I have Puppy 4.1.2 Retro running well on a Thinkpad 760XD that was manufactured in 1997.
It has 104MB of memory, a 166MHz Pentium MMX processor, a modern 320GB hard drive,
and no USB. I did a hard disk install, including a 1GB swap partition.
The good:
Puppy boots my machine in 102 seconds. It has great hardware compatibility.
The display is 1024x768 with 16 bit color. The display is -fast-.
A command like "cat *.c" does not have any trouble writing quickly
to the screen, unlike some other distros.
Networking works fine, I successfully use a 3Com PCMCIA 10/100 Ethernet card
and a Cisco Aironet 350. (Like all PCMCIA wireless cards, only WEP
encryption is supported.)
My "5 in 1" PC card reader with a 1 gigabyte memory card works fine.
It is a convenient way to copy files.
I installed the devx_412.sfs package, so now I have a C compiler,
a C++ compiler, Perl, and Bash.
I recompiled the kernel specifically for the Pentium MMX processor.
Recompilation took several hours, but it improved the boot time and memory footprint.
As Wikipedia says, Puppy "is not based on any other distribution."
That's really a plus. Last year I tried many distros on another old
machine, and it seemed like they all had the same bugs. Puppy gives you -new- bugs!
A full backup of the 16gb partition takes 130 minutes. Here is how I do it:
1. Boot from wakePup and the CD
2. Make sure that hda1 is not mounted and that hda3 is mounted.
3. dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/hda3/backup.2010.aug2.dd bs=2M
That backup can be mounted using loopback if you ever need to recover
a few specific files.
The Setup icon helped me configure what services I wanted.
I was able to disable cups by renaming the cups file in /etc/rc.d/init.d
and using chmod to make it not executable.
The ftp daemon is easy to use. It gives a good way to copy files back
and forth to my regular PC.
Puppy gives me a familiar Linux environment.
The bad:
The 760XD has a loud shrill fan that turns on after about 30 minutes.
It is very unpleasant.
The 760XD will not boot from CD. Instead, you will need to use
wakePup and an external diskette drive. I used the proprietary 46H5748
Thinkpad drive which has a unique connector.
The BIOS does not support dual boot. I tried a lot of tricks, and
just could not make it work. In fact, the Puppy hard disk install would not
boot until I shrank the hda1 partition to 800mb. Once I got the hard disk install
to successfully boot, I resized hda1 to 16GB and all is well.
The browser works, but this machine is not up to the task of displaying
many of today's web pages. For example, when the browser is already
loaded, it takes almost 30 seconds to load the eBay home page. The mwave sound
card is not compatible with Puppy or any other Linux. With no sound and
a limited video card, any kind of web video is pretty much hopeless.
The disk seems really slow. Thanks to the forum I found out about
hdparm, and discovered that this box does not support DMA! However,
it helps to add this statement to /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit right after functions4puppy4:
hdparm -A1 -c3 -m16 /dev/hda
Some of the fonts do not work.
I put the appropriate settings in .Xdefaults, but they do not have any effect
on my favorite editor. Instead, I had to recompile the editor to get all my
favorite defaults. Puppy compiled more than 20000 lines of C in about 5 minutes.
Congratulations Barry, the compilation had no problems with libraries or
external variables.
Nothing in the operating system can really get around the machine's
basic limitations. It's still just a 166MHz processor with 104MB of memory.
Conclusion:
Puppy lets me get the most possible function from this old hardware.