best puppy for very old computer

[rkonrad]

I've stuck with Wary 5 though I"ve tried all the alternatives given by a very friendly commuity! It seems the video card is still the problem. It works but scrolls slowly to render any new text/image. When and if I find the correct driver, how will I incorporate this into the system? To the user who looked up my computer - thanks. I will be looking for the driver as time permitts.

Cheers

richard

[Monsie]

Hi rkonrad,

It recognized the card as "trident" but I am not convinced that is totally correct.

If you want to identify your graphics hardware, run this command at the console:

Code: Select all

lspci -v |grep VGA

You should be able to confirm this in Hardinfo by selecting the "PCI Devices" category and scrolling through the list.

In addition, use this command:

Code: Select all

ddcprobe

if you want to determine how much video ram you have, as well as complete specs on your monitor --including resolutions and refresh rates.

Monsie

[Burn_IT]

see http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 8&start=15.

I seem to remember it ran 4.2 from CD as well.

It does have a swap partition defined and it does run better with 192Mb memory.

[rkonrad]

Thanks again for the commands to help identify my video card.. It is a Trident Cyberblade /i1 rev 5d. The journey now begins to find any an appropriate driver. I've settled with the Wary 5. None of the other versions recommended helped with my card. So I thought I would start with this community if they know of any sources I could investigate. Video RAM is 8 megs by the way. I like the look of wary as well so I'll dispense with the macpup though I use it with my desktop (as well as Vector Linux)

Cheers

Richard.

[Colonel Panic]

I can recommend Puppy Turbo (and Puppy Turbo Extreme), both of which are based on the 4.2 series of Pups and are optimised to run on old hardware.

[Dewbie]

From Barry's blog:
"Old" ideas for a new lightweight pup

[greengeek]

The journey now begins to find any an appropriate driver

I don't have a specific answer that will help, but I am in the middle of a similar issue myself so maybe my general info may be of use. There is an interaction between various modules in the video software so it is helpful to have some idea of the complexity before you can reduce it to simple steps.

In my experience it is not just as simple as clicking on the right driver and watching it install. Nor is it as simple as clicking a .pet that supposedly contains the correct driver (you might get lucky, but only if the person who made that .pet shares the identical video card hardware, firmware and linux kernel as you do)

Basically what you have to achieve is this:
1) Locate the manufacturers driver for your video card
2) Work out which kernel you have (type uname -r in a console)
3) Compile the manufacturers driver against your kernel (which may involve temporarily accessing the "devx" kernel that matches what you are using)
4) Load the driver correctly
5) Configure xorg.conf correctly

Apparently the compile steps are not difficult, but the xorg setup can be tricky.

It will become important to have an understanding of how the Xorg server decides which driver is active.

The video driver which is currently in use is specified by the xorg.conf file in the /etc/x11 folder. However, the behaviour of this file is rather problematic in my experience. The file does not always stay the same. There are circumstances under which Xorg will discard the changes you make to the file, and overwrite it.

This can cause endless problems with trying to figure out why your changes don't seem to work.

Also, it is important to remember that Xorg is able to "fallback" to basic settings if it detects that something in the xorg.conf file does not match your hardware. This means that there are at least two modes that will appear to work on your machine - firstly the fallback mode, and secondly the accelerated mode (...and there are various different levels of accleleration too. 2D and 3D accel are achieved by different methods)

There is also a .pet called something like xorg_high (which may be worth a try if you don't want to go the whole compile route just yet). The xorg_high driver is a step up from the fallback driver, but a step below true 3D acceleration based on the full (and correctly compiled) driver from the manufacturer.

The fact that only one Puppy has the correct fallback settings suggests that your video card may be a little "touchy" so it might be tricky to find the driver/xorg.conf combo that works well for you.

I recommend that you keep any important data off this machine until you have finished experimenting with the video as it is likely that you will have to work through a lot of config/reboot/reinstall.

Hopefully you will have time to do some research throughout this forum because there is a large patchwork of valuable info about how Xorg works - it's just that different people know different things depending on what happened with their particular hardware.

I recommend making a copy of the xorg.conf file that you can currently find in /etc/x11. This file will contain the fallback settings and driver name that currently work on your system. It may contain useful info, and in any case you may need to reinstall it at various times during the troubleshooting, or you may want to copy it over to any other puppy that has not succeeded in generating a working xorg.conf

[greengeek]

I mentioned searching this forum for info - you may find the search function of this forum difficult to use (I don’t know why it doesn’t give the expected results...), and you may find that a normal google search gets you more specific results (and will also include similar topics from other distros forums...) Also, this modified google search page (specific to Puppy) is rather useful:
http://wellminded.com/puppy/pupsearch.html

At the risk of offering way too much blabber (but in the hope that some of it might help you avoid non-working shortcuts...) here is a bit more info:

I forgot to mention a couple of things:
1) As well as xorg and vesa, there was another option called xfree86. A debian forum post mentions your video card and xfree86 here:
http://www.galeon.com/arturofdezm/confpresario.html
and offers a sample config file here:
http://www.galeon.com/arturofdezm/XF86Config-4
I’m not suggesting that you should use xfree86, but the format of the sample file is very similar to xorg.conf and just might include some parameters that eventually help you.
2) As well as fallback graphics modes, and 2D/3D acceleration, there are other factors that can affect operation of the card: Mesa and DRI (direct rendering) seem to be mentioned quite a bit. I am still confused about whether these can co-exist alongside true acceleration, or are used instead of it, where a correct driver can not be found. (I am still working through similar driver problems on a couple of Toshiba laptops and struggling to unravel the relationship between all these factors)

One thing I know for sure (from lots of trial and error) is that someone elses .pet driver file may have worked well for them but still have a wrong parameter for your system or needs. This seems especially true for the early AGP cards, which came out at a time when there was a high rate of hardware development, and information and software development may not have matured fully. You may have to find a partial answer and finetune it. Anyway, here is a collection of info that might help build the picture.

This webpage is fairly specific about Trident support for your card. I don’t know how exactly this is applicable to Puppy (but someone else will..)
http://linux.die.net/man/4/trident

This post mentions DRI on a cyberblade card. No solution but possibly some config info of interest:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... rt-425836/

ubuntu cyberblade issue with sample working xorg
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1698729

Linux forum that mentions a solution for a similar card and offers an xorg.conf
http://www.linuxformat.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=93917

Debian forum with major bitching session, but some good indepth comments about xorg etc
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=51558

Tip re copying a working xorg.conf (on Tecra 8200 with diff Trident, but still useful background and a sample grafted xorg.conf)
http://208.109.22.214/puppy/viewtopic.php?
p=34944&sid=16d38df046f91bd007bf36b186086464

Older murga post re 3D centre and cyberblade:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=10757

Forum member “Tempestuous

[greengeek]

.
Any chance of posting the contents of your xorg.conf file that is in the /etc/x11 folder?

It will give us a starting point to see if you are using vesa fallback or the Trident driver at the moment.

[eskimo]

Hi,

I apologize if I'm adding my question to a wrong thread but I haven't found anything more suitable (was looking for a topic named "best puppy for very very very old computer" without success

I would like to try some Puppy with my very old computer - Pentium 120, 64 MB RAM, 1.6 GB HDD, S3 Trio 64V+ PCI graphics, TEAC 24x CD-ROM drive, MissMelody-compatible ISA sound card, a PCI network card, Award BIOS (and no USB support).

The PC was completely unemployed for quite a long time - I didn't turn it on a single time during the last 3-4 years and other 3-4 years before that I was using it very rarely. At the time when it was still in active service (1996-2004) the PC was running Windows 95 SR2, which is still installed there but I would like to replace it with Puppy and see what I'll get - I'd like to try this as the last step before I throw the PC away as completely useless (browsing today's web with IE 4.0 preinstalled in Win95 is not funny).

Reading quickly through PuppyLinux websites I learnt that the puppy I should want to install and that could work with my old machine is Wary Puppy. So I downloaded the ISO image of the latest 5.3 WaryPuppy, burnt it to a CD, set the boot sequence in BIOS to "CDROM,C,A" and tried to boot... unfortunately it didn't work - although the BIOS made an attempt to boot from the CD-ROM (it displayed some 2 lines of something like "Booting from CD-ROM"), the attempt wasn't successful (the 3rd line was "Starting Windows 95")... since there is no USB support in the PC, I can't boot Puppy via USB either (actually, there are a few unused pins in the motherboard that its manual claims to be USB but they've never been connected to anything and I don't think they would work because at the time when the motherboard was born USB 1.1 was not yet standardized, not sure about USB 1.0)

To make a long story short, I'm looking for a way to boot Wary Puppy installer from a floppy drive or to use some Windows- or DOS-based installer of Wary Puppy that would allow me to install it to HDD and to use it first alongside and afterwards (if I'm happy with it) instead of current Windows 95. I searched and searched on the website, in forums but I didn't find any information related to booting from floppy

Could somebody please help me with this? Thanks in advance!

[greengeek]

I would like to try some Puppy with my very old computer - Pentium 120, 64 MB RAM, 1.6 GB HDD, S3 Trio 64V+ PCI graphics, TEAC 24x CD-ROM drive, MissMelody-compatible ISA sound card, a PCI network card, Award BIOS (and no USB support).
I downloaded the ISO image of the latest 5.3 WaryPuppy, burnt it to a CD, set the boot sequence in BIOS to "CDROM,C,A" and tried to boot... unfortunately it didn't work - although the BIOS made an attempt to boot from the CD-ROM "Starting Windows 95")

I don't think you need to drop back to a floppy boot. It almost sounds as if the CD drive could not find a valid "image" on the CD. Did you do a "burn as image", rather than as a file? That is a common issue, especially if it the "burn as image" feature is not clearly defined within your burning programmes options. I think your machine only proceeded to boot the W95 because it saw no valid boot data on the CD.

Also, it could have been a bad burn. It is worth re-burning the CD at the lowest speed possible. (The laser gets better dye penetration at lower speeds.)

If you have no joy with Wary, it would probably be worth going back to some of the earlier versions of Puppy. (they were fine-tuned for machines without a lot of power)

I’d recommend downloading the 4.3.1 iso available here:
http://ftp.nluug.nl/ftp/pub/os/Linux/di ... ppy-4.3.1/

and also downloading fatfree pup 2.17 here:
http://www.fileswap.com/dl/PBz6SgIf6J/p ... p-2.17.iso

Another one that gives good performance on low powered PCs is Gray’s Puppy NOP 431, available here:
http://puppylinuxstuff.meownplanet.net/ ... 31-NOP.iso (you may need a username of puppy and a password of linux)

Keen to hear how it goes.

[sfeeley]

@eskimo

To make a long story short, I'm looking for a way to boot Wary Puppy installer from a floppy drive

If you can boot the CD on another computer (that has a floppy drive), you can go to
menu --> setup --> wakepup

which creates a boot floppy that will convince your other older computer to read the CD drive.
http://www.puppylinux.com/hard-puppy.htm
(scroll down for the description of wakepup)

You might also look up the lin-n-win installation method, which uses windows to install puppy.
http://www.icpug.org.uk/national/linnwin/contents.htm

There are also programs that do the lin-n-win automatically (I've not used but here's the thread)
http://208.109.22.214/puppy/viewtopic.p ... efc6d0c503

you can also yank the harddrive, stick it into a better computer, install puppy there, and then move the harddrive back. Puppy can switch between computers like that. And on really old computers (like yours) sometimes, its better to use a faster CPU/more Ram to get it installed.

Also, look up the process for making a swap partition (or swap file). Both are ways of giving virtual memory to to Ram deficient computers by using your harddrive as virtual ram (its like a paging file in windows). If you can dig up some cheap ram somewhere, that would be best, since your computer is pretty near the bottom of what will run.
(You add a swap partition using the gparted program which is part of puppy linux-- again switching the drive to a faster machine might help to do this).

And take a look at some of the other puppy suggestions in this thread. Wary is a good place to start, but some of the others might have better luck.

[Monsie]

Hi eskimo,

I have a similar computer (1997 Windows 95 model) that is still in use today...
Therefore, I am quite certain that you will have to use WakePup as sfeeley suggested to boot Puppy from a floppy disk. Given the age of your computer, I would also suggest an older version of Puppy: Puppy 2.17 which you can get right here or fatfree pup 2.17 as greengeek suggested which is available over here. The reason is that newer Puppies especially Wary Puppy require 256 mb of ram. That said, I also recommend that you shop for some used ram: two sticks of 72 pin EDO ram @ 32 mb each, to hopefully bring you up to the maximum of 128 mb ram that your computer should take... assuming that you have four slots with 32 mb of ram in each slot. Lastly, I recommend that you partition your hard drive to include a swap file of 128 -256 mb of space.

Complete these requirements, and you should be able to resuscitate your old Pentium 1 such that it will perform reasonably well.

Monsie

[Dewbie]

Monsie wrote:

The reason is that newer Puppies especially Wary Puppy require 256 mb of ram.

For frugal installation, that is:
http://puppylinux.org/main/Manual-English.htm#Manual05

[greengeek]

...(browsing today's web with IE 4.0 preinstalled in Win95 is not funny).
...at the time when the motherboard was born USB 1.1 was not yet standardized, not sure about USB 1.0)

Yes, these are the biggest limitations. It will be interesting to see what benefits Puppy gives you on this hardware.

Another Puppy that is worth trying on hardware like this is MeanPuppy (developed by John Murga, who runs this forum), available here:

http://www.my-plan.org/storage/puppyLinux/
(The iso will be titled puppy-2.02-opera)

It is the most fully featured tiny iso that I have found and includes a self-installer for the opera browser.

Although the Puppy OS is easily light enough to run on your hardware the main problem you are likely to see is that the internet today requires a lot from the browser, and browsers are memory hogs. Puppy has a wide choice of browsers, and you can go as light or as heavy as you want.

The version of Opera that comes within Meanpuppy is a good start.

As others suggested, the more memory you can fit, the better off you will be.

One of the main benefits puppy offers over W95 is full USB support, but as you have pointed out, that won't bring you any benefit on your motherboard. (Unless maybe you can find a header cable that is compatible with those pins you mentioned...)

[eskimo]

Hi again,

thanks to everybody for their help and advice... I read through all of them and tried some of them and I was (partly) successful in the end.

First I burnt a new bootable CD with WaryPuppy 5.3 at 16x (got a good-quality Verbatim CD-RW medium for that - previously I had used a cheap noname CD-R) and tried booting the old machine from it - without success. The only difference when compared with the previous CD was a different message preceding the "Starting Windows 95" one - now it was "Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM: Failure..." whereas before it said "Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM: 1.FD (some unreadable characters) SystemType-00".

Then, as a second step, I attempted to boot my newer machine (AMD Athlon 2500XP) from the Wary Puppy 5.3 CD-RW - the OS launched without any problems so I could put aside the option that something's wrong with the CD - the problem was clearly caused by the fact that the old machine was incapable of booting from a CD-ROM (although its BIOS claims that it should be able to do it). Therefore I tried to create a WakePup2 bootable floppy - and here I came upon something which might be a bug in WaryPuppy 5.3 (but it can as well be just that I did something wrongly) - after choosing Menu/Setup/WakePup I got a message saying that WakePup was not installed and that I should install it via PET install (or what was the name of the installation tool). So I downloaded and installed a package named "wakepup2-20070919" (there were no other wakepups available), the installer said that all was OK but when I chose Menu/Setup/WakePup nothing at all happened. I tried uninstalling the WakePup, downloading it again from a different mirror, but the result was the same...

Since I suspected that the problem with wakepup2 could be that - being built in 2007 - it was no longer compatible with the recent WaryPuppy 5.3, I erased the CD-RW and re-burnt it with pup-431.iso. And it turned out that my suspicion might be right because this time after installing wakepup2-20070919 I was finally able to create a bootable floppy. And the floppy boot worked with my old PC. Moreover, it worked for both 4.3.1 Puppy and WaryPuppy 5.3 (I still kept the first cheap CD-R with Wary).

Yet I can't quite say that I'm too satisfied with the result because the full boot took 5-10 minutes (I hope, though, that after I'll properly install some Puppy to the HDD the startup won't take so long anymore) and I came across other difficulties - e.g. serial mouse didn't work (fortunately I found working the PS/2 mouse socket in the old PC that I had always thought had never worked) and Puppy couldn't find the sound card installed in the PC (I would think that this is a result of the card being ISA some manual configuration/tweaking could be needed). I also found strange that the Puppy launched in console and I had to manually type "startx" to get to the GUI (could be that the installer wanted to indicate to me that way that X wouldn't work with such old machine - it worked, though). But what surprised me most was that I didn't find 4.3.1 Puppy any quicker than its 5.3 Wary brother. So perhaps I should look for something older than 4.3.1 ? Maybe I'll try the fatfree 2.17 next(?) Or the MeanPuppy?

Now I think I'm gonna put this Puppy experiment of mine aside for a while and I'll return to it sometime later... but of course, if any ideas that you think might be useful for me come to your mind in the meantime, please write them down here for me... Thanks!

[greengeek]

Now I think I'm gonna put this Puppy experiment of mine aside for a while and I'll return to it sometime later... but of course, if any ideas that you think might be useful for me come to your mind in the meantime, please write them down here for me... Thanks!

Hey, nice work. Very detailed feedback. I think you are right that an install would greatly improve speed. If you come back to the project I'd probably still give the MeanPup a try. Some of the older, more lightweight stuff was optimised for lower memory machines.

[Dewbie]

eskimo wrote:

(got a good-quality Verbatim CD-RW medium for that - previously I had used a cheap noname CD-R)

Don't pay too much attention to the brand name on the package.
If you use Puppy's built-in Pburn, it shows who actually manufactured it.

Yet I can't quite say that I'm too satisfied with the result because the full boot took 5-10 minutes

Wary 5.1.1 k2.6.30.5 (the 4.3.1 kernel) boots quickly on my old Compaq Deskpro P2 / 350 / 320 MB RAM.
I tried it today on a Dell Dimension P4 / 2.2 / 1.5G RAM, and booting is unbelievably slow.
(Edit: It might be because the Dell has a CD-ROM and the Compaq has a CD burner, which apparently operates at a higher speed.)

[Dewbie]

greengeek wrote:

Some of the older, more lightweight stuff was optimised for lower memory machines.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=65544

[sfeeley]

I hope, though, that after I'll properly install some Puppy to the HDD the startup won't take so long anymore

definitely will. Puppy tries to load as much from the CD into ram at boot. On a slow CD Rom on a slow computer this can take a lot of time. But will be much faster from HD.