1.0.4 + ThinkPad 560Z: (xf86_svga; cs4237B; DWL-650) working

[moritzes]

Great job, Barry, bladehunter, bruce b., et al.! Took me some time, but I got my old Thinkpad 560z up w/ everything running. Thanks for the great distro.

It's much faster than when it had Win98 on it 6 years ago, and don't even talk about Win2K for the last couple of years.

Hard parts:
Default video did not work. Neither did the framebuffer package (could read everything, but color scheme was seriously whacked). Luckily, I have some working machines to research the forums! Basically, set video on install to 800x600x24 -- this produces a barely (to be generous) readable screen. Then, reading menus by feel, PupGet the xf86_svga-3.3.6 xserver. Modify /etc/X11/XF86Config as explained in:
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... light=svga
(Using the large-font rxvt makes the terminal pretty readable.)

Sound
cs4237B chip
Uses cs4232 OSS driver
per http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... nd+crystal
added to /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

Code: Select all

modprobe cs4232 io=0x530 irq=5 dma=1 dma2=0

Hard drive install (type 1) with GRUB
[For newbies, like me, a great help page for Grub:
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/grub/grub.htm]
Some very good posts by Bruce B. helped, along with Barry's original two pages on HD install. (New method won't work w/o a CD drive -- would be great to change the script to allow HD file instead of CD as source of puppy files. I know I could mount the iso directly somehow, but ...) Install turns out not the be so hard (after many, many attempts). The big thing was, I started testing puppy using a boot disk and HD files (no CD drive and unbootable USB) and wanted to keep using the pupxxx file that I had been testing with. But the fresh "install" (i.e., the first time running GRUB off the hard drive rather than booting from CD) wanted to create a new pupxxx file, and gagged if I tried to install on the partition that had the original pupxxx, vmlinuz, image.gz and usr_cram.fs files on it.
Solution (and forgive me if this was already on-line and I missed it) was to have the GRUB statement reference the previously created pupxxx file. I put pupxxx, vmlinuz, image.gz and usr_cram.fs on the same partition (in my case, vfat partition).
Relevant menu.lst portion is:

Code: Select all

title Puppy Linux
  root (hd0,3)
  kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 PFILE=pup080-none-524288 PHOME=hda4
  initrd /image.gz

The size referenced in the PFILE definition does not matter -- if you have resized pupxxx, the new size will be recognized. (And if you don't care about keeping your pupxxx file, of course, you can just delete it from the install partition and another pupxxx will be created.)
This gives us a "Type 1" install, with filesystem changes saved to pupxxx on hda4, a vfat partition (I made it vfat so that windows could see it should I try to get my Win2k partition up again).

My partition table (as revealed by fdisk):

Code: Select all

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1         130      982768+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2             278         832     4195800    5  Extended
/dev/hda3             131         165      264600   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda4             166         277      846720    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/hda5             278         832     4195768+   b  W95 FAT32

Probably not the way you would draw it up from scratch , but I wanted to keep the original /dev/hda5 Windows partition, which had some executables and data I wanted to save.

Other issue is that GRUB will not install easily to anything but a linux filesystem partition, so I created a 1M ext3 partition (hda1) for my /boot/grub folder. Figure I can put another distro on it sometime if I like. I made my puppy vfat partition 850M to give me plenty of room to install packages (tho' that may defeat the purpose of puppy...)

PCMCIA wireless
Used bladehunter's wifi-beta.pup
My experience (which was great) is described here:
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?p=9364#9364

All in all, a good time! Thanks, everyone.

[Bancobusto]

Glad that you got it all sorted out! Puppy's worth all that trouble, aint it?


Very well documented road you have taken... Glad to have you.

[Lobster]

Welcome to the kennels.

Will some kind Puppy add this to the wiki? (let us know if you do please)

It is suddenly very obvious that the reason laptop battery life is poor is due to Operating System design. Run in ram - not much hard disk activity. Not much HD activity = extended life (someone pointed this out recently and it was a Eureaka moment).

Everyway you look at it Puppy is right. Am I right or am I (write?)

Thank you for letting the future Lap-Puppys into . . .
. . . well FUN time for all

[moritzes]

You are so right about RAM and battery life.

I remember when the first portable MP3 CD players came out in the US (way back...) in 2000. I had a Genica MPTrip. Had about the same buffer time as the then-current non-MP3 CD players (1 min?) and the battery life was no good. Then some genius thought to add a little RAM, the buffer time (given the already small size of MP3 files) was extended by many, many minutes (so, much less CD access), and playing time skyrocketed (from 3 to 20 hours?).

With RAM running about $30-40 for 512MB, the same thing makes sense for laptops (and desktops, for that matter). Of course, I can't imagine waiting while all of WinXP (or the new Win standing tall) loads to RAM. Plus you would need 4GB to boot the monster.

Puppy, the wave of the future. (And, on my TP 560z, the wave of the past...)