Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[smeebob]

I have an old laptop with no cdrom or stiffy drive, its a pentium 1 90mhz with 32mb ram.

Basically what I did was take my laptop drive out and connect it with a usb converter to my main PC. I booted off the puppy live cd and used the Universal Installer and configured it as a usbhdd.

After that I edited the syslinux.cfg and replaced usbhdd with idehdd and then did the same with the file named USBHDD in the root of the drive renaming it to IDEHDD.

Then I just put it back into the laptop and it now boots puppy!

I couldnt find out how to do this anywhere so I managed to come right on my own. Apologies if there is in fact a thread showing how to do this , I could not find it if its there. If there is a better way to do this then by all means post it here.

(Here's a screenie)

[fredsua]

Hello smeebob, I am in the same boat as you where. I have a TI Extensa 510, Pentium 1, 100Mhz, 32mb RAM, and 775MB hdd. No cd-rom, no usb, only a 3.5 floppy drive to work with. I have taken out the hdd and installed it on my dell PIII, 500Mhz, 256mb RAM, 20G hdd laptop. Since I am a newbie and was testing Puppy out, I installed puppy 4.0 and switched hdd. Of course, it did not work as it got stuck in loading GRUB.

I am very curious as to how exactly you got it to work. I am a newbie to puppy and I'm not familiar with its software. I really would appreciate the help from an experience 32mb puppy loader.

Could you also tell me how puppy is running under these conditions? Would it be wise to create a large swap file to alleviate the memory crunch?

[smeebob]

Hi fredsua.

Puppy is not running really well on this spec machine... I don't know if it is because of the install method I chose but the load times are unusable. It will only recognise my lcd if I use xorg which if I'm not mistaken uses more memory.

I too am not really experienced with puppy, I really only posted my solution to try and save somebody the head scratching and google searching that I went through before figuring out the method.

But as I say, perhaps my method is flawed or there is a much better way of doing it than what I have done. So if this is the case any comments are welcome.

Your method will differ from mine if you are just installing the drive into your PIII laptop's drive bay and installing directly to it. Infact I would imagine that to be the best way to install it in your situation. Is that what you did? My method is more for using a usb adapter and then editing the files so that the machine reads the drive and thinks it was installed as an ide drive.

Does your pentium I drive boot on your PIII after you have loaded puppy?

[fredsua]

Yes, I am installing Puppy on the hard drive using a different computer. For more details of my findings do a search for the topic "Puppy Install on a TI Extensa 510".

So far I can only boot grub on the Extensa machine but it freezes when loading the kernel.

[fredsua]

Wow, compare to other forums I'm a member of, there's not a lot of support here. My post (Puppy Install on a TI Extensa 510) with my findings has been unanswered for days now.

[gyro]

[Mercedes350se]

fredsua,

I apologise for the rest of the forum members that have not responded.

I am on that other o$ machine so cannot directly help.

I suggest that you search the forum on modifying the menu.lst file - that is a small L not 1 (one)..

It will need the laptop drive in your PIII machine and you will have to change the hda type command in menu.lst to show the correct drive.

If you are unable to do this post back and I will arrange for my puppy machine to be up and running so I can give you a blow by blow description.

Thinking as I type this if you do a search under my name I think you will find a post that will answer your question.

In any event post how you get on.

[ezeze5000]

I hope you created a swap partition (if you are doing a full install).
About 128mb with your size hard drive should be about right.

32 MB of ram is bare minimum for Puppy4.1.1 retro.

I have an old laptop with 32MB of ram and a swap partition really made it run better.

Make sure that in your BIOS you have it set for non plug and play OS.

I hope this helps.

Sorry for the wait, I haven't been here lately (have been making network repairs).

[tempestuous]

[Mercedes350se]

@ tempestuous

If the Prime Minister can apologise, on behalf of all Australians, to the Aboriginals then ...

Anyway each to their own!

[tempestuous]

A vague excuse for your error.
A Prime Minister has political authority, you do not.
An apology is not owed to the demanding newbie, and you do not speak for me.

[fredsua]

When I made that comment I was a bit frustrated at the lack of response from members of this forum. As I said, I am a newbie to the linux world. The forum for the linux distro I have on my main PC is very helpful and very quick to respond no matter how dumb or sophisticated the question might be. Now by tempestuous making a big deal over my comment he is diverting the question stated in the topic of this thread. I don't like drama, so please let's stay focused on the topic. I don't feel I need to apologize as it was just a comment and we are all free to express our opinions.

Mercedes350se, I would like to thank you for trying to help me with this frustrated and old piece of equipment. Since my last post I had given up and shelved the lappy in the closet. I have some free time now in December and through mid January which I might just clean the dust off the lappy and try once more. I'll post my findings once more in the thread TI 510.

Once again, I thank you Mercedes350se for taking the time in trying to help as well as other members of this forum.

Peace and Merry Christmas to all!