Will Puppy run on 32MB Compaq LTE 5300?

[jason.b.c]

I'm going to go with Chris' suggestion, of removing Internet explorer, and see if that increases 98se's performance.

Ummm well if i'm not mistaken, That " can't " be done ..!!

I think internet explorer is an intricle part of windows and can't be uninstalled..

It wouldn't be any differant than trying to remove Explorer.exe from the registry...

[Sage]

98lite probably marked the beginning of the end for Macro$haft ? Nothing like having a witness demonstrate to the good judge after the defendants say it couldn't be done! Amazing that so few people haven't taken up the offer to turn 'doze back into a nearly acceptable OS, especially as 98lite used to be free.
Either jason is very, very young and has missed the whole grisly DoJ episode, or he has a nice line in sarcasm; we might offer him honourary citizenship. But only if he improves his spelling and grammar......

[cthisbear]

Thanks sage,

Shane Brooks was to Windows what Barry is for Linux...
he cut the bloat from the OS. Like Barry he did it in a different way.
98lite will definely help you shakushinnen. But also try Puppy.
No Burner? well so far you have come out a winner and good luck to you mate. So get Barry to post you the latest CD.
Send Barry $9 US and he will post out a CD to you.
I know he's obviously makng a fortune from you.
Go to the bottom of this page to find out how.

http://www.puppyos.com/download/downpage.htm#Purchase

........................
And for jason.b.c here is some reading and a history lesson.

After months of Microsoft insisting that Internet Explorer and Windows 98 are irrevocably joined at the hip and can't be separated, a fix has been found to remove IE painlessly from your system.
By a biologist.

http://www.byte.com/documents/s=146/byt ... /index.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/98lite

He also brought out XP Lite, the first of its type to remove intergrated
applications from XP.

Give them both a go shakushinnen and good luck.
..............................................
The new version of XPLITE 1.8 gives you more than 160 ways to reduce the size, improve the security, and customize YOUR Windows XP or 2000 installation to suit YOU, clean installations of Windows XP in under 350MB and Windows 2000 approaching less than 200 MB (excluding paging file) with much smaller memory requirements! These sizes are obtained simply by running XPLite/2000Lite on a fresh install of windows. Enterprising developers should easily be able to strip out additional log files, INF files and unused drivers to reduce the footprint by another 50MB or so.

If your needs are for a smaller OS, then ask yourself if you really need Windows XP or Windows 2000. We can fit a Windows 9x OS into a 16MB flash chip and most solutions fit readily onto a 32MB chip. Check out Embedded Windows 9x.

[shakushinnen]

Hi Jason,
You may be right. I tried 98lite last night, and it refused to allow me to run the option allowing me to remove IE. I assume though that this might be because I've upgraded this install from IE5.0 to IE5.5. Whichever, I can't remove IE from this install with 98lite.
So, now I've reformatted my drive and am starting from scratch. Is there a way of installing one of the Linux distros from floppys and then the net, or by pasteing files from another PC onto the hard drive. If so, which one would you recommend, and could you outline the proceedure. I must by dumb. I just don't seem to be able to follow the instructions I've seen for doing this.
John

[Sage]

Believe me - 98lite DOES work!
Forgot to mention it before, but if you are working with just a FDD to load files onto an HDD, there are utilities which permit you to chop up segments, copy them over and reassemble them. In DOS/'DOZE, which I guess you'd use for type1 Puppy onto a FAT system, you could use PARTIT; there are others. I think there's an equivalent Linux file somewhere - saw it recently, but didn't make a note. You can bet that MU knows all about it, though.....
Alternatively, Lob suggested a few really really small distros in another thread within the last couple of weeks (Search). Whilst these will be text-only, you could build up your system online.
I bet that OneBone could be chopped up and deployed from the HDD?

[Nathan F]

I bet that OneBone could be chopped up and deployed from the HDD?

Been doing just that, actually. It takes about five or six packages total to get a working X environment, add GTK1 and you can put a lot of smallish gui apps on it as well. I added qt also so I could put Opera in there (runs surprisingly fast, too) and at this point I have a really responsive little OS. The only thing bugging me is that a lot of Puppy's inbuilt tools are based on little GTK2 utilities, and I'm trying to avoid GTK2 completely in order to keep everything as fast as possible on this install.

Anyway, it's a really fast and responsive box now, way better than aything else for this computer. It takes a little bit of knowledge on the command line at first but it's kind of worth it, this install is more barebones than Puppy barebones.

Nathan

[Bruce B]

I'm going to go with Chris' suggestion, of removing Internet explorer, and see if that increases 98se's performance.

Ummm well if i'm not mistaken, That " can't " be done ..!!

I think internet explorer is an intricle part of windows and can't be uninstalled..

It wouldn't be any differant than trying to remove Explorer.exe from the registry...

No offense intended, but it would be different. The Internet Exploiter is called iexplore.exe and it is a different file than explorer.exe

Windows 9x will most certainly run without the Internet Explorer. It will actually run without explorer.exe because it is not dependant on it either. To test the validity of this statement, edit %windir%\system.ini, replace the shell=explorer.exe with something else.
For examples:
shell=c:\photoshp\photoshp.exe
shell=c:\command.com
or whatever.

Not that these programs make better shells, they don't, but the point is; explorer.exe is a shell and the operating system doesn't need it to run. Nor does it need iexplorer.exe to run. You can test iexplorer.exe by temporarily naming it to another name.

In any event, for myself, I don't remove the Internet Explorer in Windows 9x, I simply don't install it or Outlook or Mplayer.

Sometimes I will find a program that wants an .ocx file or some .dll file from the Internet Explorer in order to run. For this reason I extract and keep the IE files in a storage folder. When a program wants a particular file, I copy it to the Windows installation and register it if needed.

[Nathan F]

I keep IE around on my one remaining Windows install, for a lot of the same reasons. One of my simple security checks is to disable IE by making it use a bogus proxy server. Open InternetOptions and add a proxy server '0.0.0.0', which effectively disables the program without having to surgically remove it. You can still browse normally with Firefox or Opera. I actually try not to browse the net at all in Windows, I only keep this one around to be able to use my scanner, which has never had a Linux driver and probably never will.

The one caveot with this little fix is that WindowsUpdate will not work, but I don't trust that anyway. I do re-enable it once every couple of months and get some security updates just to be on the safe side but always do as much of that manually as possible.

Nathan

[shakushinnen]

Well,
I tried again. This time I did a fresh install of 98se and used 98lite to remove IE. It worked. But now there is no resposnse from the keyboard or mouse after it loads. (Seems to work O.K. from Safe Mode though.) So something must be loading that's screwing it up. I can move the mouse pointer, but that's it. I stopped everything except the bare essentials from loading, but no joy. Then I noticed that there were no resources allocated to nearly everything, in the device manager. I manually assigned them ALL, but it didn't help, as they were mostly removed when I rebooted.
I wonder if the fact that this is a Compaq has anything to do with it???
John

[Sage]

Compaq has a long tradition of massaging DOS and 'doze (because M$ is/was so bad). You have to load their own versions, supplied with their machines, to be sure everything works! Things may be better now?
Just cannot understand Americans. Why do they want to spend money unnecessarily on inferior products with big brand labels? Conspicious consumption, false sense of patriotism and utterly brilliant marketing, advertising, brainwashing, call it what you wish. It aint patriotic to buy rubbish. No wonder Mr Nader gets so worked up!
98lite DOES work!!!

[shakushinnen]

Can anyone tell me what Comqaq does to their machines that make them so resistant to change?
John

[marksouth2000]

I bet that OneBone could be chopped up and deployed from the HDD?

Been doing just that, actually. It takes about five or six packages total to get a working X environment, add GTK1 and you can put a lot of smallish gui apps on it as well.
...

Anyway, it's a really fast and responsive box now, way better than aything else for this computer. It takes a little bit of knowledge on the command line at first but it's kind of worth it, this install is more barebones than Puppy barebones.

Nathan, I was wondering yesterday what one would need at a minimum to do exactly that. I wasn't able to figure out the basic X setup from what I can find in the filesystem. Please post a detailed HowTo, or at least a sketch of how to proceed. I'm sure it would be a popular approach to customising a Puppy by starting from skin and bones and feeding it up carefully.

[marksouth2000]

if you are working with just a FDD to load files onto an HDD, there are utilities which permit you to chop up segments, copy them over and reassemble them. In DOS/'DOZE, which I guess you'd use for type1 Puppy onto a FAT system, you could use PARTIT; there are others.

PKZIP for Windows will make multi-floppy zipped archives that can be unzipped and reconcatenated.

Urgh, I've been giving Windows advice. Now I need a drink that'll wash the bad taste out of my mouth....

[Bruce B]

> I tried again. This time I did a fresh install of 98se and used 98lite to remove IE.

The better sequence is to install 98SE by using 98Lite. Don't install the IE or other worthless programs.

I do it this way: Put all the X:\WIN98 files (where X: is cdrom drive letter) to the hard drive in its own directory. Put the 98Lite files in the same directory.

Boot to real DOS with floppy, CD disc, or hard drive. The necessary part of this is HIMEM.SYS gets loaded with this otherwise clean boot.

Then chdir to the install directory and run '98lite' to get setup going under control of 98lite. Do a fresh install.

> Can anyone tell me what Comqaq does to their machines that make them so resistant to change?

You mean when Compaq was actually Compaq? This is probably what you are dealing with. Compaq had a 'hidden' partition with settings and diagnostics. If you zeroed your drive you lost this partition. You might need to recreate it, I don't know for sure, but if I were having certain types of unaccountable problems, I'd restore the hidden partition. One used to be able to download the files for this this. Check with Compaq for your model to find out what's available.

[Sage]

I have a few Compaq CDs here, but they tend to be machine as well as model specific. Code numbered and all that silly nonesense that makes a service engineer's life a misery (unless they work for Compaq, of course!). There are ways to bypass all that, but it's a struggle and always risks getting the no-go message. Let me know if you want to try some of mine.
The sooner we can run the morons with their WPA, hidden sectors, etc. out of business the better. Besides which, along with the RIAA and the Hollyweird loonies, they are so stupid that they don't understand that piracy actually increases market penetration, open source strengthens the breed (cf Puppy!), and increases, inter alia, music and movie sales - as evidenced from their own balance sheets. Pirateware never was a putative sale - it would otherwise have been a no sale. Where on earth did these goons go to school, or were they asleep in their maths and business studies lessons? Even your local street corner dealer understands that 'the first one comes free' and that its the add-on sales that makes the profit.....
Please, please - tell all your friends: STOP using M$ products - Puppy (and others) offer more for a lot less. Let those with a commercial interest pay the proper price for indiviual consultancy - make Barry, Klaus and all the other really deserving guys richer.

[shakushinnen]

O.K Bruce. Never thought of doing that. That makes much more sense. I suppose if I had being thinking that way I would have interepreted the 98lite menu option #1 as exactly what you're suggesting, but I guess I had that path blocked out (mentally).
Chdir????
Re Compaq - Yes, I've heard the hidden partition theory before, but if you remove it you run the risk of disabling your system??? That being the case there must be some instruction somewhere for the machine to seek this partition??
John

[Sage]

BIOS?
Some of the boards they used were just Compaq-badged clones at heart.
Anyone ever tried flashing their BIOS with another BIOS file from a similar clone? It works for some. For safety, need-two-of-a-kind so that, if things go wrong, can hot-swap and reflash back again.
Alternatively, just swap over some clone BIOS chips that 'look as if they might be similar'. More often than not, it's enough to get sufficient functions like disc initialisation working to get a BIOS utility loaded and then play tunes until something works. Since Linux ignores the BIOS, may be sufficient just to get the board started?
Good exercise for a wet Winter weekend!

[Bruce B]

> Chdir????

As far as I remember chdir was and is the dir command. Meaning chdir and dir are the same thing.

Obviously dir is easier to issue on the command line and more widely used. In my post I used chdir to indicate an *action* to take as apposed to a *location* to avoid ambiguity.

> Re Compaq - Yes, I've heard the hidden partition theory before, but if you remove it you run the risk of disabling your system??? That being the case there must be some instruction somewhere for the machine to seek this partition??

That's my general impression. Problem is that its been so many years, I forgot exactly what that hidden partition does and contains. I was thinking it contains some BIOS related instructions. I didn't want to state it with certainity because I don't remember.

I think the Compaq used quality parts and engineering for the most part. The problem for me was the machines were also a parttial vender hardware lockin, and I avoided them for that reason. (and for cost).

My favorite computer is the good 'ole White Box. My computer was at one time a 486 and eventually evolved into an Athlon K7

I've always tried to stay behind the times with hardware because it is soo inexpensive. For example last week I bought two Seagate 120GB HDs for 49 USD apiece.

[shakushinnen]

O.K. That worked really well.
Bruce, I did as you suggested. I copied win98se installation files to C\Win98,
and installed 98lite in that directory. Then I ran 98lite, choosing option1 "Clean Install". I was told that one of my cab files was corrupt or low memory or ... but I ignored it and followed the instructions to windows installation. From there it went well. Afterward, I tried installing Firefox, but kept getting the "Firefox has done a bad thing warning, and will be shut down" so I opted for Opera 6.05, which I have a license for. Opera's very fast and works well. I ran a few cleanup programs along with Larry Solway's clean system utility, which removed 24 dlls, resulting in a significant speed improvement. The only thing I want to add now is some sort of memory optimization program. 32mbs is very low. This computer is now quite useable for light surfing and e-mail.
Thanks again,
John

[Bruce B]

John,

To free more memory related resources, I recommend downloading and using Autoruns to stop worthless apps from autorunning.

www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Autoruns.html

Also, it might help to not display icons in all possible colors and not use a bitmap wallpaper.

Firefox might fail in this case. Maybe has to do with not having DCOM installed, but I don't know.

Mozilla might work.

I can't answer too many questions on Windows related stuff. Used to be an expert, but when they came out with XP, I figured this is a good time to learn Linux.

I still use Windows 95 as a light weight OS to support some of my favorite apps.

Best to you,

Bruce