Thinkpads Forum

Morning guys. As some of you may know I'm browsing around for a distro that will give me a decent performance for my 600X on it's way that has a 500mhz PIII and 256mb of RAM.

Anyway. I stumbled onto this distro and out of geeky curiosity downloaded it. I think it may be a derivative of Puppy and on a run have to say it is looking nice. I ran a LiveCD of this on my R52. The wireless driver for my Intel 2200 B/G was easy to configure OOB. Click on the WizardWizard icon that is represented with a tophat on the dock. This will let you try configuring for your hardware stuffs (ie. wireless, modem, audio, video, etc). It probed for wireless modem and configured the settings, discovered our network, and I typed in the password key.

Wireless is now operational. The flashing LED on the bottom of the LCD actually flashes! I know on some distros that LED doesn't always work!

Video codec for AVI is pre-installed. I hooked up a USB card reader and ran an AVI file using gxine player. No sound though. So went to ALSA sound configure started by the WizardWizard launch I previously mentioned. It discovered the right hardware and configured for me with a pretty easy to follow walk-through. Testing was a barking sound.

Good doggy

Sound became functional with gxine player and my copy of "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" was working. However as I hardly understand any Japanese I need the subtitles to work! I'm sure a little clicking here and there should get this working

Firefox is preinstalled on this distro and it works fine. A trip to the You Tube site and a test run of the first video I clicked on worked. With Firefox and Youtube running there is 120 mb of RAM usage on my R52. Webpage font rendering are okay. Not as horrible as some experiences I had with Ubuntu (ie. large fonts and an ugly choice for font type)

A pretty basic test of what I needed and what is normal gave me a top RAM reading of 190 mb. That was with Firefox open and gxine running. This is from a LiveCD so the results should be different when installed to the hard drive. Abiword, GIMP, Gnumetric spreadsheets, and some nice little games are also preinstalled. There's more but I've since logged off and am charging my R52's battery now. Also as on any new OS figuring out the filing system is a little learning experience. The quickest way I found is using the icon on the dock. The dock is nice but there has to be a way to keep it on bottom of opened programs. The four desktop switching is done by moving the cursor to the edge of the screen.

Not good.

Again a couple of things to tweak and I'm sure the experience will be fine.

So these are my initial observations of this OS. Seems pretty fluid and cohesive. It is a 175.3mb iso file. May work on that 600X

We'll find out soon!

Here is the link.

MacPup

Yeah, I have a MacPup CD that I carry in my bag almost everywhere I go. I have never used the distro on a regular basis, but it is kind of cool. If you have 256MB or more of RAM the OS will run totally in RAM which makes it a pretty fast puppy on even older hardware. You can even to a frugal install to a hard drive that has another OS on it without changing the partitions.

Thanks for pointing this one out. I am big fan of small distro's and this one seems to be right up my alley. While downloading it I went ahead and watched their demo video on youtube and let me tell you I am pretty impressed with what I saw.

I'm going to try it out in virtualbox under Vista first to get a feel for it and if deemed worthy, I will repartition my HD so it can be perma-installed.

The latest release of Ubuntu really turned me off to it and I was seriously considering installing Debian stable on my X41T but I'll check this one out and see how it works.

emeraldgirl08 wrote: I stumbled onto this distro and out of geeky curiosity downloaded it. I think it may be a derivative of PuppyGood doggy l]

Well darn it, now you've dragged me out into the Linux playground again!

After trying gazillions of Linux distros, I'm going to have to take a look at this one now.

I usually ditch a distro right away when it fails to find my wireless. That's the first thing I check, and the setup is usually hopelessly complex, or non existent.

So, thanks for the tip, sounds like more fun.

Man this thing runs super fast in a VM with 512MB of RAM.

I think I will be installing this one.

Does sound work after suspend/resume on your 600X? I've always had a problem with that. I thought it was due to finally be fixed.

whizkid wrote:Does sound work after suspend/resume on your 600X? I've always had a problem with that. I thought it was due to finally be fixed.

If this is for the Macpup OS I have not installed it. I have old Windows 98 on my Dad's 600X. I'm still working that out and am trying to figure out how to get his wireless connected

Embarrassingly I have not used Windows 98 before. It's interface is something that I'll have to get used to. It responds surprisingly well however but I think the problem may be the wireless card. It is an Intel 2100 which works fine with Xp Pro and Linux using WPA-PSK but I don't know if Windows 98 wants to go cooperate with the card There are no errors but my hunch is there was no WPA-PSK supplicant back when this OS was mainstream therefore it does not know what to do with that encrypted signal.