Will Puppy work on this old Dell Latitude laptop?

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philluffy
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Will Puppy work on this old Dell Latitude laptop?

#1 Post by philluffy »

hiya guys,

i've been trying to revive an old laptop, a dell latitude LM, pentium 166mmx, 40 mb ram, 2 G hd. it currently runs win98, very slowly. the main thing that's holding me back is that this laptop doesn't boot from the cd rom, it will only boot from floppy or hd. i can only physically fit either the cd rom or floppy drive one at a time as they both fit the same slot on the laptop. i've read around the forum that seems to suggest the amount of ram i have is too low. the max this machine can hold is 72 mb ram.

so my question is , can puppy really work here, or am i beating a dead horse. i have tried using pupwin98 but it doens't boot into puppy at all.

thanks for your help.

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SirDuncan
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#2 Post by SirDuncan »

I have a Gateway 2000 Solo laptop that had the same floppy/CD set-up. You will want to use another computer to install Puppy to a flash drive. Then use a WakePup floppy disk to boot from the flash drive. Then you can install to the HD.

As for the RAM, if you do not have enough to load into RAM Puppy will just run from the drive. This is not entirely desirable, but it will work long enough for you to set up a swap partition. you will want to do that before you install Puppy to the HD. Also, you may want to look for one of the smaller Puppies like LitePup and BarelyPup.

I will try to get links for you in a bit. Just have to find them.
Be brave that God may help thee, speak the truth even if it leads to death, and safeguard the helpless. - A knight's oath

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SirDuncan
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#3 Post by SirDuncan »

I actually can't find a copy of LitePup anymore. Todd (who made it) is currently working on IcePup, which looks like it could work for you as well. I can't find what version of Puppy it is based on, but it is either 2.16 or 2.17. <http://www.icepup.info/>

The latest version of BarelyPup I could find was 2.13. <http://minipup.info/barelypup/>

Please note that both of these Puplets have been stripped of most applications, so you must add what you will want. If you add too much you will again run into RAM problems. Also, IcePup is missing all wireless networking. You would have to add it if you need it.

WakePup for Puppy 2.xx and accompanying instructions( NOTE: WakePup is include in Puppy under the Setup menu). <http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=7979>

Hope this helps.
Last edited by SirDuncan on Wed 05 Sep 2007, 21:46, edited 1 time in total.
Be brave that God may help thee, speak the truth even if it leads to death, and safeguard the helpless. - A knight's oath

jonyo

#4 Post by jonyo »

Ram's a bit low for pup 98 (prob starts a boot & then hangs). I run a lap p166mmx (started with 32 megs..not enough) maxed the ram to 80 for ~ 15 bucks, use a 160 meg swap partition (helps when low ram situation) & works great with pup 98.

Might also try booting from the cd. Mine isn't supposed to either but turned out that it did boot the odd thing. Do you have usb? PCMCI slot? Probably yes. Think you could boot with a pup wake floppy (or perhaps a smartbootmanager floppy) & get a pcmcia cf flash adapter (~5 bucks) & card to work & run other pup stuff but not sure.

My lap runs recent 2x variants live cd save file to HD half decent the way setup & boots with a pup wake floppy.

philluffy
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#5 Post by philluffy »

hi guys, thanx for the replies.

As far as loading from a flash drive, that really is an excellent idea, if this old machine of mine has usb, and i'm not really sure it would actually support usb pc card add ons,coz if i remember correctly, it needs a 233 mhz cpu, i may be wrong(or maybe that's a wireless requirement.)

i've looked up on icepup, it's based on 2.13, and when u said stripped down, it really is small. i've tested it on other machine and it really is fast, which should do well for my laptop.

well as far as the ram is concerned, it takes 2 laptop edo rams, which r not that easy to find. if there's a will, there's a way...

thanx again guys, i hope there r more suggestions out there, and i really do appreciate all the help. i've been putting this project on and off for almost half a year.

By the way, does anyone know whether a pentium 166mhz can run avi files? i know win98 runs poorly on avi, but it's ok for vcd format(mpeg).

jonyo

#6 Post by jonyo »

philluffy wrote:well as far as the ram is concerned, it takes 2 laptop edo rams, which r not that easy to find. if there's a will, there's a way...
http://www.memoryx.net/dellatlmm1me.html
http://www.memorystock.com/memory/DellL ... MP166.html

philluffy
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#7 Post by philluffy »

hi again,
i finally got my internet connection back after 10days of moving house. i've tried icepup on a celeron 700mhz 128mb ram laptop and it did poorly compared to puppy 2.17 . though it's very much stripped down, it still used up more ram than puppy 2.17 so i'm quite impressed with puppy 2.17 . one thing i find funny about 2.17 is the time it took to save during shutdown, approximately 3minutes.

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SirDuncan
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#8 Post by SirDuncan »

The initial shutdown has tor create the save file first and then save to it. Depending on the size this can take a while because it is formatting the inside of file in EXT2 format. After that things should speed up.
Be brave that God may help thee, speak the truth even if it leads to death, and safeguard the helpless. - A knight's oath

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