Which laptops for USB Puppy?

What works, and doesn't, for you. Be specific, and please include Puppy version.
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newpet
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Which laptops for USB Puppy?

#1 Post by newpet »

Hello,
my old and glorious notebook passed out, so I need to replace it with a new one.
Obviously, I would like to run my puppy from my usb stick as before.

Any idea about some currently available laptop/netbook model, working OOTB ?
No matter the brand, though I'm somehow a little more acoustomed with asus and acer. And no matter screen size.

Any help is very appreciated.

cheers

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ally
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#2 Post by ally »

I'm a fan of lenovo thinkpads, robust, flexible and often excellent value

:)

starhawk
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#3 Post by starhawk »

Although it's stretching the "currently available" line quite a bit -- I literally cannot say enough good things about my ASUS 1000HE netbook. It's a 2009 model, with a 32bit Atom N270 (64bit Atoms were the next generation out) running at 1.6GHz, 2gb RAM (upped from the original 1gb), and --in my case-- a 32gb SSD. Screen is dinky at 10" diagonal, and low-res (well, everything's relative) at 1024x600 -- but the overall reliability and robust design carries it through everything.

These are available for a song (two at the most!) on eBay -- and they are incredibly robust. The plastic of the body is a bit brittle by now -- making servicing without losing screwposts a tricky proposition at best -- but it's been six years, so that's allowed I think. Besides, it's rare that you'll need to pull anything open like that (except for one specific situation, see next paragraph) -- the hard drive (or SSD) and RAM are easily accessible from the door on the bottom, and the WiFi card is incredibly robust -- mine still has its original card! (I literally cannot say that about any other system in my house... and I've more than a few...) If you do crack one open -- one small word of warning -- the cables for camera and digital mic are easily confused -- you'll fry the mic's if you swap 'em. (So be careful,and don't!)

The only real flaw in 'em (I think we can handle ONE) is that the touchpad buttons' switches, on the motherboard, have a tendency to go flat and not work any more. This is true of most of the early ASUS netbooks -- the later ones have buttons so stiff you can hardly get 'em to work if you stand on the dang thing. Anyways, if you know electronics, you'll recognize the switches at first glance as standard surface-mount "tactile" types, and you'll know how to take 'em out and swap in new ones. Four leads, easy peasy. If not -- hey, Logitech makes great wireless mice ;) or you can replace the motherboard (I did, but then I had another problem that would not have been solvable otherwise) if you want to pay the dough for that. It's not too challenging... but it *is* effectively a complete teardown.

Other than that one little ding-up, these things are built like the original Enterprise -- she may look a little shabby in this day 'n' age, Cap'n -- but it doesn't matter what's comin' at her, she'll carry the day just fine :D

Oh right -- this post was typed on the very netbook I'm talking about ;)

gcmartin

#4 Post by gcmartin »

All new PCs are 64bit and most have lots and lots of RAM. And there is some industry movement in what the "best" all-around solution should be; namely tablet or laptop approaches for home/school/business/development/general-use.

I have had one student use his 21" tablet in classroom setting with great success and NO obvious drawbacks. He was happy with his Tablet, its size and the touch things his OS allows him.

It might be in one's best interest as a "future-proof" arrangement to insure your next one is a touch-screen enabled unit. This give flexibility to whatever you might want to use it for in your future and not be constrained in OS/distro functions that you may need to take advantage of.

Recent Puppy Linuxes run on all modern PCs; namely Just-LightHouse, FATDOG, Slacko versions, TahrPUP versions, EmSee, etc.

Hope this is helpful.
Edit: naming modern PUP distro which work with New Tablets and PCs
Last edited by gcmartin on Thu 18 Feb 2016, 01:45, edited 1 time in total.

newpet
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#5 Post by newpet »

@alli
Thanks for your response. I assume you're running a PL distro by one of them. What model, if I may ask?

@starhawk
Thanks for your response. I owned a 1000HE for lets say a week. Nice looking, compact and very versatile, but I eventually returned it due to a couple of flaws. It was terribly slow (single core cpu), but I could live with it, considering a low demanding OS like Puppy.
The real flaw was the screen vertical amount of pixel rows (600). It was an issue with home banking, I remember. Lowering resolution didnt help either.

@gcmartin
Thanks for your response. I couldn't agree with you more. Touchscreens are the future. But I won't abandon Puppy Linux, I like the way it works. I just need a laptop/netbook/chromebook able tu run it from my usb stick.

Many notebooks in 2009 were able to run an OS from an external usb stick. Sadly things change.

Said that, I hope Puppy is not for ancient machines only...

cheers

gcmartin

#6 Post by gcmartin »

You'll be fine with the modern PUPs of 2015 and 2016.

Your greatest purchasing challenge is selecting the plug-in ability on your new PC. I.e. USB 3.0 or USB-C, SDSC or SDSX, micro card slots, DVD or Blu-ray, HDMI or DVI, and you MUST pay attention to the video ability of 1366x768 or 1920x1024 or 1K or 2K or 4K or... as this might be a quality factor when trying to connect to TVs or such via a cable.

I purchased a Chromebox before Christmas. Its a Lenovo with 1K video output and USB3s. Swift and extremely capable via my TV and a wireless keyboard w/trackpad. Sits behind my TV. Its Internet operations is as fast if not faster than my PCs. It has been excellent and has everything I need for Internet use. I added an extension for playing music from my local network storage.

I just saw a SAMSUNG Chromebook announcement yesterday that looks appealing but was unable to find the video resolution.

And, FATDOG and Just-Lighthouse come to you with touch-screen abilities enabled. You boot, and use as you see fit. Thus your new selection widens to use almost any new x86 Tablet or Laptop or All-in-one or PC. I have also tested, last year, the free x86 Chromebook distro which comes, also, touch-enabled on a touch AIO PC. Works the same as it does on a tablet (all tablets are touch).

Hope this is helpful

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ally
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#7 Post by ally »

I have a few, currently an x201 and a t500 with an older t61 and couple of (IBM) t21s

I have been using puppy daily for several years now and only boot to windows on very rare occasions

I'm currently running the (32 bit) tahr as the daily driver and Jose's shiba inu to play

I was a staunch slacko fan running 5.3.3 on the older machines then latterly 5.7, the new slacko 6s had network problems and have found the tahr pups a joy to use in its stead

I've put all sorts of pups on them with only the new slacko a problem having started with the 4.31 master piece

I like being able to use a dock, add hdd's etc with the thinkpads, maintaining the puppy linux archive has meant a lot of file downloads and uploads so they get worked hard, non have failed except a dodgy drive connector on a t21 but that was my carelessness

If you can, look out for the t5** models as they are better specs, the w series even better (on my wish list) or the x series for a notebook without optical drives

:)

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#8 Post by ally »

soz, duplicated

starhawk
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#9 Post by starhawk »

@newpet -- agree on the screen, disagree on the speed.

I'm running X-Tahr 1b3 here, which is TahrPup 6.0.2 with XFCE. The XFCE desktop is almost as heavy as GNOME2/MATE desktops -- not quite, but like 90-95% the 'weight' (computational resources). Yet, X-Tahr runs great.

To be fair -- the 1000HE comes originally with a gig of RAM and a platter drive. Replace the drive with an SSD (SATA-2 is fine, SATA-3 will bottleneck at the CPU and not give any advantage, even if the controller supports it, which I don't think it does) and double the RAM (replace the stick) -- super easy, takes fifteen minutes if you don't know what you're doing, five or so if you do -- boom! flies like a LearJet.

Screen is kind of cramped tho.

That said, if you want another recommendation from me -- Dell Latitude e4310. I have one of those, too. 13.3" 1366x768 screen, i5-540M 64bit CPU, SSD, 4gb RAM, great system. Honestly probably more than I need, and unlike the ASUS, it's hard to hold with just one hand. Don't trust the USB port on the left, it's wobbly, and the one on the right, try real hard not to break it -- you have to pull the motherboard to replace the port! Mine has keyboard issues but that's my fault for typing too hard ;) just the left CTRL key mechanism failed, nothing major. But you can't get individual keys -- gots to replace the whole keyboard, and that costs $15-$20 if you have the backlit one like mine is. Go figure.

Pelo

Acer does it fine,

#10 Post by Pelo »

Acer does it fine, here Aspire 1640.
I had in the past several old Acer, Red is easier to connect wireless than Dell (D505) and HP (Hewlett Packard)
This Acer has a better connexion than my new laptop.
Well, battery and CD player are broken.
I cleaned the fan. However temperature quickly get 80°
LegOPen running (see topic) but old Puppies as 431 are better (512MB RAM)
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Puppy unicorn Acer Aspire 2004, prefer Older Puppies, slimPuppies, Puppies 4 or DPUP
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edoc
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#11 Post by edoc »

Have you considered a tablet with an outboard keyboard/cover?

http://www.gearbest.com/tablet-pcs/pp_350502.html

Someone is porting Linux Mint to that tablet - probably can be adapted to Puppy.

I don't know if there's an equal laptop for $255. (the Chuwi Hi12 plus keyboard/cover)

Our son is a fan of the quality of the former-IBM-now-Lenovo laptops.
[b]Thanks! David[/b]
[i]Home page: [/i][url]http://nevils-station.com[/url]
[i]Don't google[/i] [b]Search![/b] [url]http://duckduckgo.com[/url]
TahrPup64 & Lighthouse64-b602 & JL64-603

starhawk
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#12 Post by starhawk »

...sigh...

At least this topic was from earlier this year...

:roll:

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