I decided to dust off the AOA-150 Netbook that I have, even though the battery no longer holds a charge due to some wrecked BIOS and a failure to know about it until the damage was already done…

PuppyLinux has always been a nice, small distro to use and I figured it would probably be nice on the Aspire One as it tends to run on nearly anything. One problem: after downloading the newest release, using unetbootin to copy it to a usb flash drive, and rebooting, I found that Puppy locked up with a message about not being able to find the system.

Further investigation revealed that a number of users were having this problem on some systems, but that at least one of the maintainers was blaming the users and Windows people for being unable to properly install the system. A quick bit of investigation revealed that the system was booting up from the flash drive but disconnecting it before the operating system came online. The quick fix?

boot: puppy pmedia=usbflash

Use the line above when initially booting and your problem just might go away. No flame wars with maintainers and users, just Puppy goodness.