Puppy Linux barks

I tried opening a terminal window and using alsamixer, and sure enough, the mono sound was muted, so I unmuted and seconds later was enjoying a live stream from the BBC World Service via Gxine.

So I can now get sound in just about every live-CD Linux I've tried. I can't remember whether or not I did this sound hack with Knoppix, but I plan to try it for sure.

I looked into "solid state" disk drives, which Tiger Direct does sell, and IDE-to-Compact Flash adapters, which it does not. I finally found the adapters at a price that wouldn't kill me via Froogle (I'll supply the link later). The solid-state drives -- used in a lot of military applications where the jostling and other sundry sand and crap is adverse to a regular, spinning hard drive -- are minimum of $100 for a 4 GB model.

I'm going to opt for the IDE-to-CF adapter, which goes for between $10 and $20, with shipping all over the map, and a 2 GB 80x CF card. That should run me a total of about $30, and I can have a bootable CF-based hard drive to pop into This Old PC.

Back to the Linuxes. If I can get sound from This Old PC -- the Pentium II MMX 333 MHz ... and then wireless (almost too much to ask at this point) I will have accomplished my basic goals with Linux.

See, I set the bar low ...