X crashes $15 Laptop in Puppy Linux 3.01 -- so where do I turn?
My exhaustive (and exhausting) eight-part series on what OS to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 144 MB RAM, 3 GB hard drive) spent a good deal of time on how Puppy Linux represented the best combination of quickness and out-of-the-box features of any operating system for this old, underpowered hardware.
I based all of that on running Puppy 2.13. I managed to boot Puppy 4, but the relative slowness of Abiword to start had me pausing about an upgrade from 2.13.
I must've forgotten that I couldn't get X to work in Puppy 3.01 on the Compaq. I might be able to figure out the configuration later. Or I might not.
Sticking with Puppy 2.13 is a distinct possibility, as is going to a later build in the Puppy 2 series (probably 2.17) just to get some newer packages and, more importantly, the ability to encrypt my pup_save file.
Considering the possibility of upgrading to Puppy 4.00, a slow Abiword I can handle, especially because I learned something very helpful about the Geany text editor, at least the version in OpenBSD 4.2 (version 0.11) and not that in Puppy 2.13 (version 0.10). That "valuable" something (meaning valuable to me and my work and likely not to you or yours is this:
When you tab before beginning writing a paragraph, the build of Geany in OpenBSD (and likely in most Linux systems with updated packages) will automatically tab when you hit the return key to begin your next paragraph. That means not needing to continually hit the tab key to make my paragraphs look separate when NOT writing for the Web.
For the Web, there are usually two returns (or the <p> HTML code) between paragraphs. For print, the paragraphs don't have space between them and can only be told apart by their indents, something which I've been relying on word processing programs to do for me and which I now will be able to do in Geany.
The ability to create copy for the Web and for the Daily News print system with the same text editor, and to do it with a minimum of formatting, is a very good thing indeed.
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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 was catching up on my web comic reading when I came across this. It has nothing to do with this post and for that I apologize, but pretty much anyone who reads this blog will at least get this:
http://www.xkcd.com/424/
Did you try Slitaz? It seems to be as lightweight as it gets.
I run Damn Small Linux (DSL) on a lesser system than what you've described above.
Ed,
I've run Damn Small Linux quite a bit over the past couple of years. I tend to gravitate toward Puppy because it has more applications I want on the live CD. But DSL is still something I will be using. I still have a DSL save file on this laptop. I had a lot of luck with DSL 4.0, but versions after that have some problems with the window managers. I can't seem to get the desktop to display properly in JWM, and the menus don't work in Fluxbox. I will try again, but Puppy has been working pretty smoothly.
Still, I think DSL is an excellent system, and I have boundless admiration for Robert, the guy who puts it together.
Morton,
I've used Slitaz briefly, and I haven't seen a leaner, faster Linux live CD anywhere. The small size of the distro means there isn't much in the way of applications in the default configuration. The repository is growing, but I think the system overall needs to get a bit better before it can compete with the likes of Puppy and DSL.
One of the main reasons I use both Puppy and DSL as live CDs is that each has a very rich environment with lots of applications that I tend to need. That is true especially for Puppy, where I can get quite a bit of work done with the tools included.
But Slitaz is definitely a contender, and if you need a live CD for Web browsing and a few light editing tasks, it can be very useful.