old laptop and old user

[greyowl]

I have used XP exclusively so totally new to Linux, but I am considering switching if I can find a distro which is not too difficult to use
I need some advice on which puppy or other distro would be best to use on my old laptop with the following specs:
Dell Latitude D600
1.6 Ghz Pentium M processor
1 GB RAM
20 GB hard drive
SigmaTel C-Major Audio
Mobility Radeon 9000 video
CDRW/DVD
Dell True Mobile 1300 WLAN Mini-PCI Card Wireless

I use the computer for word processing, surfing internet, Flash video, scanning, printing, photos, pdf,

Thanks for the help.

[Semme]

Obviously directed to your other thread..

This make sense? You ask the terminal "which palemoon".

Yes, you'll need a second ROX window open to drag'n drop..

[greyowl]

Obviously directed to your other thread..

This make sense? You ask the terminal "which palemoon".

Yes, you'll need a second ROX window open to drag'n drop..

Thanks for the reference.

Success-It worked.

Thanks so much for the help with this.

Now, back to the original question of this thread:

What distro is recommended for my old laptop?

[Eathray]

Your specs aren't that bad...

I'd give Puppy Wary a try.

[starhawk]

Wary won't run modern browsers IIRC.

Dell D600, hmm... wee bit out of date. Pentium M, 855PM chipset (too old even for i915, ugh). Not horrible, per se, but certainly a little older than what most folks are going to be running, even here. You can't run PAE on that system, it's not built right for that. (There are PAE-compatible Pentium M's, I hear -- I've never met one, though.)

PAE, just for the record, is Physical Address Extension. It's a feature that lets you use more than 3.25gb of RAM in a 32-bit OS. You remember all that racket about how WinXP can't handle more than three-and-a-quarter-or-so gigs of memory? Yeah, that's because it doesn't do PAE.

I'm going to cast my vote in for Precise 571 Retro. Runs great on old hardware. (No, really -- I've got it on a Pentium II laptop! That is seriously oldskool hardware as far as modern computing is concerned.) The regular version needs PAE compatibility so you have to use the Retro edition -- but it's worth it. It's compatible with most (about 90-95% of) Ubuntu Precise Pangolin packages (that's Ubuntu 12.04 if you like numbers).

[greyowl]

Thanks for the information.

I am trying tahrpup from the CD now and it seems to work OK.

How would Precise 5.71 Retro be better?

I understand that actually the Pentium M will run pae, but it is not recognized as doing so. However, I did a forcepae on lubuntu live CD the other day and it worked.

[starhawk]

I would expect Precise to be a little faster, although if TahrPup works, go with that. It's newer and somewhat significantly improved.

I've never met a Pentium M that would accept PAE, although I've never tried the 'forcepae' bit... very interesting to hear that. I had a Sony VAIO that was fairly similar inside to your Dell, but it's dead and gone now. That was my last Pentium M system... oh well...

[Burn_IT]

I use 5.7 not retro and 5.28 not retro on my similar machine.

[starhawk]

...and I'd be very interested to hear make&model of that system

[Burn_IT]

Lenovo T41P

[mikeb]

Mobility Radeon 9000 video

its not intel video so support for this instead to be considered.

lucid more than sufficiently supports my lenovo x60s so really you have a broad choice ...nothing mentioned seems to need anything cutting edge really though some versions will cause less heat....watch out for background scripts and make sure frequency scaling is working .

mike

[Bindee]

q4os seems to be getting a lot of mentions around the web for XP users switching over to Linux.

[Moat]

I'm going to cast my vote in for Precise 571 Retro. Runs great on old hardware.

+1 vote for Precise 571 Retro... the brilliant, un-sung hero of the Puppy world, IMHO. Running quite well (better than a stripped-down XP) here on an old 1.6 GHz/256 mb P4 Toshiba Satellite 2405 - and plenty of other boxes I've ran it on.

Tried Q4OS on the same Toshiba, but buggy/laggy (video "draw" issues, it seemed).

greyowl - how well did your liveCD test of Lubuntu go? Seems like that would be an excellent choice, as well (or one of it's variants, like LXLE).

Bob

[greyowl]

I'm going to cast my vote in for Precise 571 Retro. Runs great on old hardware.

+1 vote for Precise 571 Retro... the brilliant, un-sung hero of the Puppy world, IMHO. Running quite well (better than a stripped-down XP) here on an old 1.6 GHz/256 mb P4 Toshiba Satellite 2405 - and plenty of other boxes I've ran it on.

Tried Q4OS on the same Toshiba, but buggy/laggy (video "draw" issues, it seemed).

greyowl - how well did your liveCD test of Lubuntu go? Seems like that would be an excellent choice, as well (or one of it's variants, like LXLE).

Bob

I am using Lubuntu 14.04 Live CD now and it is working fine on ethernet cable. I don't know how to get the wireless to work. There does not appear to be a network wizzard to pick up the wireless networks in my vicinity. Or, is it not enabling my wireless hardware with drivers? I don't know.

I tried Tahrpup Puppy 6.0 from a Live CD and it works fine and automatically connects to ethernet and wireless. It actually showed all the wireless networks in the area. I really like the way that it connected so easy to wireless. I runs very fast but of course it is running from the RAM. If I actually installed it on the hard drive would it still run from the RAM?

[greyowl]

I also tried the live CD of Xubuntu 14.04 and it worked similarly to Lubuntu-no wireless.

[davids45]

G'day greyowl,

Puppy installed still runs from RAM as much as it needs/finds/can - if data is stored elsewhere, then there will be some short use of the hard-drive, etc. while that gets loaded into RAM as well.

With low RAM (<250MB?), there can be some use by Puppy of a small linux swap file. Presumably you set one up on your hard-drive if you have low RAM for the Pup you like. Newer kernel Pups need more RAM I suspect. But it's still 'horses for courses'.

More than 1GB of RAM and no need for a swap file with Puppy. Anyway, with GParted (in System>Utilities), you can increase your swap file if needed from booting with a Live-Pup CD (can't change the swap when it is running).

Sounds like Tahr Pup is 'heeling' well for you. I run TahrPup on some ~8 year-old desktops for the grandkids to play games and watch videos and have had no issues from them (computers or grandkids).

If you find a problem with TahrPup being too new kernel-wise, look on this forum for some old Pups put together by pemasu (do an author forum search for him) and see how one of his Pups might go.

Good luck,

David S.

[Moat]

I don't know how to get the wireless to work.

A few Google hits that may - or may not - help, FWIW...

http://askubuntu.com/questions/322861/h ... in-lubuntu
http://askubuntu.com/questions/461384/h ... om-lubuntu
http://askubuntu.com/questions/450048/c ... untu-14-04

All I know is wireless has always been a breeze on any of the Ubuntu spins I've tried - from fresh boot, I'd just right-click the network icon in the taskbar, choose the desired network to connect, enter the password at the prompt, and boom... connected within a few seconds. But yes - might very well be a driver issue. Many Ubuntu spins include a driver update facility (in system settings menu?) - might give that a try, if it's indeed there.

Bob

[greyowl]

Thank you for the information and advice. Very helpful.

[greyowl]

G'day greyowl,

Puppy installed still runs from RAM as much as it needs/finds/can - if data is stored elsewhere, then there will be some short use of the hard-drive, etc. while that gets loaded into RAM as well.

With low RAM (<250MB?), there can be some use by Puppy of a small linux swap file. Presumably you set one up on your hard-drive if you have low RAM for the Pup you like. Newer kernel Pups need more RAM I suspect. But it's still 'horses for courses'.

More than 1GB of RAM and no need for a swap file with Puppy. Anyway, with GParted (in System>Utilities), you can increase your swap file if needed from booting with a Live-Pup CD (can't change the swap when it is running).

Sounds like Tahr Pup is 'heeling' well for you. I run TahrPup on some ~8 year-old desktops for the grandkids to play games and watch videos and have had no issues from them (computers or grandkids).

If you find a problem with TahrPup being too new kernel-wise, look on this forum for some old Pups put together by pemasu (do an author forum search for him) and see how one of his Pups might go.

Good luck,

David S.

How much RAM does Puppy use?

Do all versions of Puppy run from RAM (eg Simplicity)?

Does this produce any problem if you are also running some programs that need lots of RAM eg graphic, burning, word processing, browsers, etc.

[bigpup]

How much RAM does Puppy use?

Depends on what you are doing.

Recommended minimum is 256MB, but that is so, after you get booted, there is still some free memory to run programs.
1 GB of RAM is more than enough.

To see what it uses on your computer.
Run the program menu->System-> Htop.
At the top of the Htop screen it shows memory info.
First number is memory being used.
Second number is your total system memory.
Example:
178/2018MB