I tried DSL, having some familiarity with it. I found it was weak in PCMCIA support and didn’t like the slow way it shutdown with it’s version of a frugal install. It didn’t have a driver for my wirelesss card, and I was unable to get ndiswrapper to work.

Enter Puppy. Puppy booted up and found the wireless card immediately. The frugal install works much better, and it runs well on the Laptop. I did install the links browser, as Seamonkey was a bit heavy for my computer. I also installed the dwm window manager, and generally use it instead of the very nice ROX and jwm default. In this way I move to more of a keyboard controlled computer, and dwm uses much less memory than the panel, jwm, and accessories of the default install. With only 80MB, that’s a move I needed to make, but one that works on the computer very well.

Chronologically, it was QNX (floppy disk), then Lindows, then SuSE9, then I moved and got Broadband ADSL. Then back to Lindows as I could download a distro, then it became Linspire, and then after the trumpet-blowing and back-slapping with 5-oh (I even get a mention in Peter van der Linden’s book) I looked at PC-BSD and tested their final beta and RCs of v1.0 up to 1.4 at which time Puppy had recently released 2.0 and been there more or less ever since.

Yes I’ve tried others, PCLinuxOS was surprisingly fast. Ubuntu is nice but I prefer the green-tinged Irish-developed “Mint Linux”.

I’ve also rebuilt a bunch of earlier boxen to run live (with a second CD drive for the system) and a small HDD for swap file and storage of work, as well as a more conventional build with installed (type 2) system.

I’ve never used the frugal type install apart from the Puppy 1.0.9 for Windows98 which can multiple boot (using Grub) with most other systems. Here is a link to some of my experimental stuff, with further links from the bottom of the page it goes to…

http://micro-hard.homelinux.net/puppylinux

Yes I have tried DSL but like others I find that Puppy outperforms it.

Agreed that you don’t need huge amounts of RAM if you have installed or run a swap file, or both. Remember, ALL live products need more RAM from my experience.

The great advantage of Puppy is that it sticks everything into RAM on start-up, and with old RAM for old machines often being free because the boxes are sent to the rubbish tip, unless the box is 386 vintage or earlier it is able to be worked around.

I have a 386 (100meg processor) with 64megs of very old slow RAM and a 1.5Gb HDD. That DOES RUN Puppy 2.02 AS FAST AS a modern machine. If I need do something that is calculation-intensive it is slower (of course).

Something I have discovered is that more modern Puppies by and large will run on older hardware (often requiring the IRQPOLL boot command), but the very useful add-ons for Ver 2 won’t actually install – despite trying to jump through hoops.

This is similar in many ways to the jump from version 1 to version 2. This means recent versions have little value in keeping older boxes alive. Which is why I have concentrated on the 2.02r2 Retro version I’ve developed futher – and call it r2d2

Please read my notes at that url above and check the links at the bottom. One standard look-alike and behave-alike desktop for all “renewed” old boxes in a small LAN teaching or cafe environment is essential. Or taken home in a single user situation.

So while this is not a criticism of the way things have gone forward, I think Puppy now needs dividing into several eras…

Version 1
Version 2
Versions 3 and 4
Version 5 which is being tinkede with currently (not by me)

I would be happy to discuss this further with anyone – irc.undernet.org is where I spend a lot of time (even if not at the keyboard. Look for a user called eagle`s – or email me. I run skype, ICQ and Yahoo (on ver2 puppy)

Richard in South Australia

Puppy uses whats known as a “frugal” install by default (it uses a file as a partition to store settings and add on programs, and uses ram to store 100mb or so of programs compressed so they are there when you need them.) This is why it states that it needs 128mb BUT….

Something mentioned is puppies ability to also run as a FULL install….this is basically an install like any other linux…just the kernel/window manager is loaded, and the files use and entire partition proper instead of a “partition in a file”. Programs are loaded as needed. This reduces the hardware requirements significantly, at the loss of some program startup speed. Were talking 486 with 24mb of ram here (as reported on the forum). Ive used this method myself for really old hardware and it works very well.

“For example, the terminal is not just called terminal it’s called “rvxt terminal emulator” – and that’s one of the easier ones to remember.”

This is the way old X terminals have been called for 10ths of years -> people accustomed to that (and to msys/mingw under Windows) have had a lot of time (between two centuries!!) to appreciate it , and therefore to remember it). The distinction between terminals is useful, as one cannot expect rxvt to be as sophisticated as a Konsole…..

I think for a system w. less than 128 prob. ought to go w. DSL. I found that DSL is good w. really old systems, soundcards a question mark though. Haven’t tried Puppy. A lot of the Linuxes that supposedly are for light hardware require a lot of memory. Xubuntu needs 256 for example.

Puppy might be great for medium-old systems, for older ones than that, DSL may be the choice.