Puppy as Primary Operating System

[hollipl]

Hello Puppy Linux Forum Users!
This is an post for me to say hello and invite you along on my experiment as I try out puppy as a candidate for my everyday driver operating system on an XP era Compaq Presario laptop, which due to financial obligations, has unfortunatly become the only computer I have available to me.

Specs are moderately usable for Youtube/Flash Movie streaming, light Http browsing, filling out job applications, and maybe even some audio content creation in the form of recording guitar songs and mixing with Audacity. So this little XP era machine is about to regain second life, and I'm inviting you guys along on my mission to see if puppy can fufill these needs untill my financial situation improves.

I have a built in Broadcom Wireless Radio, but also have an old linksys pcmia?? card that should be functional, along with a T-Link usb wifi dongle, so no matter what I will be able to get some kind of wifi functionality. So at the moment I am downloading the Puppy ISO to burn to a CDR that I happen to have lying around, because I am switching from Debian and have had some problems recently with Unetbootin, so CDR it is. I may even throw in a few pictures of the laptop and such to keep you guys interested so if I run into problems I have a few of you more experienced fella's out there to help me.

Oh yea, TL:DR guys. this isn't the post for you! lol
Pics and an update as I start the boot/installion.

[Semme]

Welcome Mate!

Hey, for starters, kindly supply a thumbnail instead of that screen exploder of yours, then we'll get on to addressing you.

Thanks muchly..

[6502coder]

Like you, I have a Compaq Presario laptop from the XP era. Mine is a Presario 2200, 1.3 GHz Celeron with 1 GB of RAM. Precise Puppy 5.4.93 runs quite well on it, and supports the built-in Broadcom wireless with no problems.

[Semme]

This will suffice just fine.

[Flash]

Hollipl, I changed your URL to a link rather than [img] because your image was about twice as wide as my screen and, I suspect, the screens of most other forum members. Why annoy the people whom you're asking for help?

If you post images or link to them, nothing wider than 800 pixels, please. Thanks.

To answer your question, Puppy is probably the best thing you could do for an old laptop that you want to keep using. You don't even have to get rid of Windows in order to use Puppy. So you can continue to run the Windows apps you're used to while you get used to the ones in Puppy. You might want to avoid getting online in Windows.

[hollipl]

Yes I did Realize that afer I posted, but due to the fact Im running a full debian operating system on the laptop in question, You were able to fix the problem quite a bit faster than I was. I did upload it to another host that automatically resized the picture for me and provided me with BB code. I don't use forums very often, so I feel a bit awkward. Any way, the CDR is burnt, So I'll bring up the forum on My android Phone and Carry on :]

The Laptop has a 60 gig hard drive , 1.4 GHZ single core, and 512 mb of ram.
Not much to work with, but can do in a pinch :]

Using XFburn on all auto settings for media creation.

[hollipl]

Like you, I have a Compaq Presario laptop from the XP era. Mine is a Presario 2200, 1.3 GHz Celeron with 1 GB of RAM. Precise Puppy 5.4.93 runs quite well on it, and supports the built-in Broadcom wireless with no problems.

That is good news for me then! I've used Puppy in some very Crappy situations before, with a 2002 dell desktop that had no hard drive and couldn't boot usb, I used PLOP bootloader CD to boot and then force boot USB off that CD , and use persisant LIVE usb puppy on a USB 2 speed 1 gig stick, used that as a primary computer for almost a year lol.

[hollipl]

Live CD os up and running! Its speedy enough as i just click around and browse the web. Lets get it installed and see about changing desktop evironment or do something to make it just a little pretty, that is after testing wifi and the liked.

So for right now it looks like i just click install. On the desktop? Im gonna wipe the whole drive and do LVM setup.

Any time i try to use the forum attachments to post an image it tries to say ive uploaded an empty file. Why is that? Happened on computer and phone.


EDIT: I am now typing this from the machine itself.
Its still running live, been stuch on PLEASE WAIT {X} window for a while now....
It finished installing Grub4Dos and I created and mounted a root partition, a swap, and a 48 gig home part and still waiting for some kind of message on the progress of the install...

[s243a]

I know tahrpup CE works well with 1gig of ram but large PDFs or websites with a lot of flash or javascript can bring it to a crawl. We have lots of these discussions on these forms. Here's one such thread:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 0&start=15

granted that was for a computer with worse specs than yours.

I've used Wary 5.5 and works well on old computers but got frustrated with the older version of glib c and what that means for running modern software such as browsers.

Bary's Quirky is smaller than tharpup and has more recent libraries than Wary:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky ... rky-6.1.4/

I haven't tried it yet but it might be worth a shot.

[hollipl]

I have managed to install Puppy to the internal hard drive, setup a swap part, and have access to a 50 gig partition to store files on, and puppy has a ten gig root part for programs. So now lets test it out and see if I can install firefox :]

[s243a]

I have managed to install Puppy to the internal hard drive, setup a swap part, and have access to a 50 gig partition to store files on, and puppy has a ten gig root part for programs. So now lets test it out and see if I can install firefox :]

Which version of puppy did you install?

[hollipl]

6.0.5 PAE 32 bit Tahrpup. I've now managed to stumble across the window to install a seperate Desktop mangager, I've chosen to give XFCE a try. And I do have to say it is looking MIGHTY Slick, and running better than this computer has in a minute. I've migrated recently from Bunsen Labs based on Debian Jessie, to a full install of debian with XFCE, and that was running so slow I couldn't get much working. Now I'm On Tahrpup with XFCE and i'm gonna try watching some youtube videos and a flash movie stream and see how the resources get taxed, and see how smooth the playback is.

[Semme]

You're getting warmer..

50g partition to store files and Pup with a 10g *system* partition..

[foxpup]

hi hollipl, welcome

How do you manage with Firefox?
I have a 2002 palomino desktop with 1G ram and it works with tahr, though better with wary. Newest Firefox works for me, but youtube works better with QtWeb.

have had some problems recently with Unetbootin

if you still have XP on your machine you can use rufus

[poorguy]

Hey hollipl,

I'm using Puppy tahrpup 32bit (frugal install) as an everyday driver on an old Windows XP computer without any complaints.

I use Netsurf and for basic web browsing it kicks ass.
Here is a link to a Netsurf download.

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=106016

The PoorGuy

[Flash]

Hollipl, PAE won't do much for you if you have less than about 3.3 GB of RAM.

[hollipl]

Hey hollipl,

I'm using Puppy tahrpup 32bit (frugal install) as an everyday driver on an old Windows XP computer without any complaints.

I use Netsurf and for basic web browsing it kicks ass.
Here is a link to a Netsurf download.

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=106016

The PoorGuy

PoorGuy, I tried to download the pet and it threw me a 404 page not found error.

So here is where we are at Guys.
Tahrpup is install to hdd, Sucessfully switched Desktop Environments to XFCE,swap partition is on and working, 48 something gig file partition is formated. Puppy has its own 10 gig *system* partition, but say when I download something in firefox, it seems to save it in puppys system partition download folder, not my large file partition. I want the biggest partition to be mounted at /home and function like LVM works on other distros. I'm a linux newb, sort of, but have tried many Distros and am not scared of some command line work, but I'm not exactly the best at explaining my problems in linux because I'm not sure what the problem is half the time. *sigh* Im happy to run practicly any thing but microsoft's crap, So if I can just get together a system me and my wife can use I'll be happy. She uses Windows every day at work, but I sat her down infront of the Tahrpup live CD and she was able to figure out how to do some light webbrowsing and such. I think She will like the XFCE environment better.

While I wait for an answer to the /home issue, I'm going to try to install the .deb download of Teamviewer, which would be useful when I have a decent Puppy guru to show me some stuffs.

[LazY Puppy]

http://smokey01.com/gjuhasz/packages/netsurf-3.5.pet

[foxpup]

edit: hi LazY Puppy, I was just typing this when you sent yours.

If I remember right you have palemoon for a browser in Tahr. (I threw it out because it needs SSE2 and I only have SSE on my machine). So where did you get firefox then?
Anyway, in any browser you can define the download map under Preferences (look under Edit or Tools or Extra).
I still recommend QtWeb, by the way.

/mnt/home/ is by defintion where the puppy files (vmlinuz, initrd.gz, main sfs, other sfs, savefile) are. So it is a bit like C in windows, if I remember well.
Where you put your data (D) doesn't really matter. But it is good practice to put it on another partition. (It's also good practice to regularly backup that partition and your savefile if you have a frugal install, btw.)

/mnt/home/ always mounts at bootup because the distro resides there
I always mount other partitions manually by clicking them on my desktop. I do not want everything 'open'. Windows does not require this.
To mount partitions on bootup, you could try Startmount.

I do not know teamviewer, but there are also puppy versions (pets) on the forum. (The deb from jessie or trusty should be alright also.)

[hollipl]

I was purposefully trying to install the .deb file to test puppys Ubuntu functionality. It has successfully been installed :]

Teamviewer is a Remote Desktop application that can be used for yourself, to easily control your computer from your phone while you are away,
or you can give a temporary ID to a friend, or even someone helping you on a forum, and they can see your desktop and show you how to fix problems, but you still maintain complete control and can cut the connection at any time. The Temporary ID is regenerated fresh each time the program starts so its never the same, and people can only use an ID and password to access 1 time, unless you give them the new one.