How to recover from a blank desktop/X not starting

[stevezsuzska]

I am using a frugal installation of Puppy 5.28. While trying to set myself up to compile (which is new territory for me), X failed to start after a reboot. At the time I had just installed gcc and was trying to install a pet to provide glib-compile-schemas. I successfully ran xorgwizard but X still would not start.
I managed to start JVM instead but apart from the menu bar at the bottom and the start menu, the rest of the screen is black. I do not appear to be able to start any applications, except Opera, which I notice is stored as a separate sfs file.
Is this likely to be a corruption of the pup_save.3fs file? Have I accidently overfilled it? Can I recover it? I would like to try updating the Puppy files (vmlinuz, initrd.gz pup_xxx.sfs, zdrv_xxx.sfs ) from the command line but don't know how to do things like mounting a USB stick etc. Nor can I find these files from the Puppy command line. I tried a Xubuntu live cd, which allows me to see the Puppy system files but no permissions to modify them. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

[Dewbie]

Have I accidently overfilled it?

I'm not sure about 5.2.8, but there's usually a graphic at the bottom-right of your screen, next to the clock, that shows how much free space is in the save file.

Always store a backup save-file copy on a USB flash drive, just in case.

Then, when a replacement is needed, choose puppy pfix=ram boot option, right-click / delete the bad save file, and drag / drop / copy the backup in its place.

What are your hardware specs?

[stevezsuzska]

Thanks for the reply. I'll try it out when I get home. I have a Toshiba 4320 with a 600 MHz P3 and 256 MHz RAM.

[Dewbie]

General rule of thumb with Puppies is (RAM) or (RAM + swap) =512MB.

So if you haven't yet set up a 256MB Linux-swap partition:
* Choose puppy pfix=ram boot option
* Go to Menu / System / GParted partition manager
Try this first, before you address the save-file issue.

(Your machine might work even better with Wary.)