.
But looks like neither are you.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGHHGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’ve found an article that says exactly what you did.
https://www.cpushack.com/2019/10/01/the ... 4-bit-cpu/
According to that website, one of these special processors is the
SL7QB.
When you go to cpu world you’ll find a list of motherboards that work with that CPU and they were not made by IBM.
“Board which worked with SL7QB and x64 (booted Windows XP x64 CD):
Asrock P4I945GC (latest BIOS)
ASUS P4P800 SE (latest BIOS)
MSI 865G Neo2-P (latest BIOS)
Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000 (latest BIOS)
ASUS P4V8X-MX (latest BIOS)
Gigabyte GA-8S655FX (latest BIOS)”
https://www.cpu-world.com/sspec/SL/SL7QB.html
Let’s destroy the universe so that this problem can finally be solved once and for all! Are you with me?