Puppy Linux for Old PCs
As I’ll probably say here 100 times, it is much better to rescue an old computer and make it useful than to simply toss it out into the garbage. Linux makes this easy – er, well, kind of easy, depending on the distribution and your tolerance for troubleshooting. While more and more Linux versions are requiring more and more computing power, thankfully, not all of them suffer from the never ending quest for software progress.
Puppy Linux is one of the lean, mean Linux distributions specifically designed to work well on older as well as newer hardware. There’s an extremely small version without a lot of added software, and a more “bloated” version that includes Seamonkey browser and email suite.
I was looking for a new Linux distribution to try on my old Pentium III laptop. I had PCLinuxOS 2007 on it and it ran pretty well, but became concerned over the future usefulness of this distribution on my old hardware, due to KDE 4 looming as a potential future for PCLinuxOS. (Though, PCLinuxOS is actually sticking with KDE 3.5 I believe for the forseeable future.) I tried Linux Mint on my PIII, and it worked pretty well until it stopped recognizing my monitor resolution for some bizarre reason. Then it started to hang. Who knows why.
So I thought I’d give Puppy a try. Sure, there is “Damn Small Linux” but the Puppy logo is a lot cuter. OK, that wasn’t really the reason – I had just heard Puppy had a lot of fans and felt it was worth a shot. (more…)
