Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

rrogers · Joined: 15 Apr 2012 Posts: 4

Just wanted to say that the Puppy distribution worked quite well on a very old machine. As a person who has the ability to stumble across problems in the most mundane of tasks; it was really appreciated.
The installation went easily, and the machine actually has a reasonable response time!

Ray

starhawk · Posted: Sun 15 Apr 2012, 15:04 Post subject:

Always good to hear news like this Very Happy

I'd be interested in knowing which Puppy you used (there's plenty on these forums, in addition to the "official" versions) as well as specs of the machine that got Puppified.

Oh, I almost forgot. Welcome, as we say, to the Kennels!

rrogers · Joined: 15 Apr 2012 Posts: 4

lupu-528.005.iso
AMD Athlon
Stepping 6.5.2 Thunderbird 957.6 Mhz
Ram 256 Mb
Display: 1024x768 Via686A Via 825686
Disks -- SCSI Lite-on CDLTN5265; ATA ST3802110A (60GB)
Board 7ZM Gigabyte Technology
Bios 10/26/2000 American Megatrends
I had to use the cd because it only allowed USB-FD booting Smile

Ray

starhawk · Posted: Sun 15 Apr 2012, 20:58 Post subject:

Offhand I'd mention that it might be good to look up "WakePup2" (floppy boot-to-anything disk, IIRC) for next time Wink

Also there are a lot of other floppy boot managers out there... just do a search Wink

One other thing... you might take a look around the forum here, see if there's any other Puppy you like the look/features of. My all time favorite seems to be Puplite5 (it's actually faster than ClassicPup, which is intended for really old systems, older than what you've got I think) but: to each their own, right?

rrogers · Joined: 15 Apr 2012 Posts: 4

I was thinking about trying out your suggestion because the Puppy disk didn't bring up the graphics interface on my new machine. I got a mouse pointer; but no USB interface to the mouse (as I recall) .An experiment; I have consistent problems relating to motherboard/video card so I don't expect a real definitive answer. Part of my problem seems to be the USB interfaces are being killed by the video card initialization; but that really doesn't make sense. Things that don't make sense are typically clues to what's really wrong with the machine and wrong with my opinion of "making sense" Smile

If I went through the Wakepuppy wrapper would I have the same problem? It's not clear to me how to make a CD with puppy2 and Wakepuppy anyway.

Ray

rrogers · Joined: 15 Apr 2012 Posts: 4

starhawk
I tried the suggestion to use Puplite5.
It managed to come up and work in my recalcitrant machine!
I actually just needed to run gparted and it did successfully and stably.
Something lupu-528.005.iso , gparted live, and various other live distribtuions failed to do.
They either bollocked up the x-interface or froze the USB ports; which included the keyboard and mouse. I have no idea why I attract strange motherboards and video interfaces. I also don't know why some distributions work and others fail since they all use the same underlying x-windows interface.

Puplite worked fine Smile

Ray

starhawk · Posted: Wed 20 Jun 2012, 13:07 Post subject:

Hmmm... I'm not sure that the problem you have is software related.

Take a look at the motherboard in your system. You want to make sure that the capacitors (cylindrical objects of varying size, usually with a shiny top and a glossy plastic label around the side) all have flat tops. If any are domed, or have an unknown substance very obviously coming out of them... that's bad but fixable. You'll need to have someone (I recommend a small repair shop, not a big box store 'repair' department) go in and replace the bad capacitors. This is not cheap, but it is important.