In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka “Why?”)

You might ask why I’m spending so much time figuring out how to best configure a Compaq Armada 7770dmt — a laptop with an ancient 233MHz Pentium II MMX processor, feeble 144MB of RAM and smallish 3GB hard drive.

For one thing, I almost never abandon a machine that can be used. And this one definitely can be.

Plus, I like the Compaq. It has a nice screen and keyboard, I like the fact that its power supply is totally contained in the laptop case. The thing’s pretty solid.

And I remember my long search for a laptop. Just about everything I saw on the used market was overpriced and lacking essential parts (hard drive, power brick, CD drive, memory …) but still selling for too much.

When I found this laptop for $15 and only had to add a CD-ROM drive that cost an additional $10 and a WiFi card I already had, I was hooked.

The build quality of this 1999 Compaq is much better than my 2002 Gateway, and I expect the Gateway to die long before the Compaq.

And with Linux, I’ve learned that a nearly 10-year-old PC can be quite usable. That means This Old PC, with a faster Pentium II processor (333MHz), more RAM (256MB) and which uses cheaper desktop IDE drives — and which at 11 years old is even longer in the tooth than the Compaq — is also still quite usable.

The fact that I searched long and hard for one laptop, came up with nothing from Craigslist and eBay, but then ended up with two laptops within months, getting each for next to nothing, was an opportunity to learn about hardware, software and what it takes to get things done in a variety of operating systems (I’ve run many versions of Linux, plus FreeBSD — including offshoots DesktopBSD and PC-BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, a couple of projects based on OpenSolaris, and yes, even Windows).

Even if I had $500 or so to buy new laptops every couple of years — and believe me, I don’t, there’s a lot of nobility, fun and plain old value in keeping these PCs running. And running well.

I guess you could call it a hobby.

I could do a lot worse, no?

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Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls

In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls

I know I said in a previous entry that Debian’s Xfce installation didn’t exactly provide what I wanted, but looking at what I need, Debian rises to the top of the pack.

Top of my list: Installing Debian with encrypted LVM. Especially in a laptop, encryption is a must to secure your data from prying eyes, should the laptop be lost or stolen.

And any little utility that Wolvix has can probably be added in Debian. And Aptitude is very good. It’s not graphical, but it represents the best of Debian.

And I still trust the security team for Debian more than I do most others — this despite the OpenSSL problem that has recently plagued every Debian-based distro in recent weeks. (At least somebody figured it out, and the whole incident should tighten up things considerably in the Debian Project).

And in Debian, I can easily install all of our little girl’s educational programs, although she is fairly vocal about preferring to use the newer, faster $0 Laptop, a 1.3GHz Celeron-based Gateway laptop with 1GB of RAM.

The only “stopper” is Google’s lack of willingness to easily let users install Google Gears in Mozilla-derived browsers not named Firefox. That means it’s a pain in the ass to install Gears with Iceweasel, the Debian-derived, noncopyrighted equivalent to Firefox.

And I haven’t tried Debian on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt since I boosted the RAM from 64MB to 144MB. Responsiveness in X could be a lot better with such a relative overabundance of RAM.

So as far as the Compaq goes, I’m down to running Debian or Wolvix on the hard drive and Puppy as a live CD. Like I said previously, I don’t want to kill out OpenBSD just yet, so I’ll need either a second hard drive or a 4GB Compact Flash card with CF-to-IDE laptop adapter (the latter available for a quite-reasonable $10 at LogicSupply.com). I might even spring for a second hard-drive caddy for the Compaq, should I be able to find one, to make swapping the drives that much easier.

Or I could bite the bullet, get rid of OpenBSD for the time being, try out Debian and Wolvix on the hard drive, and narrow things down. I’ll continue to run Puppy, with a separate partition for its encrypted pup_save file.

I’ve taken to using the Leafpad text editor in Puppy (I’m using it now), and the Leafpad-derived Mousepad editor in Xfce is just as fast, if spartan. Xfce’s Terminal app has similar attributes. And I have no problem running xterm or rxvt.

It’s really about the text editors and browsers I use, the software my daughter likes to run, stability, security, encryption and ease of maintenance.

Moreover, it’s about speed on old hardware. These things look very different on newer computers. My 2002-era Gateway laptop runs Ubuntu very well. I doubt I could even boot Ubuntu on this Compaq. Even the Xubuntu live CD won’t boot. With Debian, I have no problem.

On the Gateway, Ubuntu’s polish as compared to Debian makes Ubuntu a better choice. But on this older Compaq, Debian’s flexibility and added speed (don’t ask me why it’s faster, it just is) are much needed.

Next moves: I need to get a PCMCIA Ethernet card since I don’t have regular access to WiFi. While I’m at it, a PCMCIA card for USB is something I should also look into. Sure, I could transfer files over the network, but USB is … easier. (Note: Since this post was originally written, I have gotten an Ethernet card for the Compaq).

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Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka “Why?”)

In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies

I tested quite a few versions of Puppy Linux in recent days on my 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt. The bad news is that version 3.01 wouldn’t configure X properly. Any attempts to do so and then start X crashed the box.

The other bad news is that while Puppy 4.00 loads fine and runs fine, for some reason the load time for Abiword went from 8 to 10 seconds in previous Puppy builds to 30 seconds. That’s quite a rollback. On a more positive note, start times for Seamonkey were about the same.

I don’t really use Abiword all that much, but that kind of performance hit is disturbing. It could be due to the new way packages are being compiled for Puppy but is more likely something specific to Abiword, since Seamonkey appears to be unaffected.

I tried Puppy 2.17 just to see how encryption worked. It did fine. And I discovered that in the case of multiple pup_save files on a single system, the ones not in use during the current boot can easily be opened in Puppy.

One bone (pun there, intended or not) I have to pick with newer versions of Puppy Linux is the lack of the Dillo browser. I use it quite a bit. I could still add it from packages, I suppose (and I definitely will), and if the slowness of Abiword wasn’t bothering me so much in Puppy 4.00, I’d be using it right now.

As it is, I will continue testing, but for now Puppy 2.13 (hopefully with Firefox added for Google Gears compatibility) remains the front-running distro for the Compaq, especially if I’m able to remove the hard drive and replace it with a Compact Flash module and CF-to-IDE adapter card.

The fact that I can move files from one pup_save to another, providing that the non-mounted one is unencrypted, gives me more flexibility as far as upgrading from one Puppy system to another and creating a new, encrypted pup_save instead of using an old, unencrypted one.

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Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka “Why?”)

In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed

As I say in a previous post on this very topic, there are many reasons to choose Puppy Linux as the primary OS on the nearly 10-year-old Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop.

For one thing, Puppy is ideal — and explicitely designed — to run as a live CD or easily upgraded frugal install, the latter either on a traditional hard-disk drive or a Compact Flash memory card mounted in a CF-to-IDE adapter inside the Compaq’s hard-drive caddy.

With recent versions of Puppy (2.17 onward, I believe) the ability to encrypt the pup_save file that holds all of the user’s files and configurations adds both a needed measure of security to a laptop installation as well as providing an equally easy way to back up the entire system by copying a single large file to just about any storage medium, from USB flash drive to CD-RW to hard disks in formats ranging from old-school FAT to NTFS to Linux’s many types of filesystems.

Also in Puppy’s favor is that recent versions have heightened compatibility with Slackware 12 packages, promising a greater number of sources for additional applications, should I ever want or need to add anything beyond what Puppy and its own repositories already provide.

To recap, in the time I’ve had the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop (again, with a 233MHz Pentium II MMX processor), I’ve taken it’s RAM from 64MB to the maximum of 144MB, kept the original IBM-made 3GB hard drive, and run the following operating systems:

• Debian Etch “standard,” with X and Fluxbox added
• Debian Etch Xfce desktop install
• Slackware 12 without KDE
• Puppy Linux 2.13
• Damn Small Linux 4.0, 4.3 and 4.4
• OpenBSD 4.2
• Wolvix Cub 1.1.0

Truth be told, I liked every one of these installs to one degree or another. While Slackware (installing without KDE but with everything else) took up too much space and offered too few applications I wanted, it still ran great.

Rolling my own X installation into Debian‘s “standard” install was an excellent exercise, but I just didn’t have the expertise to really build it out. The Debian Xfce install was nice, but somewhat curious; all of the Debian desktop installs, even KDE, feature OpenOffice. Surprisingly, OO ran fairly well in 64MB of RAM and 233MHz of CPU. Strange, however, was the lack of GUI package management in the Xfce install. It did get me using Aptitude, so there was nothing lost there, but I got the feeling that Debian’s Xfce just didn’t offer what I wanted.

However, with Aptitude, Abiword actually installs the dictionary that makes spell-check work. At last look, neither Puppy nor OpenBSD do that.

I continue to enjoy Damn Small Linux, but the most recent versions just don’t run as well as they should on this laptop. And little things like having Firefox renamed Bon Echo (why??) made it difficult to use Google Docs with Gears, which is one of the things I want to be doing fairly intensively, made DSL fall behind Puppy in the running.

Puppy has a great selection of apps, is fairly easy to configure, extremely familiar to me and runs great on this hardware. I find myself using this live CD more and more of the time.

Much of my feeling for 2.13 over other versions of Puppy is nostalgic. I first encountered Puppy with this very release, and most likely a simple move of the cute 2.13 desktop wallpaper to a newer version of Puppy would make me extremely happy. The fact that everything in 2.13 continues to work flawlessly, however, is a strong testament to how very well Puppy is put together. I probably will test and subsequently adopt a much newer version of Puppy for use on this laptop, if for no other reason than to use the encrypted-pup_save feature that will greatly add to the security of my data, since laptops — even ones well past their prime — have a way of falling into the wrong hands.

OpenBSD doesn’t install with as anywhere near as many GUI features as … any Linux distribution. Not that any of the BSD projects can’t be configured to be as full-featured as any equivalent Linux distribution. It just takes time and effort. With a faster processor and a bit more memory, I’d really consider running OpenBSD as the primary distro on this laptop. On the other hand, hardware detection in OpenBSD excellent. It remains the only operating system to correctly auto-configure sound on this Compaq.

OpenBSD has well over 4,000 precompiled binary packages for i386 and even more software available through ports. It offers fewer packages than Debian or Ubuntu but way more than Slackware. And with the quality of the packages being so high and the tools used to manage them equally high in quality, OpenBSD remains an attractive alternative.

But again, Linux is just that much easier to use on the desktop. OpenBSD is no speed demon in X, and speed is more important when you’re running ancient hardware than it is when you have, say, a PC from the past five years at your disposal.

And with OpenBSD, things like Adobe Flash are hard to deal with. And I don’t think Google Gears will ever run in OpenBSD. I could be wrong on both counts (since OpenBSD can run Linux apps), but I do know that both are easier to do in Linux.

A bigger drive that could multiboot Debian, Wolvix and OpenBSD, with Puppy running either in a frugal install or as a live CD, is one way to go.

But running only one or two of these systems at a time seems to be more realistic, manageable and … sane. Using multiple hard drives, like I do with my test box, is another way to go. That way the pain of dual-booting is avoided, as is the tedium of continual reinstalls.

Since OpenBSD offers much of the software I want and is an intriguing diversion from Linux, I could ‘ll probably leave it on the drive for the near future. In my 500MB or so Linux partition, I will probably grow my pup_save file and update Puppy. Now that I have Firefox 2 running on one of my other Puppy installs, I’ll probably begin doing the same with this laptop, and that way I’ll be able to use Google Docs with Gears. I can probably even figure out how to make Gears work with Seamonkey, but it’s not imperative.

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Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka “Why?”)

In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong

I didn’t have high hopes for Wolvix on the $15 Laptop — a Compaq Armada 7770dmt built in 1999 — since previous attempts to load the live CD resulted in an X configuration that needed a little work.

Since then, I’ve had quite a bit more experience working in the xorg.conf file, and I was able to get a halfway decent X configuration going so I could test Wolvix Cub (the smaller of the two Wolvix distributions, with fewer packages than the larger Wolvix Hunter).

As I’ve written on many occasions, I consider Wolvix to be one of the best Slackware-based distributions available. Both the graphical configuration utility and the very flexible installation utility — also an X application — add considerable functionality to a solid Slackware 11 base.

And with Wolvix (and the rest of the Slackware-derived distros such as Zenwalk and Vector), all of the helpful Slackware console utilities are still there. Xwmconfig, netconfig, mouseconfig, even pkgtool can be used in any of these Slackware-based systems. You might not need them as much as you would in a standard Slackware installation, but they do come in handy.

Wolvix also includes slapt-get and Gslapt, the Debian-apt-like utilities that changed the way I look at package management in Slackware.

Before Wolvix, when running Slackware I dutifally downloaded updates from the Slackware FTP site, then used updatepkg to install them. One by one. By one.

One time I figured that using pkgtool for updates would enable me to save time and avoid all that typing of long filenames, or the almost-as-long procedure of copy/pasting them in the file manager for each and every package than needed updating.

I ended up with “doubles” of every updated package, since pkgtool didn’t know I was doing an update and just installed the new packages without removing the old ones. So when you’re talking about doing updates of Slackware packages with Slack’s default tools, it’s updatepkg or nothing.

All it means is that slapt-get and Gslapt, which are included in Wolvix and easily added to Slackware itself, are essential for the person whose life doesn’t revolve around using the updatepkg utility.

Just the fact that Wolvix — which can operate as a live CD with a Knoppix-like save file, or in “frugal” or traditional hard-drive installs, can be brought up to date in minutes with Gslapt in much the same way that apt and Synaptic work in Debian continues to be a revelation.

Put it this way: How many longtime Slackware users don’t have and use slapt-get/Gslapt? I bet not many.

Once I had Wolvix Cub running as a live CD with X properly configured on the 144MB/233MHz Compaq Armada 7770dmt, I used xwmconfig at the console to switch between the Xfce and Fluxbox window managers.

Not surprisingly, both WMs ran quite well, even with only 144MB in the live CD environment.

What astounded me were the extremly quick application-load times. In previous tests of Wolvix, it was quick but not so quick as to beat Debian Etch or Slackware 12 under Xfce and Fluxbox.

In Wolvix Cub running on live CD on the Compaq, a number of text editors, the lightweight Abiword and not-so-light Firefox all loaded relatively quickly. I need to do more tests, but Firefox seemed as responsive or more so than the Mozilla-based Seamonkey browser is in the ultra-fast Puppy Linux.

I wouldn’t want to run Wolvix, even the Cub edition, as a live CD in the same way as Puppy or Damn Small Linux — especially in only 144MB of RAM, but when it comes to a traditional install, Wolvix Cub or the more application-rich Hunter would seemingly make an excellent candidate to permanently run on the Compaq.

In contrast to Debian and Slackware, Wolvix installs with just about every application and utility I like, from Abiword to Bluefish, Dillo to MtPaint, and with extremely well-organized menus in both Xfce and Fluxbox. In fact, the Fluxbox menus even include little icons next to each category of applications, something I’ve never seen before.

I’m “sure” I could replicate all of this goodness in standard Slackware of Debian, but the former’s KDE focus and the latter’s devotion to GNOME mean that it would take quite a bit of work on my part to have as good an experience in Xfce and Fluxbox as I already enjoy in Wolvix by simply loading the live CD and doing an easy installation from what I consider to be among the best installers of any Linux distribution.

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Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka “Why?”)

In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless

I’m going to haul the circa-1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop to the public library where I can run it with free WiFi and see if Seamonkey (in Puppy) and Firefox (in Damn Small Linux and OpenBSD) perform acceptably with my upgraded RAM.

Since there’s no WiFi at the Daily News, I probably should just bite the bullet and get a PCMCIA Ethernet card. And if it turns out that I can use a Mozilla browser and not have it run like so much sludge, that’s my next move. (Note: Since this post was originally written, I have gotten an Ethernet card for the Compaq).

Aside on memory: While 128MB is probably the absolute minimum to run X, I don’t feel comfortable until I have 256MB. Of course 512MB or more is better, but with 256MB, most systems that will run at all will perform well enough for the user not to tear his/her hair out.

Running Puppy with WiFi

I get to the library, boot the Compaq with Puppy 2.13, and the first thing I notice is that Seamonkey starts in just about 30 seconds.

Thirty seconds. That is excellent performance. Remember, this is a 233 MHz processor. That alone is enough to pull Puppy Linux to the front of the pack.

And I’m able to use Movable Type. That’s the key. Such a relatively “heavy” browser-based application does require a good WiFi connection. With a flaky connection, it just doesn’t work, but with this good 802.11b hookup (I’m using an Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card), I’m able to run MT just fine in Puppy.

Again, that 30-second load time for Seamonkey is absolutely huge. Graphical performance is also quite good.

Next: Trying OpenBSD

I addressed the performance of OpenBSD in a recent entry. One thing to remember about OpenBSD is that the system known for its security and cryptography isn’t a “fast” system, especially running X on older hardware. On newer PCs, assuming that you can get all the hardware properly configured, the speed difference between OpenBSD and a given Linux distribution either won’t be noticeable or will be more than acceptable for those who want the other things that OpenBSD brings to the table.

But on a system as challenged as this one, the performance tradeoffs just might be too great to justify running OpenBSD.

I say might because I’ve very much enjoyed running OpenBSD on this laptop, and the ease with which I was able to add quite a bit of software that I needed, believe it or not, rivaled even Debian and Ubuntu.

Once i had my PKG_PATH set up, I was able to use OpenBSD’s superb package management system to bring plenty of desktop-friendly applications to my system, and in almost all cases those applications were put together quite well — often better than their equivalents in Debian, Ubuntu, Puppy and Damn Small Linux. Not faster, but better in other ways in terms of functionality.

So while day-to-day computing on this system might be better with Puppy Linux, if my daughter wants to use GCompris, Tuxpaint or Childsplay, keeping OpenBSD as an operating system is something I might very well do.

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Previously:

• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?

Coming up:

• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka “Why?”)

In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?

I’ve been using OpenBSD 4.2 for a few months now on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I’m leaving it on the hard drive for now. It does run better with 144 MB of RAM. I may even upgrade the OS to the current version 4.3.

OpenBSD with X is nowhere near as fast as the fastest Linux systems, but the added security and overall quality keeps me using it.

However, I’m considering swapping out the hard drive (to retain my OpenBSD installation) and trying Debian again.

Back when I ran Etch on this laptop, I remember it being slower than Puppy and Damn Small Linux, especially when it came to refreshing the screen. That was with 64MB, and I think Debian deserves another try in 144MB.

I have to gauge how important it is to have a traditional, easily updatable hard-drive installation vs. the live CD environment of Puppy and DSL. In many ways, live CDs are ideal for older machines like this one. The way they mostly run in RAM speeds things up considerably, and “upgrading” is as easy as using a new CD.

I have upgraded OpenBSD from 4.2 to 4.3 on another one of my boxes. It wasn’t impossibly hard. Still, it was nowhere near as easy as using apt to upgrade a Debian install, and when it comes to binary-package updates to OpenBSD’s stable releases, there aren’t any between releases.

My feeling after using OpenBSD for six months is that daily updates a la Debian aren’t as necessary as any of us might think, and updating the box every six months is a reasonable solution.

And here I am using Puppy 2.13, which is well over a year old but has nice-looking desktop wallpaper and a bunch of apps that work very well.

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Previously:

• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux

Coming up:

• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka “Why?”)

In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux

In the battle for which operating system runs best on the $15 Laptop, Puppy Linux has pulled out front as the fastest system with the most features I need and best functionality on this 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt.

In case you’re wondering, here are the specs of the Compaq:

233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor
144 MB RAM
3 GB hard drive

I recently bumped the RAM from 64MB to the maximum of 144MB. Before this increase, running Linux or OpenBSD (which I have installed on the hard drive) with the X Window System was difficult at best.

Smaller applications like the Dillo Web browser, the Abiword and Ted word processors, the Geany and Beaver text editors ran pretty well in 64MB of RAM.

But the 500-pound gorilla of graphical applications is Firefox.

It would be nice to get by with Dillo, but many — if not most — of the things I need to do with a computer these days require a fairly modern browser.

Whether it’s blogging, working on Dailynews.com, or on the Movable Type back end, it all happens in the browser.

And for that I need, at a minimum, Firefox 1.5.

Now that Damn Small Linux offers Firefox 2 (under the name Bon Echo, but for all intents and purposes an early release in the FF 2 series), that system is more than fair game for use on this laptop.

Unfortunately, while the browser runs great, other things in DSL have not been working so well.

For some reason, the desktop wallpaper doesn’t work. Instead, I have a plain, gray X Window background. And while JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) is the default in Damn Small Linux like in Puppy, switching over to Fluxbox in DSL has been problematic. Some builds have allowed me to use the Fluxbox menu, but others don’t seem to work at all.

I could live without desktop wallpaper (or I could figure out a solution to the problem), but with Puppy Linux (I’m currently using version 2.13 but could easily upgrade to the newer 4.00 at any time) I get a nice-looking desktop, the Mozilla-based Seamonkey Web suite, Abiword (about as fast as DSL’s Ted word processor but with the added ability to read and write .doc files), the Geany text editor, the ROX filer and quite a few other applications I’ve grown to like very much over the year and a half I’ve been using Linux.

And as far as speed goes, Puppy and DSL are quite equal on this hardware.

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Coming up:

• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka “Why?”)

Coming up in Click: An eight-part series on finding the right OS for a 9-year-old laptop

As soon as I’m able to begin posting them, my eight-part series on finding the best operating system for my circa-1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt will begin unfolding, one part a day, on Click.

I’ve been working on this series for about a month, working with everything from Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux to OpenBSD and Wolvix Cub, with a lot of thoughts about past use of Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu and more.

So starting — again, as soon as I can get the entries lined up — look for a long meditation on the best way to make old hardware work in the 21st century.