Cheap machines ideal for Puppy

What works, and doesn't, for you. Be specific, and please include Puppy version.
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Aitch
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Geode linux install

#41 Post by Aitch »

Brandon, Chicks

Hi guys,

My research on thin clients led me to a couple of articles/threads for geode based linux installs, which might help those interested in the $10 box

http://thunderlord.net.pl/evo/

http://www.larwe.com/technical/geode_linux.html

Neither is particularly new, but the compaq link looks eminently modifiable for any linux, including puppy

As I understand it, the compaq T20 & the wintern were the same motherboard/processor combination, though the support chips may have been different

I'm interested in something similar, as I want to put together a low power system on 12v supply, so this sort of box is a good starter

I'd be interested to hear how you, or anyone else, get on
On another thread, I think Raffy got puppy running on something like this

:)
Aitch

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prit1
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Re: Compaq IPAQ 500 Celeron $25 USD shipped...

#42 Post by prit1 »

mechmike wrote:http://www.accurateit.com/details.asp?iid=1255

$25 USD Shipped in the US...

Manufacturer's product description
Compaq refers to its latest product, the iPAQ, as an Internet device, implying that its primary purpose is to access the Web. Such a product is typically meant for consumers. The Compaq iPAQ is in fact a fully functional corporate PC - albeit an unusual one. Smaller than most mini-towers and irregular in shape, the iPAQ has no bus slots, and its lone external drive bay does not accept desktop drives. Rather, it accepts the hot-swappable drives typically used in Compaq's Armada notebooks. This uniquely designed product is ideal for corporate network environments and for employees who primarily use their PC for mainstream office productivity applications and corporate Internet/intranet access.
I purchased this PC. Could not install a Armada CDROM drive into this. Instead I booted and installed Xubuntu through the PXE boot facility of this machine.

And then I modified the grub and copied all required puppy files (frugal install). Now I am able to work on Puppy in this machine. I can play ripped DVD movies smoothly, only youtube did not play as smoothly.

It is responsive. Much much better than Xubuntu. Only for Seamonkey, it takes like 10-15 seconds to load. Other applications load in less than 3-5 seconds.

A very good machine for this price.

Total money I had to spend: $40 = $25 for the box + $15 for a 19 inch Monitor.

GREAT Machine !!

Prit

ThinIsGreat
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Joined: Wed 05 Mar 2008, 00:09

Re: Compaq IPAQ 500 Celeron $25 USD shipped...

#43 Post by ThinIsGreat »

How about this machine, 1Ghz, 256M/256M, HP / Compaq Thin Client T5000 Model T5700? Is this worth to try Seamonkey?
prit1 wrote:
mechmike wrote:http://www.accurateit.com/details.asp?iid=1255

$25 USD Shipped in the US...

Manufacturer's product description
Compaq refers to its latest product, the iPAQ, as an Internet device, implying that its primary purpose is to access the Web. Such a product is typically meant for consumers. The Compaq iPAQ is in fact a fully functional corporate PC - albeit an unusual one. Smaller than most mini-towers and irregular in shape, the iPAQ has no bus slots, and its lone external drive bay does not accept desktop drives. Rather, it accepts the hot-swappable drives typically used in Compaq's Armada notebooks. This uniquely designed product is ideal for corporate network environments and for employees who primarily use their PC for mainstream office productivity applications and corporate Internet/intranet access.
I purchased this PC. Could not install a Armada CDROM drive into this. Instead I booted and installed Xubuntu through the PXE boot facility of this machine.

And then I modified the grub and copied all required puppy files (frugal install). Now I am able to work on Puppy in this machine. I can play ripped DVD movies smoothly, only youtube did not play as smoothly.

It is responsive. Much much better than Xubuntu. Only for Seamonkey, it takes like 10-15 seconds to load. Other applications load in less than 3-5 seconds.

A very good machine for this price.

Total money I had to spend: $40 = $25 for the box + $15 for a 19 inch Monitor.

GREAT Machine !!

Prit

georgepds
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat 03 Dec 2005, 19:36

#44 Post by georgepds »

Rank puppie newbie here. I purchased the machine below and was able to load puppy onto the supplied 4 gB hard drive. Because the machine cannot boot from cd rom , I removed the hard drive and put it into another machine that could. I loaded live puppy onto the hard drive (using the default puppy installer), and then put the drive back into the compaq... it booted right up

Connected to the internet without problem.. Kudos to the puppy team


--g

http://www.accurateit.com/details.asp?iid=1255
$25 USD Shipped in the US...


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Lobster
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#46 Post by Lobster »

Another option is the emerging mini laptops - here is a roundup
http://www.liliputing.com/2008/04/over- ... ex_24.html

and here are some frugal PC builder resources . . .
http://tinyurl.com/66d5c6
Puppy Raspup 8.2Final 8)
Puppy Links Page http://www.smokey01.com/bruceb/puppy.html :D

mechmike
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#47 Post by mechmike »

Lobster, that FreeGeek link (the second one) is great!

Bookmarked, and going on my blog...

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prehistoric
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Re: Compaq IPAQ 500 Celeron $25 USD shipped...

#48 Post by prehistoric »

mechmike wrote:http://www.accurateit.com/details.asp?iid=1255

$25 USD Shipped in the US...
Well, I couldn't resist another chance to play with a cheap computer I don't really need. So, I ordered one, got it on schedule, and it seems to be DOA. The case fits loosely, so I believe someone opened it up to reset the BIOS password.

@mechmike,

I don't see a keylock. Did you find any evidence of case or security interlocks which would prevent the power supply from even running its fan?

@Lobster,

Second the motion on that link. Great!

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Aitch
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#49 Post by Aitch »

Hi Chris667

What an amazingly uninformative website Viglen have!!
I've tried everywhere, but could not find any specs for this little £99++ box!
What processor/speed?
Does it run on an internal laptop psu, or external 12v transformer unit?
What memory is installed/upgradeable to?
Even the downloadable pdf didn't tell me anything


Shame

Aitch
Edit
Please post how you get on with installing Puppy onto it
And especially whether the bios has a bootable usb/Ext CD setting

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chris667
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#50 Post by chris667 »

It's terrible isn't it? I haven't looked at it tonight, the weather was nice. I've just installed puppy onto a USB flash drive, which I will use to install to the Viglen. The BIOS setup allows you to choose it as a boot option, and recognises a USB keyboard (have you ever tried to get into the bios setup of a new dell? :twisted: )
I only had a brief look at the machine, after a short, brief struggle with Xubuntu I had to switch the machine off and make myself a cup of tea. It has a 40GB hard disk.
Will look at it properly with puppy tomorrow though, watch this space. 8)

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#51 Post by mechmike »

I don't see a keylock. Did you find any evidence of case or security interlocks which would prevent the power supply from even running its fan?


No...

Sage
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#52 Post by Sage »

Viglen has had a chequered history. Some of the early machines were good but a little overpriced. They went into a spin when everyone else was crashing into bankruptcy. It passed into Mr Sugar's hands and made good custom machines at good prices for a while, but the badge was again passed on. Not sure who owns the label now. Proprietary HW is usually a bad choice. This technology is so new and advancing so rapidly that it needs fullest user access to keep it tweaked, despite the fact that neophytes can break it! One learns rather quickly when one's own £/€/$ are at risk.

Xbuntu is tripe - they should line the developers up against the wall. It isn't proper Xfce, but a Gnomish version. It is broken. I hate Gnome; it is, like KDE overbloated, but without the intuitive UI. Can't see any reason to settle for anything except a properly developed Xfce distro these days, except, of course, for super-compact offerings.

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chris667
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#53 Post by chris667 »

I'm currently viewing this website on it, using Puppy 3.00 and Seamonkey as a live-cd. It's all sort of working now.
Here's a more thorough spec:
Processor: AMD Geode 399Mhz
Memory: 256MB
Hard drive: 40GB.
It has 4 x USB 2.0 Ports and 2 x USB 1.0. It can only boot from a device connected via USB 1.0, though, so slow.
We couldn't get it to work at first, but it's booted up puppy after a fashion.
Still, I'd rather have a limping, out of date Puppy than the default Xubuntu anyday.
I think I might put this machine away until I receive the Puppy unleashed CD I ordered yesterday. 8)

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capoverde
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#54 Post by capoverde »

Hi there,

compliments to all for your efforts to Puppy-ize all kinds of computers around, it's a sport I also like in the non-commercial version, i. e. garbage-recycling -- so much PC hardware gets thrown away, and often quite good stuff! Lots to learn for free.

Last one in my list of roadside PCs is a Fujitsu-Siemens Scenic 400 (Pentium III/500) whose PSU went KO: replaced it and works fine. Puppy is quite at ease there, runs without a glitch and does everything (sound, net etc) -- just like on 4 previous slower machines, only faster.

@Sage: thanks for the Kolibri hint! Didn't know this one, immediately downloaded it.

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prehistoric
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iPaQ 500 MHz

#55 Post by prehistoric »

@mechmike,

I found the problem with that $25 Compaq iPaq desktop. This is one of those that fall in the "can't happen" category. There was nothing wrong with the entire machine in the case: processor, memory, disk, I/O, ethernet port, etc.

It was shipped with a new-looking power cord with a broken conductor. :roll:

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Re: iPaQ 500 MHz

#56 Post by mechmike »

Sorry - wireless hiccup = double-post...
Last edited by mechmike on Wed 30 Apr 2008, 11:24, edited 1 time in total.

mechmike
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Re: iPaQ 500 MHz

#57 Post by mechmike »

prehistoric wrote:It was shipped with a new-looking power cord with a broken conductor. :roll:
Heh - Been there, done that with both a power cord and an IDE cable over the years. Glad you got it straight!

Yogi
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#58 Post by Yogi »

Please keep me(us) informed on your progress with the iPaQ 500 MHz. I just bought one yesterday to fool around with. I plan to make it my road trip PC. Gonna use Mean Puppy w/opera on it.

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prehistoric
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Compaq iPaq 500 MHz desktop

#59 Post by prehistoric »

Hi Yogi,

First a clarification: this is an iPaq desktop, not the iPaq handheld. The weight is significant and you may not want to cart it around. If I was going to be carting this around, I'd probably replace the HD with CF in an IDE adapter. This would improve speed and reduce the chance of losing everything in a head crash.

Here's where I'm reporting on problems found in testing 3.02 , Chihuahua, on it. http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 1&start=30

Aside from the power cord problem, I've had to download the manual to find out how to reset the BIOS password. Installing Puppy to the HD on another machine, and moving the drive, took care of my installation problems. I partitioned the 8.4 GB drive with a 500 MB swap partition and two ext2 partitions. I've used a manual frugal install from USB drive, or copying across a network for everything after that first installation.

I got 3.01 working pretty much as advertised, (just had to adjust the monitor instead of using xvidtune). At the moment, I'm testing 3.02 and Muppy-Mini-008.3 as frugal installs and preparing to do a full install on a different partition. I still have the 128 MB RAM it was shipped with installed, for software testing with little memory. If I was going to use this heavily, I'd probably replace one or both DIMMs with 256 MB PC100 SDRAM. Even adding 64 MB by replacing one 64 MB DIMM with 128 MB would make a significant improvement.

Does this help?

prehistoric

Yogi
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#60 Post by Yogi »

Hello prehistoric,

Yeah, I bought the iPaq 500mhz Celeron w/128mb ram and 4gb hd from the same place you did. $25 w/free shipping. Just waiting for it to arrive. I just need it primarily for internet. Who knows, I might be surprised what this thing can do. I think I've got some old
sdram in the closet. 128mb should be enough for Mean Puppy but the more the better, right? What I'm really hoping is this little pc is quiet. Do you know does it use a cpu fan?
Also, how's the performance so far?

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