My $45 olllllld laptop screaming on Precise puppy

[RetroTechGuy]

I have an old Dell laptop, which has 6 gb HD, P3 @ 256 Mhz and 256 meg RAM.

Didn't know that they made a P3 that slow...

My 333MHz Compaq is a PII.

Won't run Win XP, but will run the older Pups like the 4X series well. Unfortunately it is USB 1 and won't run @ USB 2 speeds, so I haven't used it in about 2 years

I cured the USB-1 on my laptops (even my 1.6GHz is a USB1.1) with a PCMCIA card.

I bought a couple of these for my laptops:

http://www.amazon.com/PCMCIA-Port-Insid ... 00A141C6G/

Keep in mind that the card driver doesn't load early in the boot, so you cannot easily boot from a USB in this card...

[rokytnji]

so you cannot easily boot from a USB in this card.

I found that with Plop pcmcia boot option. You can get the usb to boot from the card.
At least on my chinese 4 port, 2 usb, 2 fire wire combo cardbus on IBM A22M and IBM
T23 Laptops RetroTechGuy with PLOP 4.2.2 iso.

Just posting the info.

[zarg]

Well, I wanted try some other distros on the Compaq 2108 US and got mixed results:

Linux Lite: very nice clean layout and good speed live but install hung up (may be bad burn so i will try again).

Vector Linux: Very quick GUI installer but leaves me hanging after I select where to install; never enables the continue button

Simplicity: Brand new puplet Beta runs only live cd, clean and very snappy, I may carry this one as a portable OS. i got it at Distrowatch.

Anti-X: Quick, clean very fast, not as quick to boot as Pecise but very quick at opening apps(this would be my OS if Precise did not exist.

SalineOS: similar look to Anti-X, good choice of apps; hung up when trying to install licensed audio and video codecs.

Puppy Slacko 5.5: It's Puppy so of course it's good but Precise runs better for some reason on this laptop so it's back to precise with simplicity as a portable OS. Nothing does as good a job overall; Anti-X is a good contender and shows a lot of care in developement but Pup just flat works and does not lock up.

I think the big distro's are going to fade to just Ubuntu and Mint with Ubuntu trying to move into tablet/phone realm and mint claiming desktops and small distro's will be the only refuge for hardware dumpster divers like myself that like to see what can be done with old hardware.