PuppyLinux
A very good conversational review of Puppy Linux from the UK, October 2005 (prior to ver 1.0.9).Puppy 4.2 review.
An upbeat Lucid Puppy 5.0 review from IT Lure.
HOWTO Rsnapshot on Puppy Linux.
5/23/2011 Rsnapshot on Puppy LinuxPuppy Linux v2.11 on Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CS
I'm now running Puppy Linux v2.11 on a 1GHz AMD T-Bird, 3 GB HD, and 128 MB memory. Works fine. As of November 2006, I'm starting to use it as much as my Mandriva 2007.0 installation, which I also like. Initially, however, the idea was to see if Puppy could run on really old hardware and maybe serve as a network packet logger.I have an old laptop, a Toshiba 400CS, that runs pretty slow with Windows 98. The Toshiba has no option to boot from CD-ROM. DSL booted fine from floppy, but then when it loaded from the CD-ROM, it could not handle the 640x480 display. When I installed DSL to hard drive, it booted fine for only about 5 seconds before I got a BIOS error complaining about an inability to boot up BASIC. I'm pretty sure DSL was making API calls into the BIOS that simply didn't exist in this old computer.
Since Puppy advertises running on old hardware, I purged the 850 MB hard drive and ran the Puppy Universal Install. It worked. Sort of. It went r-e-a-l-l-y slow. I hadn't ever run Puppy before, so I didn't know what to expect. Turns out I was clicking many things before the menu or GUI had fully appeared.
Install never did work properly. I think it's because the scripts were running before some hardware was getting initialized. Not sure. The DOS Puppy Boot disk uses good old fashioned autoexec.bat scripts, so I pawed through the scripts, and found I could get Puppy linux to boot by letting the boot disk come up to the command prompt and then entering two commands manually (instead of running the autoexec).
A:\> driver\SHSUCDX /d:?IDE-CD,I
A:\>LINLD image=i:\vmlinuz initrd=i:\initrd.gz cl=@IDECD2.CFG
I'm still not sure why the autoexec specifies initrd as an image.gz file. My CD-ROM (mounted as drive I:) didn't have one area. I'm wondering if this is a typo in the autoexec.bat. In any case, the CD did have an initrd.gz, so I tried it. It worked. I pulled the cl command line options following the logic of the autoexec.bat. The cl option causes kernel options:
root=/dev/ram4
acpi=off
PFILE=PUP001-none-262144
Entering the two DOS commands gives a startup procedure that "works" in the sense that I eventually got the language select menu. We're talking 5-7 minutes to boot up to the character selection menu. When you think you have the Xvesa/Xorg selection window open, STOP. Wait another 10 minutes or so until the desktop appears behind the selection window. Then click through the acceptance buttons for an Xvesa 640x480x16 video mode (be patient between clicks).
Booting this way 3 times wore me out. I decided the Toshiba had to go on the sales block. I met the requirements of my ego to "get it working", but it's clear this was not functional with anything more taxing than Windows 98.
Puppy Linux Suggested Improvements
5/21/2011 Lucid Puppy version 5.2.5, released Apr 2011On the Puppy Universal Installer purple splash screen which explains GParted, first sentence should be changed to read, "..unless you are willing to loose all information on the pre-existing 'ntfs' or 'vfat' partition."
Created by brian. Last Modification: Wednesday 25 of May, 2011 17:10:56 CDT by brian.