The Shop > Software Tools
To Ubuntu or not to Ubuntu; that is the question.
DavidA:
VT,
Thanks.
The machine with the Vista is OK, Except when I try to download updates it won't accept the key. I can get by without the updates.
My laptop has the XP on it. This is the system that is faulty. It drops out of applications and reverts to the desktop at unpredictable times for no apparent reason. My antivirus programs can't find anything. I have the original CD and mean to re-install, but it is somewhere in a box with most of my other nice things (Norton Ghost, Partition magic etc. But it is one box of about twenty in the loft.
Might as well be on the Moon.
I have another machine in this room with a Celeron D processor. Not sure what OP it has. Think it's also XP.
So I am spoiled for choice.
I'll try for Puppy 2.17 this evening.
Dave.
vtsteam:
David anything that will run XP probably doesn't need 2.17. It's mainly for ancient machines.
It can probably use a modern Puppy like Wary.
You mentioned a 486 for a processor which is pre- Pentium 1, so that's why I thought you'd need a specialized Puppy.
(I don't believe XP would have run on a 486 processor -- I think it needed a Pentium of some sort, etc., but might be wrong).
Anyway, one way of trying out different flavors of Puppy is to use a CD R/W disk -- you can then erase it if you don't like one variety and try another.
One other advantage of a R/W CD: since Puppy Linux only takes up about 100-150 megabytes of the CD, the rest of the CD ( about 400 megabytes) can be used for data or additional programs! You can actually run your entire OS, programs, and data on a CD -- and if you like, pop it into completely different computer, and keep on working on that one in Puppy! Makes it totally portable. You can also do the same with a thumb drive.
Actually you can do the same thing with a conventional CD, leaving it open, you can't erase and rewrite over something, you just erase and write on unused space. Puppy can do amazing stuff.
DavidA:
Well. It worked.
Typing this on my old Esys Celeron machine using Puppy Linux 2.17. Running from a CD.
And it was indeed pretty painless.
Whether it will all work again on the next boot up is uncertain. But things look hopeful.
I'd like to thank you all for your help with this little project.
Dave.
:nrocks: :thumbup:
garym:
Great news, Dave. I thought if you persevered it would be successful in the end. As VT says now you know it works it would be worth trying a later version.
Gary
vtsteam:
Great David!
Play around with it, have fun -- there's tons of stuff to discover and try out. There's a good Puppy Linux forum at www.murga-linux.com/puppy/ .
Some suggestions if yo do decide to put it on hard drive:
1.) Don't bother with a "full" installation (as is required in most other Linux types) . Do what's called in Puppy a "frugal" install. It's pretty simple to do that, and it means you will have a lot more flexibility in the future, than if you tried to do a full installation. Trust me on that, because it's too hard to explain it all in detail here. (Roughly: the whole OS is saved as a file on your drive, and doesn't require re-partitioning the drive. Also anything you add -- programs, data, etc is saved as a "personal savefile" another big file).
You may have already done that -- since when you close down after your first session on CD I asks you if you want to create these two files -- and if you answered yes and went through the process, you already now have a "frugal" installation -- and don't need the CD any more.
The trickiest things for a newcomer to get used to is that a single click opens a program (instead of double clicking), and understanding the file structure -- where things are. No more C: and D: drives. You might see things like hda1 (for hard drive A partition 1) or sda3 (for serial drive A partition 3) and such.
And also find that there are two different ways to get to the same place: on my machine I can get to the same place by opening to either sda3 or /mnt/home . Also the concept of "mounting" a drive before you can see or access the contents, and unmounting the drive.
These things bugged me when I first started, coming from Win98, but after a couple weeks I got used to them, and now I'm so used to it that it's Win7 that I find clumsy and slow and convoluted to do anything in. Just trust that you'll get it if you use it for a time.
Anyway, good luck, and if you run into any problems or have questions, let me know.
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