Thanks for the tip, High C!

[Bruce Taylor]

I had this old ME system that couldn't talk to the broadband router, for some reason (we jsut figured out how to bounce a wireless signal to this section of our river). Puppy Linux booted beautifully, and seems to gets along w/ the new hardware.

Great way to reanimate an old box! :)

[High C]

Delighted to be of service. Woof! :D

[Meerkat]

Puppy Linux somehow goofed up my XP system. XP glitched when I restarted the box and I also ended up having to reinstall Thunderbird.

The only thing that seems reasonable to me is that PL messed with the CMOS scratchpad.

[High C]

Puppy Linux somehow goofed up my XP system. XP glitched when I restarted the box and I also ended up having to reinstall Thunderbird.

The only thing that seems reasonable to me is that PL messed with the CMOS scratchpad.

Did you just run it from the CD, or install it? :confused:

[Meerkat]

Ran it from a live CD only. Saved the profile back to the CD-R/W. I'm puzzled too.

[High C]

Ran it from a live CD only. Saved the profile back to the CD-R/W. I'm puzzled too.

This is indeed puzzling. :confused:

So you got it to save its settings to the CD-R/W. That's a pretty cool feature.

I also have it on a flash drive that it can boot from, though not that many BIOSes are capable of booting from a USB device yet. In a few more years, I imagine it will be common. Imagine libraries or schools full of dumb terminals that have only a motherboard, CPU, and RAM. A user carries around his own USB data pen and up comes his own unique desktop with all his files, programs, addresses, etc. :cool:

What would a terminal cost, $150? :cool:

[Meerkat]

Not sure where things are going. MS is investing billions to make a server farm which they hope people will call "home" and access via internet based internet apps that they charge monthly for. Personally, I think they're fighting human nature about leaving personal information in stranger's hands and they're dead wrong. Time will tell...

Meanwhile, unless you're a speed demon, it's possible to buy an entire computer the size and weight of a car radio for not a whole lot of money. I've got one the size of an unabridged dictionary that includes a tray loading dvd burner. Runs a slow 1.2ghz due to an unsophisticated CPU design, but what the @#$ do you need unless you're a game geek or a cartoon animator doing rendering?

Want to have some fun with PL? There are all kinds of nifty tinsy computers to put it on... :)

[Meerkat]

BTW, if you're not scared of playing with new/different OS's, freeBSD is the cat's meow. It was good enough for Apple to turn it into OSX... ;)

Runs everything Linux does with a lot less zealotry.

www.freebsd.org

[stevebaby]

http://www.dailyrama.com/miniature_computers.html
Miniature Computers

[Rick Starr]

I also have it on a flash drive that it can boot from, though not that many BIOSes are capable of booting from a USB device yet. In a few more years, I imagine it will be common. Imagine libraries or schools full of dumb terminals that have only a motherboard, CPU, and RAM. A user carries around his own USB data pen and up comes his own unique desktop with all his files, programs, addresses, etc.

Hotel rooms, airline seat backs, cafe's, airport lounges, the possibilities are endless. The harderit gets to travel with a laptop the quicker this will come to pass. Very exciting.

Dumb terminal must have connectivity: must be portal. Laptops will go the way of the carousel projector and good riddance.

[GregW]

A little while back I tried Damn Small Linux (DSL). The whole idea behind the project was not to exceed 50MB including OS, a basic set of tools, word processor spreadsheet, browser, and a few other "essentials. When I installed it ( into RAM) I just sat in front of computer and laughed, I couldn't believe they could get everything to fit in 50MB and the damn thing worked!
Fits on pen drive, a business card size cd etc, really cool.:D

[stevebaby]

Please excuse all the links at the bottom of the Miniature computers link.
I'm sure that no one on this forum will click on them though.

[Meerkat]

DSL is a very versatile 50MB mini desktop oriented Linux distribution.

Damn Small is small enough and smart enough to do the following things:
Boot from a business card CD as a live linux distribution (LiveCD)
Boot from a USB pen drive
Boot from within a host operating system (that's right, it can run *inside* Windows)
Run very nicely from an IDE Compact Flash drive via a method we call "frugal install"
Transform into a Debian OS with a traditional hard drive install
Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram
Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!)
Modularly grow -- DSL is highly extendable without the need to customizeDSL was originally developed as an experiment to see how many usable desktop applications can fit inside a 50MB live CD. It was at first just a personal tool/toy. But over time Damn Small Linux grew into a community project with hundreds of development hours put into refinements including a fully automated remote and local application installation system and a very versatile backup and restore system which may be used with any writable media including a hard drive, a floppy drive, or a USB device.
DSL has a nearly complete desktop, and many command line tools. All applications are chosen with the best balance of functionality, size and speed. Damn Small also has the ability to act as an SSH/FTP/HTTPD server right off of a live CD. In our quest to save space and have a fully functional desktop we've made many GUI administration tools which are fast yet still easy to use. What does DSL have?
XMMS (MP3, CD Music, and MPEG), FTP client, Dillo web browser, Netrix web browser, FireFox, spreadsheet, Sylpheed email, spellcheck (US English), a word-processor (Ted), three editors (Beaver, Vim, and Nano [Pico clone]), graphics editing and viewing (Xpaint, and xzgv), Xpdf (PDF Viewer), emelFM (file manager), Naim (AIM, ICQ, IRC), VNCviwer, Rdesktop, SSH/SCP server and client, DHCP client, PPP, PPPoE (ADSL), a web server, calculator, generic and GhostScript printer support, NFS, Fluxbox and JWM window managers, games, system monitoring apps, a host of command line tools, USB support, and pcmcia support, some wireless support.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-3.0.jpg http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

[High C]

DamnSmallLinux and Puppy are very similar. I've tried both.

It's a spectacular concept which vividly demostrates why we should all resist "bloatware"!

[Bruce Taylor]

My first word processor, Speedscript, used a bit less than 5K of RAM. I wrote two books and an M.A. thesis on it.

[mister_moon]

Bump. This thread encouraged me to give Puppy a quick look. It's damned fast and very slick. The boot from a flash drive feature is very cool if you've got a box that's new enough to support it.

One good possible use of it if you don't want to run it every day is to use the live CD get data off of a corrupted Windows box before a rebuild. It will mount and read NTFS partitions and then burn CDs, thus saving your precious data.

Did I mention that it was fast! It blows Ubuntu away...

[Meerkat]

http://www.logicsupply.com/images/photos/cases/VoomPC_big.jpg

Just the thing for your Puppy or DSL: size of a car stereo and runs off 12V. Designed for automotive and boating applications. No moving parts! 8.32" x 2.2" x 10" (not including the fins)

http://www.logicsupply.com/images/photos/cases/C156B_big.jpg
Just slightly bigger and you get room for a dvd burner and notebook hard drive. Can also run on 12V and you can watch movies on it when it's not running navigation software! ;) 7" x 2.7" x 7"

http://www.logicsupply.com

[mister_moon]

Just because I like these Linux threads, I thought I dredge this one up again. I'm testing the live CD of Mepis 6.0 as I type this on the Konquerer browser.

Puppy would not run on my little Toshiba laptop at all, so I started looking at some of the other distributions. The just released a new Ubuntu distro 6.10 "Edgy Eft". It's nice enough I suppose, but it was pretty slow the last time I had it installed, and it seems to be still.

Mepis is pretty snappy on this little 'puter, so I think I'm going to give it a go. I like the KDE window manager a lot better than Ubuntu's Gnome interface as well. We'll see how it goes...

[Bruce Taylor]

I´m on Puppy´s Seamonkey, here. The kids seem to prefer it to Knoppix (my favorite, so far).

I´ve been meaning to try Mepis.

[High C]

...I'm testing the live CD of Mepis 6.0...

I have Mepis 6 fully installed on one of my laptops, the one I use most.

The thing that's great about Mepis is that everything I've tried just works. No problems with drivers, printers, hardware recognition, video formats that won't play, none of that.

I also have Crossover Office installed. Crossover allows me to run Quickbooks, Quicken, and the MS Office Suite, the Windows versions. There are a couple of quirks with Outlook, but the other Windows apps work flawlessly.

The only thing that isn't just right is the standby and hibernate power management stuff. Other than that, Mepis is terrific for a full install. It'll run for weeks if I don't try to put it in Standby.

For "live CD" use, though, Puppy is much faster, but lacks Mepis' ability to get everything to work.

[John Bell]

I'm struggling to decide which of my laptops I'm going to install it on. The Dell that's mostly a desktop or itty-bitty Toshiba that I drag around everywhere.

I'm dreading rebuilding them if I don't stick with it. Perhaps I should just buy a bigger hard drive to put in one of them and partition it so that I can play with Linux on one of the partitions.

[High C]

...Perhaps I should just buy a bigger hard drive to put in one of them and partition it so that I can play with Linux on one of the partitions.

Dual boot setups can be tricky. According to what I've read on a Mepis forum, Windows has to be installed first, then the Grub boot loader detects it during the installation of Mepis.

Do your homework before jumping into the fire www.mepislovers.com.

Also be sure you can get any wireless network adapters and other hardware to work with the live CD before you install.

[John Bell]

Mepis and Ubuntu are the only distros that work with the video and wifi on both of my laptops. I've done an Ubuntu dual boot before and it worked fine. Getting it off was a bit of a trick, however.