Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

8-bit · Joined: 03 Apr 2007 Posts: 3402 Location: Oregon

I see a lot of users wanting the latest and greatest version of Puppy with the latest kernel, software, and features.
They often are trying to run on an older computer with maxed out limited memory and get disappointed in that they are having problems.

Well, I have an old Compaq laptop with 192 megs of ram that I started out trying to run one of the late versions of Puppy.
I had installed qt and another program that would mount 16meg drive images for use in booting over a serial connection to another computer.
As I mounted drive images, icons on the desktop became corrupted and my pupsave file also did.
I even had icons disappear and not get recovered on the next boot.

I ended up dropping back a few versions to Puppy 4.3.1.
My problems disappeared!

So what I am trying to pass along is that if you have an older PC, you do not really need the latest version of Puppy.
You can use an older version that may have been fairly new when your PC was and it should work better for you.

There are still many members that run older versions of Puppy quite happily!
So when trying to find a version of Puppy for your older PC, do not discount using older versions of Puppy that have been around for a while.

The hard part may be finding the old Puppy ISO and associated devx and kernel source files.
But not impossible.

tlchost

dejan555 · Joined: 30 Nov 2008 Posts: 2728 Location: Montenegro

Even though I can run puppy 5.4.3 on my desktop and it works ok performance is not optimal (mainly because newer graphics modules I believe) so I'm still using dpup 485.
One laptop I had worked best with puppy 215CE!
And the one I have at the moment runs 5.4.1 so yeah you have to test which puppy suits best, I believe that's why it's good to have so many puppy versions and using various distro packages.

8-bit · Joined: 03 Apr 2007 Posts: 3402 Location: Oregon

For quite a while, I was using Puppy 3.0.1 on an older PC.
The best thing to do is to step forward if one needs later support for an application they cannot live without.
Also, there have been a few early Puppy releases that have been revisited and updated such as Puppy 2.1.6.

linuxcbon · Joined: 09 Aug 2007 Posts: 853

I guess the solution is to try different versions until you find one that fits your needs.
If trying on the same pc, you can type "glxgears" to see how many fps for each version and compare video performance. (this doesn't work if different hardwares or it displays the screen refresh rate of 50-60 Hz).