n9viw wrote:Also, how is it that a WINDOWS emulator recovery disk can repair or recover LINUX files?
That's one I've not heard before. Usually Windows can't even read the partition -- Puppy is usually installed to an ext2 or ext3 partition, and IIRC Windows needs additional software to recognize that.
IIRC, if you're installing to NTFS or FAT32, that will cause you problems as well -- I particularly recall the blatant warnings in the Universal Installer about frugal on NFTS being slow and tedious but functional, but I've never done it. It just didn't sound like a good idea (which I think was the goal of that text).
I seem to recall making that mistake about "puppy pfix=ram" vs "pfix=ram" myself a couple times. Someone on here was quite patient with me when that happened
I do think that's a problem that could be easily fixed in software, but I don't program, so I'm somewhat talking out my you-know-what here.
FWIW, I'm sorta a Puppy hypocrite. I like Puppy a lot, and I recommend it to a lot of people, but my main system (Dell laptop) still runs XP every day. *shrugs* I'm not sure why. I think it's one of those "taking comfort in familiarity" sorts of things, but I'm really not sure. I'm not a representative sample here, though -- most of the people on this forum haven't used Windows (unless forced) in a couple years at least. I know one fellow (no longer active, sadly) who NEVER used Windows. Puppy was his intro to computers -- not quite sure how that worked, though.
My us$0.02:
every Puppy (real or software-based) poops the carpet once in a while. You really shouldn't hold that against it.
To expand: while I'm sorry for your troubles... firstly, I'm not sure that they're Puppy related (you had hardware problems, too, etc.), and secondly, if Windows had been the OS that borked, you'd be reinstalling, having (most likely) lost everything, meanwhile swearing that "next time" you'd have backups. You'd likely also be just plain swearing, too.
While you should always have working backups of the important stuff (I'm something of a hypocrite here as well -- I'm not very good at that), an OS that's somewhat more fault-tolerant is good for you. Puppy has that fault-tolerance built in, if you do a frugal install -- you can usually recover a corrupt savefile by booting "puppy pfix=ram", mounting the corrupt savefile (just like a drive), then copy over your files, unmount the bad savefile, and create a new one over the old.
All of that said... there are over a hundred thousand Linuxes out there. Maybe Puppy isn't for you (I think you're giving up too soon, but that's me). Check out some others. Give them a chance. But it's really not fair to say "WHOOPS! Had ONE SMALL PROBLEM with this one distro! Guess I better go back to Windows and stay!" Linux is (generally, and --IMO-- supposed to be) free. It doesn't cost you anything but time to try it.
Oh, one other thing... I promise this is the end of my sermon
This forum has two purposes, one being to spread Puppy knowledge around us.
The other is to help people like you.
Give us a chance, too.