Which Puppy for an older computer?

Booting, installing, newbie
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jakfish
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#31 Post by jakfish »

@Dewbie: I run 4.32 on an ancient Sony Vaio Picturebook, one of those with the Crusoe processor. The processor may have something to do with it, though on my equally-ancient IBM Thinkpad 570 (PII-300Mhz), 4.32 works as well, and much faster.

I will try that firepup, thanks for the tip.

Jake

tommy
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#32 Post by tommy »

I suggest to use a barebones version of Puppy. I'm at this very moment writing this post on a acer 355 featuring Pentium non-mmx 133MHz, no L2 cache and 40MB ram. I run puppy barebones 2.01r2 on it. Your PC is faster than mine. You can add old Firefox 1.5 or Opera 9 to it, download at http://dotpups.de on puppy 1 and 2 section (dig into it to find other puppy 2.x stuff). Memory footprint is very little, but a swapfile is required, though! I use this old junk to connect remotely from home to work PC, using rdesktop and VNC through a ssh tunnel.

You can also try out Turbopup extreme, Akita (beta13 at present), 2.14R.
Good luck!

starhawk
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#33 Post by starhawk »

Heads-up -- TurboPup breaks when you try to change how it works or improve it. It works fine until you try to modify it, and then it makes a real mess on the carpet. (I've tried this.) Also, there is only one wallpaper setup that will ever work, and that's basic black.

Also, while ClassicPup will run, it's going to be incredibly slow because it's full of flashy special effects that bog down any processor.

FWIW, check out the "pUPnGO 2012 Plus Extras" thread in Puppy Projects here on the forum. I've got the FreeOffice version running on an old laptop with a 300MHz Pentium II CPU and 128MB RAM. Works great. Since Celeron's didn't come out until the Pentium II era anyways, you'll be OK (I can't guarantee that it'll run on a Pentium I or a K6-II or anything like that!).

circularL7
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#34 Post by circularL7 »

Haha. You guys/gals are great. I finally have an excuse to buy all the old computer stuff that I thought were junk. Now that the '98 is running smoothly for all kinds of things that it has never done before, I'll have my eyes peeled for experiments.

I need an old printer, so I can print e-books. :D

Dewbie

#35 Post by Dewbie »

circularL7 wrote:
Now that the '98 is running smoothly
Which Puppy version is it running?

circularL7
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#36 Post by circularL7 »

Dewbie wrote:circularL7 wrote:
Now that the '98 is running smoothly for all kinds of things that it has never done before
Which Puppy is it running with?
It's not. I read a page, perhaps on this forum, that noted the possibility of causing real trouble. My experience had become so rewarding in fun as I came to understand and experiment more that I wanted to slow down on my aspirations that seem more appropriate to people with more skill and just take it slow, like a hobby.

That project was much too big for me at this time. I'm taking a little time off from it to recuperate; I spent a lot of time researching and working on it this weekend while I should have been working on other stuff. Such is life.

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Sky Aisling
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Which Puppy for an older computer?

#37 Post by Sky Aisling »

Hi circularL7

Another thing to consider is that some older CD/DVD drives won't read new medium disks because of the type of plastic used.
The older medium disk material has a greenish tint to the plastic.
You can sorta see it if you hold the disk to the light and rotate the disk.

That may be the reason the $1 thrift store disk worked.

circularL7
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Re: Which Puppy for an older computer?

#38 Post by circularL7 »

Sky Aisling wrote:Hi circularL7

Another thing to consider is that some older CD/DVD drives won't read new medium disks because of the type of plastic used.
The older medium disk material has a greenish tint to the plastic.
You can sorta see it if you hold the disk to the light and rotate the disk.

That may be the reason the $1 thrift store disk worked.
Thanks. I had been guessing that, but it was only for the ISO that it didn't read. I downloaded a boatload of programs via the new ones.

During the last week, I've been changing RAM sticks and drives, all of which are garage sale finds. It's up to a cool 192 Megs of RAM, but I'm a little concerned that she kunt tek it; she'll be torn to bits. LOL. I have one stick without any form of ID, one stick that's marked PC 100, and one that's marked PC 133. Apparently, it's sensitive to the order of placement because it wouldn't boot under some orders.

A rather demoralizing experience has been noticing PC's that are exponentially more powerful going for $20 on Craig's, etc. However, she's been upgraded to handle thumb drives, so I'm going to take another run at Puppy but via USB. Blam!

I'll update you in a week or two.

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Sky Aisling
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Which Puppy for an older computer?

#39 Post by Sky Aisling »

Make sure you add a *swap* file like Dewbie suggests (on page 1 of this thread).

circularL7
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Re: Which Puppy for an older computer?

#40 Post by circularL7 »

Sky Aisling wrote:Make sure you add a *swap* file like Dewbie suggests (on page 1 of this thread).
Will do.

circularL7
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#41 Post by circularL7 »

Tell me if I understand this correctly: I can download a Puppy to my thumb drive, and I can download all my info to my thumb drive, and I can take my Puppy and all my data on my thumb drive and use it on any computer that I like?

Kind of like Keanu Reeves in that movie in which he stores info in his brain and plugs in wherever he likes?

And! If I understand what I'm doing with Puppy, I can modify it to be what is perfect for me and have this modified Puppy forever?

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greengeek
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#42 Post by greengeek »

circularL7 wrote:Tell me if I understand this correctly: I can download a Puppy to my thumb drive, and I can download all my info to my thumb drive, and I can take my Puppy and all my data on my thumb drive and use it on any computer that I like?
More or less, yes. Bear in mind there are LOTS of puppies, and they are optimised to suit different machines. So you may prefer to have several puppies on the one thumb drive - that way you are likely to find one of them will suit any machine you want.

Example - you might have puppy431 to suit 10 year old computers (if they boot from usb...), Wary5.3 to suit 5 year old computers, and two versions of a newer puppy for pretty new machines (Lots to choose from - Fatdog, Saluki, Lucid, Slacko, Precise...).

Newer machines may require a puppy with a "PAE" kernel or a "non PAE" kernel (depending on their design) - so that will have a bearing on which versions of Puppy you choose.

Puppy is a cut-down operating system so it is pretty hard for one single pup to drive every possible system perfectly.

You may also have to make a decision about how you format that thumb drive - FAT32 is likely to give you the best portability of data - but it might be best to format the drive with a boot partition in ext2, ext 3 or ext 4, and a separate partition in FAT32 for your data.

No doubt others will have good suggestions about the best way for you to set up the thumb drive. Theres' lots of puppies, and lots of different methods.

circularL7
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#43 Post by circularL7 »

It's incredible.

Yogi
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#44 Post by Yogi »

This might help decide your choice:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=84271

circularL7
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#45 Post by circularL7 »

Yogi wrote:This might help decide your choice:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=84271
Thank you.


Would you, any of you, give me a link to a good set of directions for creating a shell and a set for creating a partition, both for Win 98? I've found some stuff, but I really don't know if I'm looking at good directions or not.

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6502coder
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Wary on a old laptop

#46 Post by 6502coder »

For what it's worth, I have Wary 5.1.4.1 running dual-boot with Win98 on an old Sony laptop, 333 Mhz Pentium II, 192 Meg ram. I have a 256M swap partition, a 1G partition for the Puppy files, and a 600M partition for my data files. I use this machine mainly for writing and for playing around with various programming languages (Javascript, Python, BaCon), and it's great.

I admit it's not really usable for surfing the Web but I don't use it for that anymore, although I used to have a cheap Airlink wireless card working.

I use a frugal install. I tried a full install once but it really wasn't noticeably faster.

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greengeek
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#47 Post by greengeek »

circularL7 wrote:Would you, any of you, give me a link to a good set of directions for creating a shell and a set for creating a partition, both for Win 98?
Not sure what you mean by "a shell". Also, when you mention W98, do you mean you want to boot into W98, or you just want to prepare the thumbdrive by using W98?

I don't think I can remember much about W98 anymore.
Roughly speaking, what I would do is:
Boot a computer with a Puppy "live CD" (I would use Puppy431)
Use the Puppy431 Gparted to partition a fresh thumbdrive into two partitions - one ext2 and one FAT32
Install Puppy in "frugal" form to the thumbdrive ext2 partition
Set up the grub4dos bootloader
Add extra puppy "frugals" to the thumbdrive.

These steps are usually easier than they sound. We can be more specific once we know for sure exactly what you are needing.

(if your intended target PCs are quite new then Puppy431 will still be great for setting up the thumbdrive, but perhaps a little too old for booting those newer PCs. I'd still load 431 to the drive, but also add another newer pup aswell, so that it had a more recent "kernel" to suit newer machines)

circularL7
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#48 Post by circularL7 »

Thanks for all the info! Every time I check this thread, I learn more.

First, the update: I have booted Puppy 2.14 by live CD. The problem was that my garage sale CD reader was listed in BIOS as a secondary. After nosing around a bit, I figured out how to change the old reader, which is no longer in the PC, to secondary. (I haven't played around enough to figure out how to remove it.) I then changed the new reader to primary and changed the jumper that selects its location in that hierarchy.

Greengeek, I discovered that my previous question was silly. I don't know what a shell is; I read something about it somewhere but was just as lost after reading it as before. But, I do have directions to partition with W98, but I don't know how I want to boot it, and I think that the PC is so old that it will not boot from a thumb, but that remains to be seen.

I already have 2.14 working, so I'd like to cut my teeth on that (and I don't have a CD-R/W with me right now). But, I'm going to try the rest of your advice. I'll update you when I'm back this way.

6502, thank you. That's the kind of thing that I'd like to be able to do. Today, I picked up an unopened Java Power Pack to play with. I have no clue what that is, but for $2, why not? I'll probably learn something from the directions.


BTW, I really liked Puppy. I only nosed around a bit, but I didn't feel like an outsider like I do with Microsoft products. I liked the dialogues and the multicolored text. It's inviting.

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greengeek
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#49 Post by greengeek »

OK, I guess you will be best with the operating systems loaded to a hard drive. I would still recommend using Gparted (from the 2.14 live CD) to create a FAT32 partition for W98 and/or data, and a separate Ext2 or EXT3 partition for any versions of puppy you want to install. Also, if you have enough HDD I would add a third partition of 512Mb as "Linux Swap".
If you don't have enough disk space for a separate SwapPartition then it is apparently possible to use a swapfile (I haven't tried that...).

(On another note...even if the bios is too old to boot directly from USB there are still some ways to store the puppy O.S on a usb drive and trick the system into booting from there by "bootstrapping" from a floppy or CD. There is one method called "plop" booting, but there are other ways aswell...)

circularL7
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#50 Post by circularL7 »

Update (and request for more help). It turns out that I'm using 420turbo.
greengeek wrote: Roughly speaking, what I would do is:
Boot a computer with a Puppy "live CD" (I would use Puppy431)
Use the Puppy431 Gparted to partition a fresh thumbdrive into two partitions - one ext2 and one FAT32
Install Puppy in "frugal" form to the thumbdrive ext2 partition
Set up the grub4dos bootloader
Add extra puppy "frugals" to the thumbdrive.
Booted with a live CD. Partitioned a freshly formatted thumb drive as directed. I don't know if I installed Puppy on the thumb drive; I downloaded it to the drive. Is that the same thing?

I don't know how to set up the grub4dos bootloader, but I do have it on the hard drive and thumb drive.

greengeek wrote:OK, I guess you will be best with the operating systems loaded to a hard drive. I would still recommend using Gparted (from the 2.14 live CD) to create a FAT32 partition for W98 and/or data, and a separate Ext2 or EXT3 partition for any versions of puppy you want to install. Also, if you have enough HDD I would add a third partition of 512Mb as "Linux Swap".
I will do these things too. I would like to learn and do both methods.

My hard drive seems to be write protected, so I have to find out how to get that out of the way.
(On another note...even if the bios is too old to boot directly from USB there are still some ways to store the puppy O.S on a usb drive and trick the system into booting from there by "bootstrapping" from a floppy or CD. There is one method called "plop" booting, but there are other ways aswell...)
Is there a method that you recommend? If so, would you link to an article or post or explain it?

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