(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I have two very, very old laptops (one siemens and the other one IBM)
As these are very low on RAM (one has only 64 and the onther 128) and the Siemen's CD unit it's mostly dead, and also there is no usb boot, I intend to take out the hdd and connect it to a desktop computer (with plenty of ram memory ...) and make a frugal install on this hdd. Then put it back in the laptop and run puppy.
With more processing power and more ram the installation should be done in minutes, while using the old laptop............, well it's painfully slow, not to talk about the bad CD unit.
Is this possible, and what do I have to keep in mind making this?!

Are you planning to connect the hdd to the big computer with a USB adapter cable?

Here's the problem. With low-RAM machines like yours, a full install with swap is preferable. But Puppy won't do a full install to a USB device. So you are stuck with frugal.

Make sure that you add a swap partition to the hard drive. And flag the main partition as bootable.

You will use Grub4Dos Bootloader Config to set up the bootloader on the drive. It should be smart enough to do it correctly, so the drive boots when you move it back to the laptop.

Not an USB adapter. I found on internet a n internall adapter from 40 to 44 pin IDE. Somethimg like this
http://www.okazii.ro/componente-compute ... a121264798

mmagdiel wrote:Not an USB adapter. I found on internet a n internall adapter from 40 to 44 pin IDE. Somethimg like this
http://www.okazii.ro/componente-compute ... a121264798

I've done it many times with an adapter like that.
Full installs with swap partition.
Depending on your cpu speed, it could be a problem
getting decent performance with your limited ram.

rjbrewer wrote:

mmagdiel wrote:Not an USB adapter. I found on internet a n internall adapter from 40 to 44 pin IDE. Somethimg like this
http://www.okazii.ro/componente-compute ... a121264798

I've done it many times with an adapter like that.
Full installs with swap partition.
Depending on your cpu speed, it could be a problem
getting decent performance with your limited ram.

And it is running without any compatability problems?! That's my question, because making this with a windows installation would not run unless the 2 computers are the same[/quote]

Frugal should be fine. A full install would be different, and with limited RAM that is what you really should be doing.