Puppy, Damn Small Linux don’t let me down

I pulled the 30 GB hard drive from the $15 Laptop today, swapped in the original 3 GB drive (which wasn’t bootable with its original Windows 98 install) and decided to throw distros at it. For those not following along, it’s a Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II, with the biggest chink in the armor being RAM — only 64 MB of it.

Here’s the scorecard:

FreeBSD: I got pretty far, but the installer refused to write partitioning info to the drive.

DesktopBSD: Graphics flaked out before I could get too far in the install process.

Xubuntu 6.10 alternate install: Got very far, but it wouldn’t copy apps to the drive, so the install stopped there.

OpenSUSE net install: Wouldn’t boot.

Scientific Linux (science-lab spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux): Wouldn’t boot.

DeLi Linux 0.7.1: Everytime I get to the point where I’m supposed to tell the installer where the CD is, I forget to type in hdb, if that’s indeed where it is. If I’m booting off of CD, shouldn’t the system itself know where the CD is?

Damn Small Linux 3.3: Runs flawlessly from CD, frugal install to hard drive went without a hitch, and it runs well with a 233 MHz CPU and 64 MB of RAM.

Puppy Linux 2.14: Due to the slowness of Gparted in Puppy 2.16 and my preference of the plain Puppy over the 2.15 Community Edition, I did a conventional install of Puppy 2.14 (conventional being recommended over frugal install due to my low RAM). All runs well, and while not as snappy as Damn Small Linux (mostly due to the choice of apps in both distro), I could be very happy running Puppy on this nearly-10-year-old laptop.

(Editor’s note: This entry, originally slated to run June 25, somehow never got posted. The material below has been added in the last few hours.)

After running a frugal install of DSL for awhile, I decided to build my own Debian system on the laptop. I did a standard install, added X, then Fluxbox. The biggest surprise thus far has been that when I apt-get a new app, it automatically shows up in the Fluxbox menus. That doesn’t happen on my other Debian box, which was a Desktop install with GNOME, adding Fluxbox as an alternate window manager. Whatever they’re doing over at Debian, they are doing it right. I’m having a lot of fun building up the system just the way I want it.

While I intended to work a lot from the command line, I also needed GUI capability. Dillo runs great, but I needed more. I installed IceWeasel, Debian’s renamed version of Firefox, and it’s running great. Takes about a minute to load, but after that it responds well. Remember, this is 233 MHz and 64 MB. The only nagging problem is that the laptop’s clock battery is dead, so when I start it up, Debian does a lot of filesystem checking. Gotta figure out how to pull that battery and get a new one in there.

So add to the list above:

Debian 4.0: Flawless install. Started with “standard” install, added X, Fluxbox and my favorite apps with apt-get. Running great with low specs.

COMING UP: A full review of Puppy 2.16.1

Thin Puppy back in the game

Ever since its Compact Flash chip died, the Thin Puppy has been out of commission, but I managed to pull one of the two CD drives from This Old PC and meld it with the Thin Puppy (Maxspeed Maxterm thin client).

It’s a TDK CD-R drive, 2002 vintage. I pulled the IDE cable from the CF adapter and powered the drive with the previously unused hard-drive power cable (from the fanless power supply in the thin client).

Since I was having so much trouble with memory while running Puppy from the CF card (the box has 128 MB), I thought I would try Damn Small Linux instead, but that CD wouldn’t boot.

So I tried Puppy 2.13, and it booted fine. Except that I have a whopping 4.6 MB of memory left after booting. That’s in contrast to about 50 MB when running from the CF drive. (Yes, the Thin Puppy has no HD storage, not even the 1 GB CF — everything is done in memory).

Predictibly, the SeaMonkey browser was painfully slow, bringing the system to its knees. So I went to the much-lighter Dillo browser — something I should’ve done before the CF chip was killed.

Dillo doesn’t to half the complex things that “modern” browser do. There’s no CSS or Java, for instance, but the result is a blazing-fast Web experience that barely taxes the CPU or scarce memory in the Thin Puppy.

And yes, I am posting now on Dillo.

I am disturbed, however, by Damn Small Linux’s refusal to run on the Thin Puppy from CD. I’ll have to try DSL-n, the original DSL’s larger cousin, which is built on a new version of the Linux kernel.

The little DSL was running great on This Old PC over the weekend, although I didn’t get a chance to connect to the Internet, and that’s seemingly where all the real problems come in to play.

A teacher likes Xubuntu Linux … and another geek slims down Ubuntu

This 24-year-old teacher has been converting old iMac G3s to Linux with Xubuntu. He’s got a helluva lot of comments on this post (which I found at Low End Mac).

He asks about whether or not he’s using the right distribution, and in the comments, there was a link to this page on how to set Ubuntu up for high speed on low-spec systems. The writer, K. Mandla, says that his experience with Arch Linux made him (or is it her?) want to tweak Ubuntu for Arch-like speed:

I’ve built these systems on a variety of hardware. I used the core elements of this to put together a 75Mhz Ubuntu box, a 120Mhz Pentium system, a 300Mhz laptop for my mom to use, a 750Mhz laptop for music and movies, a 1Ghz desktop for gaming (you laugh, but I can run NWN at 1280×1024 on that ) and a 2.26Ghz see-if-you-can-break-it machine.

The results depend on the hardware, as you might imagine. But my proudest achievements are the fact that the 75Mhz Pentium build gets to the desktop on less than 22Mb (19Mb for the 300Mhz laptop!) and the 2.26Ghz machine goes from the Grub menu to the desktop in 27 seconds. It’s a joy to watch.

Damn Small Linux with a little n

I could never get Damn Small Linux to recognize the Ethernet on the Dell GX 520, so I couldn’t really evaluate Damn Small Linux, one of the few, the proud mini-Linuxes that run fast — and do so on old hardware.

I downloaded the ISO for DSL-n, which is 90 MB, as opposed to plain DSL’s 50 MB. Sure it can’t fit on a business-card-size CD anymore, but the net configuration in the bigger -n version runs much like its big brother, Knoppix (on which DSL is based). I was on the Web in 2 minutes.

And I’m posting this through the SeaMonkey browser.

On a somewhat related topic, the Daily News blogs moved to a new server over the weekend, promising a better experience for both readers and bloggers. We’ve had quite a time of late, with CGI timeouts and plain inaccessibility. Hopefully all is now well. I’ll report back in a few days.

Meanwhile, I’m exploring DSL-n.