THIS is the main reason I switched to Puppy.....

[rokytnji]

Hey rokytnji...

I would love to hear about what optimizations you have used with your P3 to get the most out of it. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks




Oh, and in the spirit of answering Mike Walsh's question, I use Puppy as it is small, light, and portable.

Right now the t23 is doing beta testing duties for AntiX 16. I run a SMC wireless N pcmcia card on it. I also use 2 port usb and 2 firewire port pcmcia card on it also which fills both pcmcia ports. All work after I install. Whether it be Puppy or or anything else.

The wireless card

http://www.ebay.com/itm/SMCWCB-N2-EZ-2- ... XQEgpTBiZm

The usb and firewire card.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Adaptec-AUA-142 ... xyx0JTim5T

Beta testing the non pea i486 4.4 kernel. My laptop is a must have for the distro team I belong to because of the savage graphics chip. Newer xorg and savge, sis, and via chips do not play nice anymore with the open source savage, openchrome, and I forget the name of the open source driver for the via chip tonight.

I watch videos outside of my browser on youtube using smtube with mplayer but puppy has other players also for that that I am sure other members can mention. I hope that helps you out.

I used to run a A22m IBM P3 with 512MB of ram. But I sold it.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 193#492193

I am 2 screws short of finishing my screwup upgrade on a z60M also.

http://antix.freeforums.org/ibm-z60m-cp ... t6327.html

starhawk might grin on that one.

[TyroBGinner]

Thanks for the fairly extensive response. I am looking more for improvements via software, and I guess I was thinking you were working along those lines. It is surprising to see such hardware being so available and inexpensive. My case centers around an old "desktop" computer, so the notebook computer hardware would not help. I wonder if there exist old cards (likely PCI) that are correspondingly affordable. It is academic, anyway, as I don't want to spend good money on something so old. It is long past time for an entirely updated computer. I think I will try a fully overclockable processor and motherboard - something in the top of the i5 range or an fx-8350 or better with a motherboard up to $150 in price.

[Puppyt]

Why did I switch to Puppy? Having recently been forced to use M$ Win7 computers at work for the past fortnight, an IE-only networked environment (security risk popups ad nausum, update warnings, "your usb needs to be scanned and fixed", etc etc) has felt like I've been having my nose rubbed continously in the mistakes of well-meaning but ignorant University IT and Administrivia personnel. And the M$-inflicted masses just swallow it all up, stick on that hamster-wheel like their lives depend on it. By contrast, Puppy makes my academic "chores" an absolute breeze, and at far, far less than the smell of an oily rag.

Case in point - throwing out a trailerload of household garbage at our rural tip I saw a section trackside for electronic items to be minced for recycling. Saw two black boxes that had been left outdoors in the dust for a few days and possibly suffered some light rain. Offered $2 each for them, perhaps there was something I could salvage from them, before returning the carcasses to the dump, as likely warranted. Well. After cleaning out the dustbunnies and visually inspecting the PSU and mbo for cracks and electrical problems I plugged them into a restricted circuit in the shed. Both booted up fine OOTB, but had been tragically infected with Win7. Perhaps that was why they were thrown out, but these are i7 mbos with 6-12Gb DDR3 ram, USB3.0, and 1TB hdds that I immediately formatted. Blistering speed. Details are a bit hazy as this was a few months ago and I've been away for work, but intend to frugal-install a juicy 64bit Puppy on it later this ANZAC weekend. (Alas I will have to offload my beige-boxed x486 and P3 machines to make room for these new finds!) While I am chuffed at my windfall, I am frankly embarrassed at the *willful stupidity* of some (most?) in the mainstream who will not challenge the M$ and Apple doublespeak that the FOSS ethos equates with piracy and personal data insecurity. No-one mainstream questions the "sustainabiltity" of the upgrade paths plotted out for them by the commercial regimes. I question absolutely everything, and I use Puppy Linux because it supports - no, explicitly helps me - challenge the consumerist hamsterwheel. Anyone reading this will know that words cannot adequately express the feeling, but Thank You, Puppy Linux, you are better than chicken soup for the soul...

[quirkian2new]

hey, Puppyt,
congratulations to your ANZAC windfall ! Each upgrade new version of M$ Windows will just make redundant nearly 30% to 50% of the existing hardware of winfugees. haha !

[nic007]

The last user friendly version of Windows was XP. You are right, these neverending popups in Windows is a big no no. It's just terrible.

[cthisbear]

Windows 7 Lite by eXperience is fast, a quarter of the size of Win7
and I have yet to find a fault.

Searching for >>> Windows Tiny7 Rev01 Unattended Activated CD (x86)

gives results in what he removed.

The man was a genius.
Also did Tiny XP iso's as well.

Chris.

[J_D_]

Big XP fan here. Butttt..... I wanted better.Hate Vista. Hate antivirus software. Three years ago I tried Mint. Very nice. Maybe too nice. Seemed to offer everything MS did. I really liked it. I did have problems getting wireless to work on one of my laptops. Mint also came with a lot of great software that I dont need.. I was hooked but I went looking at several versions of Linux. Found Puppy, 5.6, I think. It was perfect. Fast. Easy to use. What more could I want ?? Then I found Tahrpup and I am done searching. It is so easy even an uneducated old guy like me could use it. Tahrpup just keeps getting better. I even have it on a couple flash drives for backup, just it case.

[poorguy]

Howdy,

I happen to like old hardware as I also believe it is very usable and should be used. I also like the fact at how amazed people are when they see what I have done with their once owned computer which they tossed out.They come over and see it fly and then Hmm. Ok I have upgraded them from what they were which makes them what they are now usable.I'm still using a Pentium 4 @ 3.0GHZ so yes older computers still have lots of life in them.

As far as updates I believe security updates are needed for new exploits.I don't worry about adobe as it isn't allowed or installed on anything I own as it in my opinion isn't needed for what I do and most things are HTML5 anyway. I have always carefully chosen what updates get to be installed as some in my case aren't needed and can cause problems.

I like the simple UI that Puppy has which is one reason I use it and it does run well with old hardware that I use. It took awhile for me to get used to running as root but I have become comfortable with it now and realize having a password doesn't make anything any safer just takes longer to crack. Nothing is bulletproof.

I still use other Linux distros and have no complaints with them. Puppy Is just cool and unique in its own way . Simple plain menus very functional and it just works that is what I like about it.

[Pelo]

"The fact is, just because updates are available for a given piece of technology does not mean that they are required or even that they will improve anything. The updates may, in fact, reduce functionality or introduce problems where there were none before" i translated to french the article linked by mike Walsh.
I fully agree with it.
Updates are not required, they are available, there is an huge difference.
Even with Puppy Linux, you would change your ISO each day to fit the laste releases, either kernels or desktop or apps...
No need !

[Mike Walsh]

Goodness me, this thread has had a lot of attention in the last six months..!

I'd completely forgotten about it. 'The hamsterwheel of consumerism...' I like that!

Yes, Puppy still achieves its principal aim from all those years ago.....of keeping old hardware useful. And 'in a most delightful way'.....to quote Julie Andrews in 'Mary Poppins'.

And as for PuppyT, well; jammy bugger!! A pair of i7 minis for $2 each.....jeez, Louise. That is unbelievable; of course Puppy would be blisteringly fast on them. You go, my son... Yes!!


Mike.

[rokytnji]

Yeah. Presently when time permits. Fall and Winter are my biker busy months.

I have a touchscreen single core n270 atom netbook. Like so.
http://www.macomp.com/companiontouch.asp

I have the 2 gig ram model. I shoe horned a 60 gig zif ide pata SSD drive in it made by KingSpec. Freaking cheap KingSpec did not put trim support in that drive.

The plan is. I also have a Samsung S7 Edge phone like so.
https://www.verizonwireless.com/smartph ... y-s7-edge/

I know for a fact. Because I have done this. That this distro below automounts the phone when the phone is switched to MTP in settings <developer mode>. Distro I mention is below.

https://www.linuxliteos.com/

Notice earlier I said when time permits. I have not researched yet which Puppy to load yet on that netbook and what is needed for MTP file transferring for a Samsung S7 Edge running Android Marshmellow 6.0.1 .

Because later on the plan is to pack the netbook with the phone in the motorcyle saddlebags or in my bicycle over the shoulder mail bag. Use the phone as a mobile wifi hotspot and transfer files from netbook back to phone if needed. The battery is still good on that netbook. I've ran Carolina on it before. Right now it is wiped and stored.

But. When time allows.

Edit: I killed the IBM z60m with my ineptness and hurrying when I should have been methodical and patient.

[Pelo]

Mike Walsh, we are happy for the success of this topic.
However, Puppy users, beware the the Mike's arguments to switch to Puppy ... They could be valid for Puppy Itself...
Some Puppies (Lucid 5.2.8 ) are still use in schools in France by teachers. And it's really a challenge to update the version. Some tools were created (POU) but the teachers seems a little bit lost with it.

[Mike Walsh]

...I have the 2 gig ram model. I shoe horned a 60 gig zif ide pata SSD drive in it made by KingSpec. Freaking cheap KingSpec did not put trim support in that drive...

Hi, Roky.

I got me one of them 64GB Kingspec PATA SSD's in the old Dell lappy. They do include TRIM support in the SATA models, but not the IDE/PATA versions. I guess it's becuse XP was the last OS that really operated from IDE hard drives.....and it didn't include TRIM support.

I just use the 'manual' version of 'garbage-collection & organisation'. I leave around 10-12% of the drive unformatted; this gives the controller room to shuffle blocks around, rotating used blocks out of service, prior to deletion, and marking them as ready for re-use....

Works for me. Of course, using these for Pup, they're not getting anything like the amount of read/write activity that Windoze does, for example..!


Mike.

[rufwoof]

I was just curious as to whether anybody else in our community has experienced this kind of system and/or hardware degradation, due to never-ending updates for the sake of updating.....just because they're there, and available.

Or is it just me?

Mike.

Hi Mike. I've transitioned over to a policy of just using Debian old-stable as my primary boot choice... which Jessie will enter into in the next few months. Old-stable just gets security updates i.e. relatively infrequent updates. Then when the next Debian Stable (Stretch) enters old-stable, replaced by Buster being the new stable release, I'll 'upgrade' to Stretch then. In effect let release bugs all be ironed out and the system be well documented (loads of google search results specific to any issues you may have) before switching over to it. Older versions of programs that have been extensively tested/fixed before being adopted approach. Stick with the Debian repositories and that's pretty rock sold ... or at least as about as stable as you might ever get.

Combined with a dual boot choice of frugal or full boot and that works well for me. Install as though a full, add live-boot and squashfs-tools along with grub4dos and you can make a sfs of the full version, drop that into a sub-folder and boot that as though a frugal install. Exact same system loaded each time, but where you can periodically reboot Full and apply/test updates before updating (recreating) a new sfs to frugally boot.

If you separate out HOME to outside of the sfs, then any changes to the users program configuration files or docs/pictures stored in/beneath HOME are preserved across reboots. So you can mostly just frugal boot without having to save things at shutdown.

I have noticed that in having used Jessie for a while now that the updates frequency has tailed right off ... and I like that calm. No doubt when Stretch (next Debian release) comes out that will get loads of updates coming through, and I'm content to side-step that phase and only adopt it once its been tested across millions of hours by millions of 'testers' (users).

That policy is fine if you run on older kit. I tend (and I'm content) to run hand-me-downs. If you're into the latest (potentially flawed) versions of programs and/or hardware, then one option is to run later versions (kernel, software etc.) ... and become exposed to frequent updates. Another option however is to use backports, where you might temporarily open up your repository list to backports in order to grab the drivers/kernel from a later version in order to get things working, before removing that from your repository list.

Once I have the programs and desktop how I like it I'm content to stick with that and boot the exact same factory-fresh/pristine system each and every time, but also have the security fixes automatically coming through as and when needed. I can live with a larger main sfs than the more typical puppy (mines 1.2GB, but includes the Out house sink) as all-told likely a combination of puppy sfs's would get up to around that level anyway by the time you add in the likes of Libre, Openshot, Blender, Audacity, Kodi ...etc.

When you have the progs you want/need already installed and working well, updates can be more of a downgrade, the fewer the better IMO. Security updates yes, fine, I want those. But 'updates' of existing programs that work well enough already for my needs ... no thanks ... at least not just yet, I'm happy to only adopt those when they've been widely tested by millions and patched/fixed to levels where no further updates (other than security) are anticipated