Yesterday, I tried alpha2, but the video was overwhelmed with red... I can't explain it, and can't reproduce the symptoms today.
Today, I downloaded and booted with 1.0.5RC... I'm typing from it right now!
I found it strange that when I first tried to boot it came up red like alpha2. Even stranger, I then booted to XP to copy the pup003 to the C:\, but found the pup003 to be smaller than it should have been. I deleted pup003 and tried again. Since my USB is 1.1, each attempt takes forever.
After 4 boots, the colors were normal. I didn't do anything to fix them, they just started working. Also, each of the boots resulted in different sized pup003 files on the thumb drive. I gave up and copied my Chubby Puppy 1.0.4 pup001 file to pup003 on the C drive through Windows. When I booted again with the thumb drive removed, 1.0.5RC found the pup003 file I created, did some updating to it and everything has been fine since.
Since I didn't want to blame Puppy for crashing my car (I was driving while doing the initial boots, only 2.5 hours to get home tonight), I didn't take any notes. Puppy 1.0.5RC was not able to create a usable pup003 file on my laptop. Some were too small, but all were corrupt. Some of the bootups hung while loading to RAM. I don't know why, but the only thing that I can think might have been a factor is the USB version/speed because once I took USB out of the picture, the boot problems went away.
My modem was found ttyS1 like before. I configured wvdial and dialed out successfully on the first try. I don't know if its an inactivity disconnect feature, but every couple of minutes, wvdial keeps loosing the connection. I'm not used to this... Its rather anoying.
So far, everything that I've tried seems to work. I will continue to try different things... I'm pretty happy with so far.
Its been a long day/week... I'm pretty tired right now... I'll re-read/edit this over the weekend...
Thanks Barry!
babbs