The Sinclair QL Forum

I'm a total noob to anything that isn't DOS/Windows (or QL)!

To give an old Eee PC a new lease of life I recently setup BionicPup Linux on it. It seems mostly intuitive, easy to get online and it's obvious how many things are done.

But I'm stuck with something which is probably really basic, too basic even for googling as that doesn't help. I want to download disk .img files (e.g. 360k/1.2mb DOS disks) and then copy the contents (just the files) onto external storage.

I've found the 'Package Manager' which seems to be where you go to install extra programs, like apps, but called packages. Apparently 7zip is able to open .img files so I installed that. For good measure I also installed mtools (tools for manipulating MSDOS files). When I select the Uninstall option both are shown there, so it seems to have worked.

But I can't find them anywhere! Where does it put newly installed packages? Is there something else I have to do first?

I've never used a PuppyLinux derivative (which I am assuming this is?)

AFAIK, Linux packages tend to get installed into /usr/local and then symbolic links (aliases) for things like binaries and config files are placed in eg /usr/bin and /etc

But from my limited experience of Linux, this varies a bit from Linux to Linux, and also depending on which packaging manager you use (apt, yum, synaptics, flatpak, snap, etc)

It's all very confusing which is why I've decided to standardise on Ubuntu and its derivatives so that I stand a fighting chance of actually knowing where things might live! )

As to why you are not seeing them in your application launcher (equivalent to the Windows "Start menu" ) I don't know.

On Ubuntu (and others?), App launcher entries are configured across

globally: and (local user only): and they have a .desktop extension - they are just text files (like most configs in Linux) so you can copy one and edit it to make a new entry for your apps if you like

Not sure whether this applies to Puppy though.

Thanks.

There were certainly app looking things in those locations (that I probably would never have found) but they all appear to be ones that came pre-installed, I have yet to find the new ones, but I will explore along those lines.

Two important commands on the linux terminal you should know:
Finds a program that is in the $PATH and can be started - will hand back the complete path to the binary.
finds a file starting from <start path> and printing its path, e.g.
Will return the path to gedit (assumed it is installed on your box).

Your package manager should also be able to tell you where it's going to install a program - maybe in a well-hidden "Package details" tab or the like.

What ToFro said!

Also, the locate command is also useful, if installed.

Cheers,
Norm

Thanks.

with
I was able to find some related files but couldn't find how to run anything. But it's ok now as it turned out somethings that it came with (UExtract) is able to unpack .img files, so that's fine for now!

I've made some progress.

Turns out the p7zip has no gui, it needs to run from the terminal, where you specify the archive path, where you want it unzipped, various switches etc. So that explains why that wasn't doing anything no matter what I clicked on.

For other things, I still could not run them even though a menu item was created, e.g. I installed the Audacity package but clicking on it's new icon did nothing. So I attempted to start that from the terminal too and instead of doing nothing it actually gave some feedback! It was missing a couple of libraries or whatever they are, that it needs to run. So I searched for those, installed them and now it runs - both from the terminal and from the start menu icon!

So now I feel like I'm getting somewhere.