I won't go into detail about how we run multiple Puppies from a single partition, because it'll just confuse the issue. But, even with our method, if I'm trying Puppy out for the first time on a new (to me) machine - frequently a refurb anyway! - I will limit myself to a single install.......and work out the 'kinks' with that one first. Once that's successful, THEN I'll consider installing a second or third Puppy.
Ya gotta learn to walk
before you can run. That apples to ALL stages of your life.....and any learning process.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I
will make a recommendation here.
Although the veterans amongst us in the Puppy community tend to employ the "quick'n'dirty" method, when we were putting together the new Beginner's section on the Puppy Forum around 18 months ago, we tested a whole bunch of USB 'installer'-type apps. We soon came to the conclusion that the best types were those that were 'dd'-based.
Balena Etcher is one such, though because of Puppy's somewhat unique set-up, it refuses to work for us.......but the one we found that
consistently worked for us, and created a fully-functional, bootable USB
every single time was the ROSA ImageWriter.
It's simply an easy-to-use GUI front-end for 'dd'. QT-based, this thing has been statically-compiled, and hence will work literally
anywhere. Although you can obtain it from, say,
pkgs.org, these are invariably RPM packages. I know most of you tend to like installing the proper, correct type of package for your distro; most of you aren't as "hands-on" as we are in Puppyland!
We found the simplest way to obtain this is to download the pre-compiled binaries as a tarball direct from the ROSA wiki:-
ROSA ImageWriter
Scroll down below the image to the section titled "Where can I take it?" (bear in mind this is a translation from the original Russian wiki!).....and just click on the appropriate tarball for your architecture. There's both 64-bit AND 32-bit, so this'll still work for those of you running 32-bit distros on really elderly hardware.
When you unzip the tarball, you end up with a directory containing the ImageWriter binary, along with a couple of "ReadMe's" and a 'Lang' sub-directory. Keep this directory as-is, though you can move the directory anywhere you like.......all you need to do is to click on the binary to execute it directly. (You may need to go into 'Properties', or whatever your file-manager calls it, to set it as executable).
This thing just
works. Stat. And I've never met a distro yet that doesn't come with 'dd' pre-installed.....
Mike.