That's a shame.
I like the puppy distribution. I'm not a linux expert,
but I've experimented with enough different live versions
to appreciate the fact that Puppy just boots up and
(almost) everything works!!
But the single MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE of puppy is the
multisession capability.
It allows complete portability.
I can make small configuration changes that persist
across a reboot. I don't have anything on the hard drive.
Don't even need a hard drive.
Yes, there are workarounds. I currently use the Feather
distribution running in VirtualPC 2007 on an XP
laptop. Nice thing about Feather is that it's
compatible out of the box with the hardware abstraction
layer used by VPC2007. It talks seamlessly to the fake lan card
and XP takes care of translating that to the real wireless hardware.
Works fine, just isn't portable. I really like
the notion of everything being written back to the cd in Puppy.
But I digress...back to the multisession issues...
I'm not very smart and I've been messing with Puppy for all of three
days. There's no way I can solve the problems, but I might
be able to stimulate thought in someone who can.
I've read a bunch of conjecture here and elsewhere on the web
about the multisession problem. I'm not buying it;
and here's why.
I see two symptoms.
First problem is multisession boot.
I have several desktop and laptop systems with read only cd,
rw/cd, rw/dvd, readonlydvd/cdrw combo drives.
ALL of my systems work fine with the original distribution
while it's still single session.
After you write the second session is where things fall apart.
These do not work:
The Toshiba SD-R2312 1A06fw dvd-ROM/cdrw combo drive will NOT boot a multisession disk. (compaq Presario 900)
The Toshiba SM-1902B read only cd drive will NOT boot a multisession disk. (Dell Inspiron 7500)
The symptom is that the CD is ignored and the bios proceeds to boot
from the hard drive.
These work:
The Compal TSB24H1 Slim DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive WILL boot a multisession disk. (Compal CL-51)
The Teac CD-224D readonly cd WILL boot a multisession disk. (Toshiba Satellite 2545CDS)
The Liteon LTR-52327 CD-RW drive WILL boot a multisession disk. (Random desktop P450)
These are ALL internal drives. They all work fine with single-session disks.
This is a limited sample, but there appears to be a trend. Toshiba drives
won't boot multisession cd's. Would be interesting to see statistics from
a bigger sample of drives.
It's either the drive or the bios.
Puppy doesn't even get started, so it can't work around this.
I claim this is THE most important feature of Puppy.
If there are many drives that fail, somebody should take another look
at the architechture to see if there's an alternative that does work.
Keep the disk single session and find some other way to save the persistent data.
Once you hand off exectution to Puppy, it can do anything it wants with the
CD format.
Given the choice of a multisession disk that's compatible with other operating systems
but doesn't perform it's Puppy function, or an incompatible disk format that does
succeed in working puppy persistent storage, I'd vote for an incompatible
architecture that WORKS.
The second issue is writing to the CD.
I have tested two drives
The Toshiba SD-R2312 1A06fw dvd-ROM/cdrw combo drive
The Compal TSB24H1 Slim DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive
Both are internal laptop drives.
Both have the same write problem.
They spit out a bunch of error messages and eject the cd.
The error messages have been posted multiple times by others, but I can repeat them
if it matters.
If I poke the CD back in, sometimes more than once, they do continue
on and write a multisession disk that will boot properly in any of the
above drives that will boot a multisession disk.
Now for the weird stuff. I have a six session CD that I just wrote with the Compal
drive with the errors/eject issue. I booted that in the Liteon LTR-52327
then tried to save the session. The system locked up at "performing OPC"
for a while then ejected the cd with a "can't write disk error".
I'd left the compal system running.
I put the CD back into the Compal unit and exited saving session.
This time, it saved the session without complaining. ????
Then I put the CD back in the Liteon drive, booted windows and asked
Nero to write to the disk. Wrote flawlessly. I don't think the OPC error
was the fault of the liteon drive or the media.
Maybe there's a clue there?
Most of my experiments have been with HP 12X CD-RW media.
I did make one CDR disk and experienced exactly the same
multisession boot and write error message problems
with it.
Given that Puppy DOES have control of the write process, and can write the drive,
it should be able to understand the error conditions and work around them without
ejecting the cd in the process.
And I LOVE the completion screen: "Puppy has successfully saved your session...unless it didn't..."
That's really comforting. ;-(
I don't mean to be kicking the Puppy. It's a fine distribution. It would be nice if it's coolest feature and primary distinguishing characteristic
...persistent storage on the CD, (user multisession, but not necessarily using
the multisession cd paradigm)... worked on a wider range of drives...
specifically, the ones I have
mike