(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Woof woof! Merry Christmas! (and puppy new year!)

My good old puppy desktop pc (HP d530c) is aging and needing a new notebook, I was looking for a laptop/notebook not too old but strictly working with puppy 3.01

I understand that, due to new recent hardware changes, the good old puppy 3.01 with 2.6.21.7 kernel it is pretty impossible to have a modern recent notebook working with puppy 3.01 (to not say of evil UEFI BIOS issues)

But, having compiled, customized, modded thousend of binaries for my beloved puppy 3.01, I was looking for a most recent notebook/laptop able to run puppy 3.01

Do you have some advices?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Because you are buying a laptop, I can assume that you want WiFi. Your chances of finding the driver for a modern WiFi adapter in the 2.6.21.7 kernel are going to be pretty slim.

rcrsn51 wrote:Because you are buying a laptop, I can assume that you want WiFi. Your chances of finding the driver for a modern WiFi adapter in the 2.6.21.7 kernel are going to be pretty slim.

Yes, but I am looking a laptop only for in house use only, so, with an ethernet port, I can anyway go online. I'm more concerned about video card and evil UEFI BIOS. I built, trough the years, a pretty customized puppy ecosystem in my desktop pc and, frankly speaking, passing from puppy 3.01 from another recent puppy version, due to hardware changes, makes me similar to a citizen with all his comforts that, arrived on a desert island, is constrained to start from scratch or almost from zero, or similar to people moving from old home to new home that during the transport lose the great part of household tools and comforts

Dingo wrote: evil UEFI BIOS

If you buy a used machine that was originally Win7, you will be OK.

Many refurbished Win8 UEFI machines now have Win10, but switched to Legacy mode. They should be OK too.

Disable secure boot in the UEFI bios, has always worked for me to get Puppy to boot.
Fast boot option or something similar, also may need disabled.

Hardware support is going to be the big issue.

I have a recently new laptop and a fairly new desktop.
Tahrpup 6.0.5 was the oldest Puppy that would support all the hardware.
The 5 series Puppies would boot on them, but not all hardware would work completely bug free.
Puppy 4.3.1 and other series 4 Puppies would not even boot to working desktop.

With most of the hardware support built into the Linux kernel.
Wonder if you could just use a newer kernel in your Puppy 3.01
Probably would need to add some firmware for the hardware.

Most laptops are now using the Intel Processors integrated graphics. They have no added graphics cards. I know you are going to need latest Intel drivers and probably Linux kernel to fully support it.
The Intel i915 driver, has really only gotten close to 100% bug free, with the latest version.
Intel is also constantly changing their processors that are used in laptops. That integrated graphics updating, improving, and different from the last version.
Does your Puppy 3.01 even have an Intel i915 driver?

bigpup wrote:Wonder if you could just use a newer kernel in your Puppy 3.01

As far as I remember it already exists a puppy 3.01 with 2.6.25.16 kernel that, I fear, it is not enough for recent hardware. Puppy 3.01 had i915 additional pet it seems to me that I think downloaded and stocked somewere in external hard disk

I surely don't pretend the moon, The fact is that I have tons of big and little programs built in puppy 3.01 that would be an huge waste of time and energy trying to build again in a more recent puppy version needed to run more recent hardware (assuming to be successful in building that is not a sure thing)

Maybe running puppy 3.01 in a virtual machine would be a possible solution?

The easiest solution would be to get a used laptop somewhat near the era of Puppy 3.01. One advantage is that by this time they are super cheap. Something from the Intel Duo Core era would still have enough oomph to run modern Puppies and still probably be good for Puppy 3.01.

You should be able to get something seller reburbished for less than $100.

I just took a look at EPC and they don't even have Intel Duo for sale anymore, but have a Lenovo t410 first gen i5 4 gig of RAM for $100. https://deals.epcusa.com/lenovo-t410-no ... am-dvdcdrw

That is going to have a lot better chance of running it than something that came with Windows 10.

The truth is. You are not going to really know the answer until you try using Puppy 3.01 on some new computer.

If you could put Puppy 3.01 on a USB flash drive.
Go to the place you want to buy the computer and try it out.

About swapping kernels.
I was talking about putting one of the 4 series kernels in your Puppy 3.01

I think you will find that Slacko5.7 will work well on your 'new' NB. Micko did a great job on that one and uses k3.4.82

Regards
8Geee

Hey Dingo,
Don't blame you for wanting to hold on to that Pup it was very lovely Puppy indeed, had a lot of fun with it.

Dingo:

You're right about the i915... had to be a separate D/L IIRC as pet. I have a 900a xandros, and I think 3.05 included it. I know the Dingo-4 series had it. As above, I moved on to Slacko5.7.

Regards
8Geee

You can try TazPuppy if you want.

mistfire
Is TazPuppy a small enough version?