Which legacy Puppy is best for my project?

[Senex]

around the pups you mentioned eide / sata (libata) was a bit messed up so ended up with 2 kernels ...one to support each. I don't believe eide would affect you anyway as thats earlier than the ide you probably mean. As it happens lucid and perhaps others seem to be no problem in this respect.

OS dependant...those things that need a driver basically...the psus do not and probably ok to onit mouse keyboard since they are generic types, the physical construction of the enclosure and fans, coolers...
Are you really including floppy drives?

mike

I made the edits to the parts-list. Let me know if any slipped by me. Yes, on the floppy drive. I'll be using XP Pro on one dedicated HDD until such time as I'm confident enough to replace it with Linux. Despite a ton of Google searches, and asking questions on four or five forums, I'm unable to find conclusive answer as to whether or not a regular floppy drive is required, and whether or not USB FDD will do absolutely everything one on a floppy connector can. Only conclusive info is that there are certain possible situations in which XP Pro does requires a floppy drive. I've decided to err on side of caution and include one.

So are you saying I should use SATA DVD burner & HDD to install 4.2.1? Will the mere presence of the IDE/EIDE burner & HDD have adverse effect? If I can determine that none of the other distro releases require IDE/EIDE, I'm willing to ditch it, as it's there for no other reason.

[mikeb]

Well everything linuxy that you seem to be intending to use has SATA support so IDE is not needed for those. Even XP seems to cope ok...well never had a problem with it...I guess SP3 has a good collection of drivers in there. If you don't need it then go for a simple life.

Floppy for Xp...password cracking, bios? I lobbed floppy drives years ago.... bios updates seem to come in win32 form now... any floppy can be emulated and burnt to a Cd anyway. a windows 98 cd or freedos for a bootable DOS. I just considered floppies too unreliable anyway...but thats just my opinion.

4.21 could be installed from a cd or usb to wherever...hard drive most convenient I would say.

mike

[Senex]

So does this mean Puppy 4.2.1 will only use 4 of the six cores, or that it cannot handle Phenom II x6 1055t at all?

Just looked into Slacko 5.3.1 that has kernel 2.6.37.6 :

CONFIG_NR_CPUS=8

Puppy4 k2.6.30.5 and Lupu k2.6.33.2 has a max of 4 .

[Senex]

Best news I've had in awhile! IDE/EIDE is officially cut & edited from the parts-list.

Its my hope that I will never have any need for the floppy drive, and once I replace XP Pro with the winning Linux distro, I can send the floppy drive to the dumpster, and free up a bay. Its simply better safe than sorry. At worst, I waste a few bucks on a floppy drive that is never used. That is a gamble I can live with.

I have the Puppy 4.2.1 CD already...actually I have all the CDs/DVDs of distro versions I want to trial in storage.

So what about current version of parts-list? Any changes needed? Any potential problems or incompatibilities? Sorry if I sound overeager to finalize the list!

Well everything linuxy that you seem to be intending to use has SATA support so IDE is not needed for those. Even XP seems to cope ok...well never had a problem with it...I guess SP3 has a good collection of drivers in there. If you don't need it then go for a simple life.

Floppy for Xp...password cracking, bios? I lobbed floppy drives years ago.... bios updates seem to come in win32 form now... any floppy can be emulated and burnt to a Cd anyway. a windows 98 cd or freedos for a bootable DOS. I just considered floppies too unreliable anyway...but thats just my opinion.

4.21 could be installed from a cd or usb to wherever...hard drive most convenient I would say.

mike

[Karl Godt]

No Idea, Really !!

Never had a Puppy running with a kernel less than 2.6.30.5 .

Look into /etc/modules/DOTconfig* if some of your hardware is mentioned therein .

CONFIG_DRIVER_WHAT=m or "is not set" would be probably problematic for boot sequence .

Doubt that the 2.6.25 kernel would support more cores than the 2.6.30.5 kernel .

[Senex]

Unfortunately the link takes me to info sources I found awhile ago, which are either outdated (one stops at the AMD 64-bit Opteron and Athlon64 era), or appear to require more knowledge than newbie-level to use. From what I've seen, it does appear that Geforce 6800 series will work "with XFree86 versions 3.3.6 and/or 4.1.0" so this might be good news...not sure. Anyway, thanks for the tip!

Senex,

Since Debian 5 (Lenny) is based on kernel 2.6.25 it might be useful to look at the documentation for supported hardware as listed by the Debian 5 team: http://www.debian.org/releases/lenny/i3 ... 01.html.en
This documentation also provides links to other sites for further info regarding various systems and hardware peripherals.

Hope this helps,
Monsie

Edit: Actually, Debian 5 did use kernel 2.6.25 during testing, then moved to kernel 2.6.26 so although there was a slight upgrade, I feel the information might still be very useful.

Monsie

[Senex]

Okay, so if Puppy 4.2.1 cannot handle Phenom II x6, is there any Phenom II CPU it can handle? If not, what is the most powerful CPU it will run on?

What about my selection of motherboards and graphic cards...are these at least workable? I will consider downgrading my CPU choice, if the boards & graphic cards will work, as I have some wiggle room on the CPU, but cannot compromise with the rest.

Edit: On the off chance anyone is interested, I've now downgraded my CPU choice to Phenom X4 9850 (95w), and of course this means the motherboards on my parts-list has changed to accommodate it. Hopefully, that will increase the odds for Puppy to run on this build.

CONFIG_NR_CPUS=32 2.6.24.5 slax kernel...yay ... mean puppy..

Arn't those cpus built to handle the megabloat of vista and beyond.... or perhaps more likely high delivery servers... I see a little lost puppy wading around in the machine

mike

Yeah, Have two Core2Duo with 2cores with 1thread each , one atom 1core 2threads and one atom 2cores 2threads each .
So still in the older Pup-range .
The xload meter at bootup is best with the 2cores á 2threads atom .
k2.6.30 coretemp.ko does not want to load on it , but that's all .