Puppy 4.31 and Pulp
Posted: Wed 20 Apr 2011, 04:30
Works great on Thinkpad 560x (233MHz, 96MB, using Pulp01) except can't get sound to work.
The laptop no longer boots from any hard drive so I boot to floppy and then use
loadlin from the hard drive.
Works perfectly on Thinkpad 600E (400MHz, 288MB, Puppy 4.31) with dead onboard mouse
which had to be disabled with a hex editor before the laptop would boot. Lilo.
Also on a Thinkpad 770E (266MHz, 228MB, Puppy and Pulp) which lost its floppy controller
and then stopped booting from any hard drive. I boot to MRCC (?) DOS Clean using
Ultimate Boot CD (a regular DOS boot CD won't do it) and then use loadlin.
These last two required manual setup of CD4237B sound and some adjustments to
BIOS (acpi=off, forget what else but full instructions were online some place).
The two slower models (did not check the 400MHz) crash using Puppy 4.31
mplayer but work with pulp mplayer, which appears to have been compiled
for i586 (PII without MMX2 or AMD-K6-2). The i586 version works on newer
computers and should be standard. (Also mplayer source code was set to
compile for i486 architecture with the i686 cpu - I hand edited when
I compiled my own mplayer).
--------------------
DELL D600 - everything works great except the 1.6GHz cpu runs at 600MHz even
with the correct power supply and Speedstep set correctly (I even downloaded
and ran an XP program for the Speedstep bug), and the battery
charges but the computer recently stopped being able to run off it even
fully charged (30 min > 0 min in one day). We had to replace the keyboard.
(Had two dead D600s to rob it from). Typing on it right now.
From a friend who was tired of replacing batteries.
It was running at full speed until halfway through a netflix movie
and has not gone back to full speed since, and keeps complaining about
the DELL 4.6A power supply that we provided it with (OEM, right one)
not being identifiable. Works the same with 3.5A. Lacks a floppy drive.
Another DELL 900MHz (don't have it here) works okay except that if you
use framebuffer console (in Pulp linux - I can't find fbcon for puppy 4.31)
sound disappears. In Puppy and also Basiclinux. It has an odd USB port which I
had to compile a special kernel for in Basiclinux but it works in Puppy.
This came to us because it was running at a crawl with XP and Norton (some
driver conflict). No antivirus needed any more. Sound was turned down
AND muted by alsaconfig but works now. This one only worked with the 2.6.30.5
kernel - with all other laptops I use the retro kernel but the hardware is
screwy in various ways.
A DELL Latitude 300MHz works well with puppy (if you plug in a keyboard,
since the onboard one finished dying over the course of a few days after
it came to me). Sound is crummy but usable. I had to change a BIOS setting
which was causing the CPU to run at very low speed during boot, and we
put black electrician's tape on the mouse buttons so they would stay put.
-----------------
Two Compaq AMD-K6-2 machines which need i586 mplayer:
Compaq Presario 1200 - 475MHz, 32MB onboard memory plus 128MB added and
a 200MHz swapfile. Pulp 01 (I started with 96MB).
Alsa sound works well (oss driver for via82cxxx does not play any sound).
I forget if I chose Xvesa or Xorg. Firepup 4 crashes with illegal instruction
when it loads, Seamonkey crashes with illegal instruction when I try
to access Google Voice, and Opera 9.64 has very scrambled video
(big black areas). I should try the other X. Basiclinux works with
all three browsers (Xfbdev) with no problems so it could be the
video. I will try to find Xfbdev for Pulp (4.12 kernel) or use
DSL linux instead. AMD-K6-2 runs slower than rated speed so
it takes forever to start the browsers anyway. Makes a nice radio
using lynx with lynx.cfg set to use mplayer as VIEWER/DOWNLOADER..
(Oddly enough, this one was given to us with no hardware problems
unless you count only 32MB RAM). 800x600x16 color. It has one
double-thick PCMCIA slot which is perfect for a red NIC card that
takes up the whole space and won't fit in most computers.
Compaq Presario 1675. 380MHz, 64MB onboard, and it recently stopped
recognizing the 128MB added RAM so won't run regular Puppy. It came
with Win2k (very slow boot now) and a power jack that needed to be
resoldered, and I had added Basiclinux, which worked fine except
yesterday the pcmcia port seems to have died (error message about
not finding a bridge) so I copied pulp to hda2 and attempted to
install lilo to dual boot with 2K. I set pulp as default and it
booted to Basiclinux. (I had to copy the bootsector via floppy).
I installed lilo to floppy and it booted partway into Pulp then
'loading kernel modules' and it stopped. Don't know if this is
related to the design or the broken pcmcia. I had hoped to
try with USB wireless. Might try DSL live CD with USB wireless,
or use itas an MP3/CD player with pulp. Sound works fine in Basiclinux.
----------------------
A 900MHz HP Pavilion N5415 that came to us with dead pcmcia
and some odd controller problems (XP sometimes sees the CD-RW
drive to write to but can always read from it,
and sometimes finds USB headphones). Works fine with Puppy.
Crummy sound unless you plug in speakers or headphone. Does 1280
resolution but with Basiclinux/mplayer DVDs play in the middle
half of it at 800 and won't fill the screen (Xfbdev, Xvesa,
svga, vesa, fbdev).
Gxine (Puppy) and SMplayer (XP) I think do fullscreen.
A few keys are loose but go back on easily. Runs quite hot.
-----------------------
Winbook XLi -300MHz, upped it to 256MB RAM, comes with both
types of laptop mouse, both PS/2, both recognized by Basiclinux
but Puppy could not find either so I had to plug in serial or
USB mouse. Sound works in Basiclinux but could not make it
work in Puppy. (Crummy sound anyway). Basiclinux keyboard
and mouse freeze up when you do anything graphical due to
some kernel bug in 2.4.31 and earlier. I installed 2K and
everything works, except we had to take apart and repair
the floppy drive.
----------------------------
Gateway Solo 2000 200MHz 110MB RAM (three slots using some
strange RAM and that is all I could round up), given to us
because video did not work in Win98 with text expansion.
Sound appears to have died (I think it worked with Win98)
but it works okay otherwise with puppy 4.31. High quality
screen and keyboard, quite light especially if you remove
floppy, CD-ROM and battery.
These were all given to us free by friends and other people
whose computers or other things we fixed. The under 300MHz
models are quite slow to load graphical browsers, and semi-
recent browsers need more than 96MB total RAM. So my cutoff
for puppy on the internet is 200MHz 96MB. Lots of those
around free for the fixing. You can even sort of watch
Youtube at 400MHz (a series of stills).
The laptop no longer boots from any hard drive so I boot to floppy and then use
loadlin from the hard drive.
Works perfectly on Thinkpad 600E (400MHz, 288MB, Puppy 4.31) with dead onboard mouse
which had to be disabled with a hex editor before the laptop would boot. Lilo.
Also on a Thinkpad 770E (266MHz, 228MB, Puppy and Pulp) which lost its floppy controller
and then stopped booting from any hard drive. I boot to MRCC (?) DOS Clean using
Ultimate Boot CD (a regular DOS boot CD won't do it) and then use loadlin.
These last two required manual setup of CD4237B sound and some adjustments to
BIOS (acpi=off, forget what else but full instructions were online some place).
The two slower models (did not check the 400MHz) crash using Puppy 4.31
mplayer but work with pulp mplayer, which appears to have been compiled
for i586 (PII without MMX2 or AMD-K6-2). The i586 version works on newer
computers and should be standard. (Also mplayer source code was set to
compile for i486 architecture with the i686 cpu - I hand edited when
I compiled my own mplayer).
--------------------
DELL D600 - everything works great except the 1.6GHz cpu runs at 600MHz even
with the correct power supply and Speedstep set correctly (I even downloaded
and ran an XP program for the Speedstep bug), and the battery
charges but the computer recently stopped being able to run off it even
fully charged (30 min > 0 min in one day). We had to replace the keyboard.
(Had two dead D600s to rob it from). Typing on it right now.
From a friend who was tired of replacing batteries.
It was running at full speed until halfway through a netflix movie
and has not gone back to full speed since, and keeps complaining about
the DELL 4.6A power supply that we provided it with (OEM, right one)
not being identifiable. Works the same with 3.5A. Lacks a floppy drive.
Another DELL 900MHz (don't have it here) works okay except that if you
use framebuffer console (in Pulp linux - I can't find fbcon for puppy 4.31)
sound disappears. In Puppy and also Basiclinux. It has an odd USB port which I
had to compile a special kernel for in Basiclinux but it works in Puppy.
This came to us because it was running at a crawl with XP and Norton (some
driver conflict). No antivirus needed any more. Sound was turned down
AND muted by alsaconfig but works now. This one only worked with the 2.6.30.5
kernel - with all other laptops I use the retro kernel but the hardware is
screwy in various ways.
A DELL Latitude 300MHz works well with puppy (if you plug in a keyboard,
since the onboard one finished dying over the course of a few days after
it came to me). Sound is crummy but usable. I had to change a BIOS setting
which was causing the CPU to run at very low speed during boot, and we
put black electrician's tape on the mouse buttons so they would stay put.
-----------------
Two Compaq AMD-K6-2 machines which need i586 mplayer:
Compaq Presario 1200 - 475MHz, 32MB onboard memory plus 128MB added and
a 200MHz swapfile. Pulp 01 (I started with 96MB).
Alsa sound works well (oss driver for via82cxxx does not play any sound).
I forget if I chose Xvesa or Xorg. Firepup 4 crashes with illegal instruction
when it loads, Seamonkey crashes with illegal instruction when I try
to access Google Voice, and Opera 9.64 has very scrambled video
(big black areas). I should try the other X. Basiclinux works with
all three browsers (Xfbdev) with no problems so it could be the
video. I will try to find Xfbdev for Pulp (4.12 kernel) or use
DSL linux instead. AMD-K6-2 runs slower than rated speed so
it takes forever to start the browsers anyway. Makes a nice radio
using lynx with lynx.cfg set to use mplayer as VIEWER/DOWNLOADER..
(Oddly enough, this one was given to us with no hardware problems
unless you count only 32MB RAM). 800x600x16 color. It has one
double-thick PCMCIA slot which is perfect for a red NIC card that
takes up the whole space and won't fit in most computers.
Compaq Presario 1675. 380MHz, 64MB onboard, and it recently stopped
recognizing the 128MB added RAM so won't run regular Puppy. It came
with Win2k (very slow boot now) and a power jack that needed to be
resoldered, and I had added Basiclinux, which worked fine except
yesterday the pcmcia port seems to have died (error message about
not finding a bridge) so I copied pulp to hda2 and attempted to
install lilo to dual boot with 2K. I set pulp as default and it
booted to Basiclinux. (I had to copy the bootsector via floppy).
I installed lilo to floppy and it booted partway into Pulp then
'loading kernel modules' and it stopped. Don't know if this is
related to the design or the broken pcmcia. I had hoped to
try with USB wireless. Might try DSL live CD with USB wireless,
or use itas an MP3/CD player with pulp. Sound works fine in Basiclinux.
----------------------
A 900MHz HP Pavilion N5415 that came to us with dead pcmcia
and some odd controller problems (XP sometimes sees the CD-RW
drive to write to but can always read from it,
and sometimes finds USB headphones). Works fine with Puppy.
Crummy sound unless you plug in speakers or headphone. Does 1280
resolution but with Basiclinux/mplayer DVDs play in the middle
half of it at 800 and won't fill the screen (Xfbdev, Xvesa,
svga, vesa, fbdev).
Gxine (Puppy) and SMplayer (XP) I think do fullscreen.
A few keys are loose but go back on easily. Runs quite hot.
-----------------------
Winbook XLi -300MHz, upped it to 256MB RAM, comes with both
types of laptop mouse, both PS/2, both recognized by Basiclinux
but Puppy could not find either so I had to plug in serial or
USB mouse. Sound works in Basiclinux but could not make it
work in Puppy. (Crummy sound anyway). Basiclinux keyboard
and mouse freeze up when you do anything graphical due to
some kernel bug in 2.4.31 and earlier. I installed 2K and
everything works, except we had to take apart and repair
the floppy drive.
----------------------------
Gateway Solo 2000 200MHz 110MB RAM (three slots using some
strange RAM and that is all I could round up), given to us
because video did not work in Win98 with text expansion.
Sound appears to have died (I think it worked with Win98)
but it works okay otherwise with puppy 4.31. High quality
screen and keyboard, quite light especially if you remove
floppy, CD-ROM and battery.
These were all given to us free by friends and other people
whose computers or other things we fixed. The under 300MHz
models are quite slow to load graphical browsers, and semi-
recent browsers need more than 96MB total RAM. So my cutoff
for puppy on the internet is 200MHz 96MB. Lots of those
around free for the fixing. You can even sort of watch
Youtube at 400MHz (a series of stills).