Thin Puppy Torture Test -- Day 11
It's Day 11. That's how long Puppy Linux 2.14 has been running on the Thin Puppy. To recap, the Thin Puppy is a Maxspeed Maxterm thin client, with the internal CF card removed (and with the Puppy-loaded replacement since fried). It's based on a mini-ITX motherboard of undetermined origin, running a Via C3 Samuel 1 GHz processor, VT133 chipset, with what look like s proprietary (to Maxspeed) CF-to-IDE adapter and fanless power supply.
The box has a fan, but it only runs when the client is tilted about 70 or 80-degrees in either direction. Otherwise, the unusual heat sink on the CPU seems to be working. It has copper pipes going from the top of the CPU to additional heat sink material bolted to the metal case.
The box has 256 MB of PC133 RAM installed.
Since the CF card died, I hooked up a CD drive and loaded Puppy, then disconnected the drive and sealed up the case. So the Thin Puppy is running totally in RAM, with no boot device attached. I used to have a USB flash drive connected, but since then the MUT utility that mounts drives in Puppy has flaked out, and I can't mount anything, nor can I seem to kill out the processes that keep me from doing so.
But the Thin Puppy continues to run, and I have been using it heavily these past 11 days. It has given me a good appreciation of this minimal hardware platform and of Puppy Linux as an OS and distribution. I even gave away my Puppy 2.14 disc away since then to somebody who was interested in it. I'll have to burn a new one, although I've got a couple of 2.13 discs for booting my other computers.
Like I've said before, Puppy is the first Linux distro on which I've been able to configure EVERYTHING ... except wireless. But I think my $9 Airlink AWLH3026 wireless card from Fry's is cursed and won't run in any Linux distro.
But other than that, Puppy has been as good as ... yes, OS gold. It wasn't so good with 128 MB of RAM, but ever since I doubled that, it's been running great.
And I expect I'll eventually get a new CF card and turn the Thin Puppy off. But not yet.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
i have found ONE distro that this wireless card agrees with. it's PCLinuxOS. it's an OK distro...however, i'm thinking about slapping this airlink101 card from fry's in my wife's computer (running XP SP2) and getting a card that is more widely recognised. personally, i think the companies who manufacture these cards/devices should offer linux support.
anyhow, you can find pclinuxos @ www.pclinuxos.com and download the livecd there.