(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I'm confused to what is going on to my BionicPup installation. Last time I booted, everything was fine, but then the system appears to be corrupt and unable to load its own icons after I installed coolreader. Static is coming out of my PC and the desktop icons won't load. When I tried using an image viewer, things would not load properly.

Even my wifi broke. What could be going on? Can I fix this installation or am I forced to just reinstall?

Any tips?

EDIT: This was a Bionic32 Pup

You don't say how you installed Puppy but a full install is not recommended. If you have a frugal install (the preferred and recommended way to install) the base sfs stays intact, is in read-only format and is almost impossible to corrupt. Most users use a savefile/folder (which is read/write) with a frugal install to record personal savings (be it installation of addiditional applications, personal configurations or whatever) and this is where potential problems may occur almost certainly due to user operation/input. If you use a read/write system like a savefile to record your changes, frequent backups are essential as fallback should anything go wrong. There are ways to operate Puppy without the use of a savefile. Personally, I don't use a savefile but save my system changes to an adrv or ydrv which is read-only like the base sfs.
So - if you haven't before, do a frugal install instead (this is highly recommended). If you then decide to save your changes to a savefile/folder, do frequent backups or use an alternative method like mentioned above to save your changes.

Which Bionicpup?
There are several versions.
If nothing else, tell use the exact name of it's iso file you downloaded.

Does this still happen after you do a completely power off, wait 1 minute, power on, and boot to Bionicpup?

@ XiaoSpence:-

I'd try a 'power-cycle'.

Shutdown. Unplug the computer (if a laptop, remove the battery, too). Press & hold the power button for at least 30 seconds - 60 is better. This ensures the power capacitors are completely drained, and not holding any residual 'juice'.

Re-connect everything. Now; power-on, and boot back into Puppy.

What happens?

(BTW, I have to agree with Nic. 'Full' installs are definitely not the norm for Puppy; they're usually reserved as a last-ditch attempt if you're grimly determined to install Pup to elderly, low-spec hardware....)


Mike.

Funny - my Bionicpup64 desktop was similarly broken when I booted up yesterday, but there were ext4-fs errors during the text part of boot (size mismatch, directory overrun...) on loop2. The menus and task bar still worked but the desktop was grey with a lot of warning triangles. So an unmountable savefile can break the desktop.

I just deleted the savefile and copied a backup.

More relevant to you, since you had just installed a package. I installed pcmanfm-qt a few weeks ago. That broke the desktop in a similar way. I expect it installed an xdg-data package, of some kind, as a dependency, which overrode the Puppy one.

In that case I went into the package manager and, from the uninstall page, I selected the pcmanfm package plus all of the dependencies that went with it, and uninstalled them.

Having done that the desktop went back to normal.