FossaPup Puppy Linux GRUB2 menu entry

Puppy Linux is one of the most handy of the super light linux and considered my goto distro whenever I need to make changes, edit files, and copying files or moving files between distros and between partitions. It dispenses with the need to key in sudo privileges because it is already considered as root and has no issue whatsoever when I need to access another Linux partition.

I was using the olders year 2015 tahrpup 32bit for a long time before finally upgrading to the current 2020 FossaPup 64bit version.

The tahrpup was easily recognized when I issued the ‘update-grub’ command. And should the particular version of the Linux distro could not find it, the GRUB2 menu entry was simple and straightforward.

I would use the chainloader command entry to get it to boot, thus:

   menuentry 'Puppy Trusty tahr-6.0.5_PAE (2015)' {
		set root=(hd0,x)
		chainloader +1 
   } 

However the new FossaPup was very much different. The files were not installed from the root of the partition. Instead it was installed in its own folder. Despite installing the Grub4DOS bootloader in the partition where it was installed, the ‘update-grub’ could not detect it to be included into the menu entry.

Thus it necessitates manually inputting the GRUB2 menuentry into the grub.cfg file via the 40_custom file. It took me many trial and error from what I found online to finally get it to work.

My GRUB2 menu entry as follows:

  menuentry 'FossaPup64 9.5 (hd0,5 /dev/sda5)' {
	insmod part_msdos
	insmod ext2
	set root=(hd0,x)
	echo 'Loading vmlinuz ...'
	linux /fossapup6495/vmlinuz pmedia=atahd psubdir=/fossapup6495 pfix=fsck
	echo 'Loading initrd.gz ...'
	initrd /fossapup6495/initrd.gz
  }

Points to note:

• set root=(hd0,x) where 0 refers to the 1st hard disk drive, while ‘x’ refers to partition number
• hard disk number starts from 0, while partition numbering starts from 1
• since my fossapup is installed in folder fossapup6495, linux kernel and initrd need to point to the folder where the files reside.
• Plus take note to include ‘psubdir=/foldername’ so it could find other files or it won’t work

The way Fossapup was designed to boot up the sfs squashfiles, you could just copy the files into a folder in the partition where you would like to have it and just key in the above menu entry. No need to use the installation method that came with FossaPup live CD.

After booting Puppy Linux for the first time, create the saving location so that your Puppy Linux configuration and changes would be loaded each time it is booted.

The above GRUB2 menuentry is what worked for me and for my several installs in my various PC. If it didn’t work for you, first check the folder name entry. And it is correct, then probably you may need to modify it further to get it to work.

Cheers!

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