Puppy CD cannot start x windows

[colingw]

I just tried to run puppy from livecd for the first time, but when I select either Xorg or XVesa, it hangs on a black screen. I've tinkered with a few distros in the past, but never got very good, so I'm a bit lost as to what to do. I had the same problem when I tried running DSL (which makes me thing my computer is the problem), however I'm writing this from an Ubuntu 5.04 live cd (the only other livecd i could find), so I know that something will work... windows is having no such problems, either. Is there any tests I should run or suggestions as to how to fix the problem? Or any other information I need to provide?

the specs:
Puppy 3.00
P4 2.4, P4S8X, Radeon 8500, 1GB Ram, etc...

[Bruce B]

Welcome!

There have been two other similar complaints within the past few days with version 3.00

May I suggest trying Puppy version 2.17.1? See if results vary.

[designengineer]

I had the same problem on an older version. Xorg or Xvesa did not recognize my video setup on my laptop, so it would halt at a blinking cursor.Assuming you have the same problem, here is a link to the step by step fix I was given:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=11931

Ignore the first 8 posts and start at the one from Guest on Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 12:48 pm.

It was tedious, but it worked.

Greg

[colingw]

DE, I tried doing what was recommended in the thread you linked to. I started it up in command line, ran xorgconfig, using the specs I found in the manual for the monitor and both the "ati" and "radeon" drivers, but nothing worked. I don't actually get a blinking cursor on the screen. The screen goes completely blank, as if the video card is outputting nothing.

Out of curiosity, how did you go about running puppy off your FAT partition? I mounted the iso in windows, copied the files onto the fat partition, and created a boot disk, but had no success in running from the hard disk (was trying to run 2.17.1 without burning a new disk--don't want to produce a bunch of coasters).

[designengineer]

I created a FAT partition and boot using a floppy. The main information is here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=8908

I made modifications since then, such as putting everything on the root of the FAT partition drive.
So that I absolutely could not inadvertently mess up anything on my WindowsXP partition,I partitioned my hard drive to give me a "D" drive, then placed everything suggested on that drive. I then made a bootable disk with WindowsXP and added this to the autoexec.bat file:

c:\go.bat (since it is a bootable floppy made by XP, it does not even see the NTFS partition that XP resides on, so to the floppy, it is the "C" drive, not "D")

Now when I want to use Puppy, I just boot from that floppy and it brings up the fastest little operating system in the known world. No messing with Grub or the MBR or anything.

[alienjeff]

Now when I want to use Puppy, I just boot from that floppy and it brings up the fastest little operating system in the known world. No messing with Grub or the MBR or anything.

Excellent! Your conservative and non-intrusive approach looks good. A step-by-step how-to posted to HOWTO (solutions) section of this forum would be a great addition for those hesitant to upset their Windows installations.

I boot from floppy, too. However, all my boxes have been purged of all remnants of Redmond a long time ago.