Hardware -- success 5.25 Retro on Compaq Armada PII-333

[RetroTechGuy]

I just frugal installed Lucid 5.25 Retro on my old (test-bed) 333MHz Compaq Armada (#7400)... 256MB Ram, 512MB swap file.

Seems to work fine, so far (haven't tried the wireless yet).

[RetroTechGuy]

And the wireless works:

PCMCIA Trendnet card... (using it right now)

Edit (02Jan2012):

The wireless card is a TEW-441PC (11g card)

Have now rebuilt the system, resized partitions, removed the 512 MB swap file, and put in a 512 MB swap partition (still dual boots Win98 -- which runs K-meleon for a browser).

Have now put Seamonkey on it, as Firefox is just too hardware intensive for it.

[pikacane]

I saw the 5.25 and thought for a moment that you had managed to boot off a 5.25" floppy that would have been impressive.

I'm running Wary off a similar system right now, a Toshiba Tecra 780DVD. PII 266, maxed at 192mb ram, TrendNet USB in a CardBus hub since the onboard USB is 1.0. I'm using SeaMonkey with Adblock, NoScript, and RequestPolicy to lighten the load. It's a little slow, but very usable.

I'm using it as a liveCD, but allowed the sfs file to be moved to hdd. For some reason it didn't ask me what size swapfile to make, so it's at 200 mb. While I'm tempted to try a frugal hdd install, I'm a little concerned with Windows getting disrupted. I haven't played with Win98 in ages, this is fun. I got the laptop for free from Craigslist, from a gentleman who didn't think it was worth anything anymore.

[RetroTechGuy]

I saw the 5.25 and thought for a moment that you had managed to boot off a 5.25" floppy that would have been impressive.

I still have 5.25" floppy drives... (and I think I even have data on some disks).

I'm running Wary off a similar system right now, a Toshiba Tecra 780DVD. PII 266, maxed at 192mb ram, TrendNet USB in a CardBus hub since the onboard USB is 1.0. I'm using SeaMonkey with Adblock, NoScript, and RequestPolicy to lighten the load. It's a little slow, but very usable.

I'm using it as a liveCD, but allowed the sfs file to be moved to hdd. For some reason it didn't ask me what size swapfile to make, so it's at 200 mb.

I typically try to provide a minimum of 512MB (Swap+RAM). On the 333, I have 256MB RAM, and a 512MB Swap.

While I'm tempted to try a frugal hdd install, I'm a little concerned with Windows getting disrupted. I haven't played with Win98 in ages, this is fun. I got the laptop for free from Craigslist, from a gentleman who didn't think it was worth anything anymore.

Try Lin'N'Win -- you just use the existing Win98 boot loader, and link into that:

http://www.icpug.org.uk/national/linnwi ... innwin.htm

Use the boot disk to perform a frugal install, and save the grub block to insert into your system.

[sheldonisaac]

(most snipped)

I typically try to provide a minimum of 512MB (Swap+RAM). On the 333, I have 256MB RAM, and a 512MB Swap.

Please excuse if this is wrong to post here.

I recently got a Dell D610 with 2GB of memory and a 2.13GHz processor, with Windows XP on it.

Added a frugal Puppy Lucid 5.2.8-005.

The 456MB swap file ( It is actually the Windows pagefile.sys ) takes about 20 seconds to load, from /mnt/sda5 , which is a FAT32 partition.

Is that slower than expected?

Can someone please advise?

Thank you.

[RetroTechGuy]

(most snipped)

I typically try to provide a minimum of 512MB (Swap+RAM). On the 333, I have 256MB RAM, and a 512MB Swap.

Please excuse if this is wrong to post here.

I recently got a Dell D610 with 2GB of memory and a 2.13GHz processor, with Windows XP on it.

Added a frugal Puppy Lucid 5.2.8-005.

The 456MB swap file ( It is actually the Windows pagefile.sys ) takes about 20 seconds to load, from /mnt/sda5 , which is a FAT32 partition.

Is that slower than expected?

Can someone please advise?

Thank you.

With 2GB of RAM, you may not need a swap file or swap partition at all.

Try turning off the swap and see if you get better performance.

Swap is only needed when you run out of RAM.