I brought a new live CD — Puppy Linux 4.1.2, the latest version of that OS — to boot.
This Old PC (333 MHz Pentium II MMX, 256 MB RAM, 10 GB hard drive with Windows 2000) already had a pup_save file from Puppy 2.13 (the first version of Puppy I ever ran).
That's the beauty of Puppy: You run it from the live CD and can create a save file in your Windows partition, so you can have a full Linux environment without installing or partitioning anything.
Anyway, I did an "upgrade" from Puppy 3.01 to 4.1.2 on a different PC , and that didn't go so well. A few desktop icons didn't appear after I ran the new CD, which modified the pup_save.
When I booted 4.1.2 on This Old PC, I received the same sets of warnings, and the messages on screen acted as if I was doing a 3-to-4.1.2 upgrade rather than 2.13-to-4.1.2.
However, once the machine finished all its housekeeping, I was in 4.1.2, and everything looked just like it should.
I don't have any networking on This Old PC at the moment, but a check of quite a few apps in Puppy revealed that the OS runs great on what now is a 12-year-old PC.
I can't wait to stuff a couple of wireless cards into the box and/or hook up Ethernet to see how well it performs on the Internet.
I do have a few spare drives, but I'd really consider using my CF-to-IDE adapter and running with a 2-to-4GB CF card instead of a traditional hard drive. Puppy runs fairly well in 256 MB of RAM (although it's always good to have some Linux swap available; a good reason to keep a spinning hard drive).
One thing Puppy IS good at is minimizing writes to flash media and thus extending its life by orders of magnitude, and that makes Puppy a great system both for This Old PC and the Self-Reliant Thin Client (which is now running Debian Etch from CF but would run much better with Puppy). Both have 256 MB of RAM, which is doable with Linux but not ideal. If either of these systems would address 512 MB of RAM, I'd install that much immediately, but since they both max out at 256 MB, that's what I have to work with.
8 comments:
Enjoyed your article. I had ubuntu running on an old computer. It ran, but was so slow. I ran Puppy Linux 4.1.2 and saw a great improvement.
I do taxes for a living so I ain't no computer geek. But by following instructions, step by step I was able to install on my hard drive.
Long story short, I am happy that this old computer is now running.
Hi Steven,
I want to make a comment (and I have a question) about a great post you made back in December, 2006. I thought posting to a blog that you're currently writing would more likely be read by you.
The blog was:
http://thisoldbrowser.blogspot.com/2006/12/speed-up-yahoo-in-old-browsers.html
Unfortunately, I'm not "up to speed" on blogging. So I don't know how to contact you. And I don't know if it's proper to type my email address here?
Hello Matt. Like you, I am hesitant to leave my email here.
Let's see, how do we do this without letting the world know our email?
Gentlemen, most of my current technology writing is at the Click blog. You can also e-mail me:
steven (dot) rosenberg (at) dailynews (dot) com ...
Or find this e-mail address at Click.
Re the stripped-down Yahoo pages at http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/ ... I'm surprised those are still available.
These days when I need a "light" browser, I use Opera. There are others in Linux/Unix that are easier on resources than Firefox, but Opera is fairly universal and extremely resource-sparing.
greetings to all.
I would first like to thank the writers of this blog by sharing information, a few years ago I read a book called costa rica investment in this book deal with questions like this one.
Hello .. firstly I would like to send greetings to all readers. After this, I recognize the content so interesting about this article. For me personally I liked all the information. I would like to know of cases like this more often. In my personal experience I might mention a book called Generic Viagra in this book that I mentioned have very interesting topics, and also you have much to do with the main theme of this article.
This article is quite informative.I've got lots of information.
Keep it up!
Best regards,
PC repair miami
Post a Comment