Distros : Puppy - Tweak

Change The Puppy Desktop

Its very easy to change the look of Puppy, Right Click an empty space on the Desktop, Point to Desktop and click on Desktop Settings.

Right Click the Desktop to change it

In Puppy Desktop Click Themingand if you prefer a lighter Desktop Click Original Pup.

Choosing a Theme for Puppy.

That's better, now for a closer look at the Desktop, you have shortcuts as normal but down at the bottom are shortcuts to the usable Partitions on this laptops Hard Drive.

Turn on the Lights, that's better.

One nice way to see the layout of your hard drive is with the GParted Partition Manager.

Right Click an empty space on the Desktop, Point to System and Click on GParted.

Choose the drive you want to examine sda for the first, sdb for the second, etc.

Selecting a Drive to Work On.

Now you can see how the Hard Drive is split up into Partitions, the Size of each Partition and the File Systems that are used.

Linux sees everything as a file and presents devices such as hard drives in a folder called /dev (short for device)

I have the hard drive split up into seven partitions so I could choose to boot into Windows 7 or different Linux Distro. A typical Windows 10 laptop would generally have three to four partitions with the Windows Partition being the latest and the rest tiny by comparison.

The first partition /dev/sda1 has Windows 7 installed and is formatted with the NTFS file system.

sd is short for SCSI Disk and a for the first disk the number represents the partition.

The second partition contains the Debian 9 Linux Operating System and is formatted with the ext4 file system. I am using a folder on that partition (see the Mount Point) to save these screen shots.

The Third Partition contains CentOS 7 Operating System again the ext4 file system.

GParted - Examining the Hard Drive

This is an old laptop and its Hard Drive can only have what are called 4 Primary Partitions but a solution was developed where one of the Primary Partitions can become an Extended Partition /dev/sda4 and this Extended Partition can contain more partitions called Logical Partitions

The small brown rectangle /dev/sda5 is a 2GB Swap Partition, twice the size of my miserable 1GB of ram, If Linux runs out of RAM it will push stuff onto the Swap Partition and hopefully keep on task.

Debian 10 is on /dev/sda6 and I intend to put another Linux Operating system on /dev/sda7. The last Secondary Partition, the biggest, is /dev/sda8 size 96GB , I have labelled it data as I am filling it up with all types of junk data.

Modern Hard Drives do not use the old system of Extended Partitions so Linux will simply label each partition on the first hard drive as /dev/sda1 to /dev/sda6, no skipping a beat

A lot more info here Disk Partitioning at Wikipedia.

Mounting a Windows Partition

One way that you might find puppy useful is to copy files from a sick Windows Machine that won't boot up.

The Windows partition with an NTFS file system generally will be the largest partition, hover over the sda icons on the Desktop to see which is the largest and click on that icon to mount that partition and open it in a File Manager.

Mounting the Windows Partition

I clicked on the Windows Partition sda1, the File Manager opened and I single clicked on the User Directory as I want to get to my Documents Folder in my User Directory.

File Manager Options

Single Clicks are OK for a Desktop but when using a File Manager, its painful, do the following for a One Click to Select and Double Click to Open.

Right Click on an empty place in the File Manager Window and Click on Options and in the Window Behaviour Click to clear the Single Click Navigation box.

Single Click to Select, Double Click to Open

That's better, I had already mounted the 2nd Partition on my Puppy USB key (thanks Rufus), then I dragged across my Documents Folder to the USB key, a box popped up and I choose Copy.

Copying Files from Windows Documents Folder to a USB Key

Unmounting a USB Key

Before you remove a USB key from a PC you must first unmount it (eject it) to prevent damage to its file system, on the Desktop the icons for /dev/sda1 (Windows Partition) and /dev/sdb1 (Puppy USB Drive) show that these partitions are mounted. Click on these icons to unmount or use pMount to get a better overview of all mounted drives, and choose to unmount from there.

Puppy pMount Overview of Partitions on the First Hard Drive

You can then safely remove the USB Key. You can also choose to unmount all mounted partitions, this will also happen when you shut down the PC.