Recently in Puppy Category

It's been many months since I last used Puppy Linux. I bet more than a year has passed since I seriously ran Puppy, still one of the best Unix-like distributions/projects for older, underpowered computers.

I decided tonight to break out the 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt (233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor, 144 MB RAM), which has OpenBSD 4.2 on the 3 GB hard drive (yes, I know 4.5 is out, and yes I do have the CD set, and yes, I'll probably reinstall) and two pup_save files in its 0.5 GB Linux partition.

During my extensive tests of operating systems on this platform, I ended up running the aforementioned OpenBSD 4.2 and Puppy 2.13, the latter from live CD.

I'm in Puppy 2.13 right now. I know it's old. I know Puppy 4.something is out now and that the project is in some sort of turmoil.

I decided to get deeper into Puppy 4.1.2 on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop.

I'm always looking for platforms on which I can do all my Daily News-related work, which means I need the Java runtime and Flash video.

Well, there is a Java package for Puppy. I'm surprised Java isn't part of the base install, but it appears not. I installed the package, and I even brought in the Opera Web browser to augment Seamonkey.

Both browsers are performing well, but for some reason Flash doesn't work in either. I distinctly remember Flash working in all of the Puppy 2 and 3 releases I've used previously, and now I'm left wondering what happened.

Also, Java did NOT work in either browser, so easy use of the LogMeIn remote-desktop service is not something happening in Puppy. I'm getting to the point where I'll need to bit the proverbial bullet and install Java from source in OpenBSD on this laptop so I can get that functionality. I can live without Flash (and the Flash I do have in i386 OpenBSD via Opera is marginal at best; it works in YouTube but not in Brightcove). I can sort of live without Java.

But it's better for the work that I do to have both of these things working well.

Also, I was surprised to see not Pidgin or Gaim as the IM client in Puppy but something I'd never heard of. Pidgin is available as a package, so that's not such a problem.

The end result is that while Puppy 4.1.2. runs quite well at first blush, I need to look closer at why I was so unsuccessful at getting Flash and Java to work. It should be easier than this.

And while Flash remains somewhat of a problem in OpenBSD (I probably need to be running an up-to-date Linux such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Slackware, Zenwalk ... take your pick) I'll probably stick with it for the time being as my primary OS.

As of today, here are all the machines I use and what they run:

At the office:

Work box:
Dell Optiplex GX520
Pentium 4 (3 GHz)
512 MB RAM
Windows XP SP2

The Debian Mac:
Power Macintosh G4
466MHz single PowerPC processor
384 MB RAM
Debian Etch

The Self-Reliant Thin Client:
Maxspeed Maxterm 5300(??) thin client
VIA C3 Samuel (1 GHz, running at 500 MHz for some reason)
256 MB RAM
8 GB Transcend Compact Flash module as boot drive
1 GB USB flash drive for backup
Debian Etch

At home:

iBook G4
1 GHz CPU
384 MB RAM
120 GB Fujitsu hard drive (replaced by me in a 3-hour odyssey)
OS X 10.3

This Old PC:
Pentium II MMX (333 MHz)
256 MB RAM
10 GB hard drive
Windows 2000 (I haven't booted this or connected it to the Internet in over a year)

The $0 Laptop:
Gateway Solo 1450
Mobile Celeron (1.3 GHz)
1 GB RAM
30 GB Toshiba hard drive
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Debian Lenny, Puppy 3.01

The $15 Laptop:
Compaq Armada 7770dmt
Pentium II MMX (233 MHz)
144 MB RAM
3 GB IBM hard drive
OpenBSD 4.2

I have quite a few machines in various states of repair that I might resurrect over the next year if and when I get the time, but this is what I have right now. With the exception of the white-box This Old PC, all of these get fairly regular use.

I have my Self-Reliant Thin Client running Debian Etch turned on all of the time. I haven't been able to find power-usage specs for the Maxspeed Maxterm (it could be a 5300, but there are no model numbers on the box), but with no moving parts, a Mini-ITX-size motherboard, Mini-ITX-type fanless power supply and fanless VIA C3 Samuel CPU, as well as non-working case fan (except when tilting said case at a 45-degree angle) and a Compact Flash chip instead of a spinning hard drive and no optical drive, the thing is totally silent and must be fairly sparing on electricity use.

I don't think I even moved the mouse yesterday, but today when I brought it out of screen-saver mode, there were three updates to Debian Etch:

dbus
dbus-1-utils
libdbus-1-3

Thus far, the 8 GB Transcend Ultra Speed 133x Compact Flash is performing quite well, meaning it hasn't died.

The last time I killed a CF chip, a 1 GB Transcend, I think the premature death occurred due to inserting or removing the module while it was mounted.

Since in this case I have the Self-Reliant Thin Client sealed, that CF chip is staying in there and won't be plugged and unplugged all that often.

That might stay true, but I want to get more CF chips and load different OSes on them. Then I could remove the cover to the CF-to-IDE board in the thin client and pop in and out different CF cards with totally different configurations.

Some of the CFs I'd want to do:

• Puppy Linux (could be a much smaller CF due to the nature of the Puppy distro and its "frugal" install)
• OpenBSD (I'm anxious to see how easy/difficult it would be to install to CF)
• Wolvix (which also offers a "frugal" install, though I'd chose a "traditional" hard drive install so I could use slapt-get/Gslapt to update the box)

Not having an optical drive hooked up makes the "preparation" of CF cards on the Self-Reliant Thin Client difficult. To install a new OS, I'd have to:

• Remove eight screws to open the case
• Remove the CF card cover
• Remove current CF card and plug in new one
• Unplug the CF board's IDE cable from both the CF board and the motherboard
• Plug in a standard IDE hard-drive cable into the CF board on one end, the motherboard on the other
• Plug CD-ROM drive into "middle" of IDE cable
• Plug hard-drive-style power cable (the thin client has one, even though it doesn't need it for its intended purpose)
• Install new distro (and probably do more than one so I don't have to repeat this procedure)
• Test new distro
• Remove IDE hard drive cable
• Plug CF board's IDE cable into CF board and motherboard
• Replace case cover

I could leave the CF board/adapter's cover off if I wanted to do a lot of swapping of CF cards. It would be a very easy plug-and-play way to swap distros, that's for sure.

And I could keep the current 1 GB USB flash drive plugged in for backups of the various systems. That would also facilitate file-sharing between the OSes on the multiple CF cards.

Not that anything approaching brain-surgery-level thinking was in any way involved here, but I figured out why and how it's easy to get paragraphs to automatically indent when writing in the Geany text editor.

First of all, it's not called automatic tabbing or paragraph inentation. The correct term for what I'm enjoying so much is auto-indentation and it can be turned on and off under the Document menu in Geany. The defaults for auto-indentation can also be set in the Edit menu under Preferences--Editor.

When writing for print, where I don't need — and can't stand — having two returns between paragraphs. After transferring the file from this laptop to my newspaper's print publishing system, those double-returns demand that I delete one of them. That's because in most non-Web publishing, indented first lines make paragraphs distinct from one another, not extra linefeeds.

So having the indents on the first line of every paragraph helps me seen where each paragraph begins.

I know that programmers use indents to help structure their code. But when something so right for coding in C also helps hacks like me, making traditional word processing applications less needed, everybody wins.

(This post was originally written on May 22, 2008; since that time, I've added the RAM, and it does indeed make a difference. It's still not easy to live with 144 MB of RAM and 233 MHz of CPU, but it's easier than having less than half of that M. What I can say is that 500 MHz of CPU and 256 MB of RAM is positively picnic-ish. Also, I finally did the OpenBSD 4.2-to-4.3 upgrade on the VIA box. It wasn't easy, but I did get it done.)

If the question is "how low can you go" in terms of computer memory, it's all about applications.

If you stayed in the Linux console and never ran X, just about anybody could be happy with 32 MB of RAM. It might be hard to actually run Linux or a BSD in 16 MB, but I've heard of Linux distributions that will do it, Damn Small Linux, Tom's RtBt (is that the right spelling?) and DeLi Linux among them.

But as much as the hard-core users talk about how they stay at the command line all the time, it's hard to get much done strictly in a console when you're a regular person. Sure you can use Lynx for text-only Web browsing, you can set up Mutt (and Postfix/Sendmail/msmtp/esmtp, Procmail and whatever other helper apps are needed) with highly customized configuration files designed to handle and filter multiple mail accounts, use Vi or Emacs for text editing and all that.

But the bottom line for me is that I need a Web browser. A "real" Web browser, something that works with Movable Type and Google Docs, and that pretty much means Firefox or some Iceweaselish derivative.

I don't tend to use OpenOffice very much (although it runs better in Debian with 64 MB that you'd think), I barely even use AbiWord these days. I'm not saying that I won't need OpenOffice in the future, but at present I'm most comfortable using various X text editors, including Geany in most Linuxes and BSDs, Gedit when I'm in GNOME, and Google Docs half the time just for the easy portability of my copy.

And while Geany doesn't load super quickly from a "traditionally" installed distribution (but is quite quick when loaded into memory as it is in Puppy Linux, once it's loaded it runs very well indeed.

And the Dillo Web browser -- which looks better in its OpenBSD incarnation than it does anywhere else -- performs quite well in 64 MB of RAM. The only problem is that Dillo can't do everything I need to do on the Web. At least the Dillo in Puppy and DSL has https support. That's not turned on in OpenBSD, and the app needs to be recompiled to add it. I can manage to turn on cookies in OpenBSD, which helps me with some sites, but for anything remotely complicated, Firefox is essential.

And while Firefox will run in 64 MB of RAM, it does so very poorly. There just isn't enough memory to keep the program from swapping to the drive incessantly whenever doing just about anything.

In this very 64 MB, I've run just about everything that will load on this Compaq laptop: Puppy, DSL, Debian (the Xfce install, plus a "standard" install with Fluxbox), Slackware (without KDE) and OpenBSD.

Truth be told, Almost all of these OSes run just about the same. Damn Small Linux has a bit of an edge, and if DSL 4.3 ran as well as 4.0, its inclusion of Firefox 2 would put it over the top. As it is, I've lost my desktop wallpaper, and I can't figure out how to display the menu in Fluxbox (even though I prefer to run JWM).

Puppy definitely needs more memory, especially to run the Mozilla-derived Seamonkey Web suite.

Debian Etch was OK. While the Xfce install is odd in many ways, as I say, I was surprised to see OpenOffice run at all -- and not too badly at that. Iceweasel was, again, an exercise in frustration. But Debian remains a distinct possibility for this machine.

It's main OS for awhile has been OpenBSD, with a partition set aside for the Linux files generated by the Puppy and DSL live CDs.

OpenBSD runs pretty well, but as I said, Firefox remains an issue.

The question: Will things improve with the boost of RAM from 64 MB to the Compaq Armada 7770dmt's maximum 144 MB? From my past experience, I know that Puppy can run in 128 MB if you have swap space, and DSL is certainly comfortable with 128 MB.

To answer the question, I could reduce the memory in my Via test box from 256 MB to 128 MB and see how OpenBSD (now version 4.3) runs in that configuration. But I'd have to pull the cover from my converted thin client and find a 128 MB SIMM. I've probably got one ... somewhere.

Better to just wait for my Compaq memory to come in the mail (luckily it's cheap).

I've know for awhile that 256 MB is a significant sweet spot for Linux, but I'd love for 144 MB to be just sweet enough to give this laptop a new lease on open-source life.

And while I managed to upgrade my VIA box from OpenBSD 4.2 to 4.3, it takes a lot more work than a simple apt-get, and I'm reluctant to do it

I've been able to have OpenBSD's /etc/fstab automatically mount the ext2 filesystem on my Compaq Armada 7770dmt's hard drive with no difficulty lately, but every couple of days or so I get a message while booting OpenBSD that says the Linux filesystem is not clean and that I should run fsck on it.

I then boot Puppy Linux 2.13, run e2fsck on the partition, the errors are cleared up, and all is well until a few more days pass.

I haven't lost any data, but I'm going to do a few experiments.

First, I added noauto to the /etc/fstab line so the Linux filesystem will not be automatically mounted. Then I'm going to run Puppy for a few days and check the filesystem with e2fsck.

It could be that the errors are coming from Puppy alone. I think that's unlikely, but it is a possibility.

Then I'll experiment with manually mounting (with mount) and unmounting (with umount) the Linux filesystem while in OpenBSD.

That way I can see whether or not automounting and unmounting the ext2 filesystem in OpenBSD is what's causing the problem.

Hours later: Looks like OpenBSD is NOT responsible. I ran Puppy totally in RAM (using the puppy pfix=ram boot parameter), than ran e2fsck to clean up the filesystem on my ext2 partition. Then I ran Puppy the "normal" way, in which the system mounts the partition to access the pup_save file. I then rebooted and once again ran Puppy without mounting the partition. At no time did I boot OpenBSD or mount the filesystem in that OS.

Once I was back in Puppy, running pfix=ram to keep the partition unmounted, I ran e2fsck and got this message:

/dev/hda3 was not cleanly unmounted, check forced.

I had one more test to do.

Now that I had run e2fsck on the ext2 filesystem, I needed to boot OpenBSD, mount the filesystem, write a file to it, then unmount it. After that, it would be time to boot Puppy Linux again, using the pfix=ram boot parameter again so as not to mount the filesystem in Linux, and then run e2fsck again to check the filesystem and see if mounting, writing to and then unmounting it caused any errors.

So I booted into OpenBSD 4.2, mounted the ext2 filesystem, modified a few files, added a few, then unmounted it. I rebooted and did the same thing again.

Then I booted into Puppy, again with the pfix=ram boot parameter so as not to mount the Linux partition.

I ran e2fsck. After two boots of OpenBSD, during which I modified files in the Linux filesystem both times, there were no errors in the ext2 filesystem.

I said it was "unlikely," but in fact it's Puppy Linux, NOT OpenBSD that is not "cleanly" unmounting the Linux filesystem. I truly expected it to be the other way around.

I'll have to test this with Damn Small Linux, Wolvix and maybe even Slitaz to see if this is a Linux problem, or just a Puppy (or Puppy 2.13, to be more specific) problem. But right now, OpenBSD has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Mounting the filesystem in:

Damn Small Linux 4.3 caused no errors

I've had a bit of a difficult time with my OpenBSD 4.2 installation on the $15 Laptop — a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 144 MB RAM, a 233 MHz Pentium II CPU and 3 GB hard drive. I use PCMCIA cards for networking, an Orinoco WaveLAN Silver for 802.11b wireless and a TRENDnet TE-100PCBUSR 10/100mbps for wired Ethernet.

Since I upgraded the memory from 64 MB to the 144 MB maximum for this machine, things are running much, much better.

But I'm running out of room in the /usr partition. I'm not sure whether or not OpenBSD can be installed in a single partition, but since the install FAQ tells you to set up separate partitions for everything, that's what I did.

On this drive, I set aside about 600 MB for Linux filesystems to create swap and a place to store files for Puppy Linux, leaving 2.4 GB for OpenBSD.

At the end of the OpenBSD partitioning, I had 1 GB for /usr, which is where applications are stored in the system.

For awhile things were going fine. I had our daughter's Gcompris, TuxPaint and Childsplay games on here, Firefox, the Geany text editor, plus a few console apps like nano, mc and mutt.

But it's not console apps that are taking up all the space.

I pulled the games and their libraries in order to fit the Opera Web browser and the Linux compatibility package needed to run it. That was the best thing I've done for this install since I did it. On this old hardware, the Linux build of Opera runs much faster than Firefox.

That speed really shows up when blogging with Movable Type. For some reason, even in Linux, scripts keep timing out in Firefox and the Mozilla-based Seamonkey. Now that I have Opera installed in both OpenBSD and Puppy 2.13, I'm a lot happier on this old laptop, which is about as challenged as it gets when it comes to old hardware working with modern operating systems and applications.

Anyhow, I needed to do some more "formatted" writing, and I did have the Ted word processor installed. But Ted isn't great when it comes to centering type, print previews or generating PDF output.

I needed Abiword. But I didn't have enough space.

The only thing big enough: Firefox.

Yep, I got rid of Firefox. One thing about the OpenBSD package manager that isn't helping me out here is that when you install a package, all the dependencies are checked, and the additional packages needed are downloaded and installed. But when you remove a package, the system doesn't check its dependencies for whether or not they're still needed by other applications in the system.

I'm sure there's a reason for this, and there's probably even a way around it (like the great deborphan app that I use in Debian), but I know nothing about it.

Anyhow, I managed to get Abiword installed, and I have 500 MB left in my /usr partition. Unfortunately, the spell-check in Abiword doesn't work in the OpenBSD build. Abiword spell-check doesn't work in Puppy either.
The spell-check installs and works most of the time in Debian (especially when you install it with Aptitude and get all the packages you need, rather than with apt-get, where at least sometimes you don't).

I found an old OpenBSD mailing-list hack about how to fix Abiword's spell-checking capability, but it didn't have enough information, and it didn't look like it would work anyway.

But the good news is that with this amount of memory, Abiword 2.4.5 runs extremely well in OpenBSD 4.2. Additionally, for some reason the fonts in Abiword look better in OpenBSD than then do in most other Linux/Unix systems.

So now I have Abiword, Geany, Opera and the Dillo browser as my "main" applications on this system. I don't want to forget the Rox-filer file manager. I put that on the box awhile ago. I still need space to add the Flash plugin for Abiword, and Rox is a prime target for removal so I can get that space ... or the space to install Gaim/Pidgin for IM.

But I just can't do it. I've loved the Rox-filer ever since I first used it in Puppy, and I just can't give it up.

I probably should. I removed mc (Midnight Commander) for space reasons, even though it probably doesn't take up all that much space, and since I had Rox. If mc didn't have problems with the function keys in the console (it misreads the keys for some reason), I'd be able to fit one more app in. (Note: mc works perfectly in an xterm window, just not in the console).

What I'm going to have to do eventually is reinstall OpenBSD. I need a bigger drive so I can have a big /usr partition, install everything I want on it, as well as have room for a full Linux install as well, something I could use in addition to Puppy.

So the OpenBSD install is really tight, in terms of space for applications, but it's working extremely well. I now have the ability to share files between OpenBSD and Linux via an ext2 partition, and that has added tremendous value to this laptop.

I could be using my Gateway laptop a lot more. It's got way better specs (1 GB RAM, 1.3 GHz CPU) and runs Linux way faster. But it isn't so hot with OpenBSD due to the noisy, uncontrollable-by-BSD CPU fan. And its PCMCIA slot still isn't fixed, so I can't run wireless with it.

The Compaq may be underpowered, but it has a very clear, very bright screen, an excellent keyboard, working wireless, no ACPI issues (since it has no ACPI), and there's just something about getting it to work and keeping it working that I find compelling.

And there's also something about OpenBSD that keeps me coming back to it, even on the desktop.

I've been trying to mount a Linux filesystem in OpenBSD 4.2 for awhile, and finally I figured out how to do it (and do it automatically at boot) without screwing up either my OpenBSD or Linux partitions.

I have a tutorial on this about 1/2 of the way done, but this was another situation where the excellent OpenBSD FAQ and man pages, as well as a couple of good general Linux/Unix online tutorials gave me all the help I needed. (I can never remember quite how to make chmod do what I want without looking it up.)

Since I installed OpenBSD on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt's hard drive without fully setting up the Linux partitions (all I have is swap and an ext2 partition for my live CD files), OpenBSD didn't know how to properly mount the ext2 partition.

Briefly, I needed to run fdisk in OpenBSD, transfer the Linux information to the OpenBSD disklabel, create a directory in which to mount the Linux filesystem, give the wheel group write access to that directory, then edit /etc/fstab to properly mount the ext2 filesystem at boot.

Once I was sure the Linux filesystem was properly mounting and was writable from OpenBSD, I booted Puppy Linux without mounting the partition and then ran e2fsck to clean up any errors (there were some).

Since then, the filesystem has been error-free, and I can easily exchange files between my OpenBSD and Linux installs on this laptop.

It's nice to solve a problem for a change.

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.

The OpenBSD system on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt) has a 3 GB hard drive mostly devoted to OpenBSD, with about 600 MB set aside for Linux, about 130 MB as Linux swap and the rest an ext2 filesystem on which I have my pup_save file for Puppy Linux and any other Linux files I've generated with other live CDs (Wolvix and Slitaz at the moment).

As I recall, I created the Linux partitions at one end of the drive and reserved the front for OpenBSD.

As a result, OpenBSD wrote its disklabel -- the system's guide to how the drive is partitioned -- to include one big Linux partition and not the separate swap and ext2 partitions I later created.

Check your disklabel this way (as root) (and with the name of your drive, mine being wd0):

# disklabel wd0

You should see any non-OpenBSD partitions at the end of the list.

You can edit the disklabel this way:

# disklabel -e wd0

This opens a file in vi (the default editor in OpenBSD, or whatever the $Editor variable is set to; I'd reset it to Nano if only I knew how).

I tried to modify the disklabel to recognize BOTH Linux partitions, but all I got were errors in both OpenBSD and when booting Puppy 2.13.

To figure out how to edit the disklabel, I ran the following command in OpenBSD:

# fdisk wd0

I figured that copying the "start" and "size" info into the disklabel would make my Linux partitions mountable in OpenBSD.

Nope.

I got some fsck errors when I booted Puppy. I fixed them by a) deleting and re-creating the Linux swap file and b) running Puppy in RAM (boot parameter: Puppy pfix=ram) and running e2fsck on my ext2 partition.

I still don't have my Linux filesystem mountable in OpenBSD, but I didn't lose any files or filesystems either.

Clearly I need to figure out how to take the information from fdisk and properly write it in the disklabel.

I'm just glad (and very much amazed) that I didn't lose anything. It's a tribute of sorts to the OpenBSD system and documentation that I managed not to totally kill the whole installation.

I know that application startup time isn't everything. But it's definitely something.

Here are the numbers for Puppy 2.13 and OpenBSD 4.2 on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 144 MB RAM):

OpenBSD
Firefox 2.0.0.6: 120 seconds
Opera 9.22: 37 seconds

Puppy Linux 2.13
Seamonkey (Mozilla-based): 30 seconds
Opera 9.02: 34 seconds

Analysis: Firefox/Mozilla is a fairly heavy application, but the Seamonkey version of Mozilla does quite well in Puppy, where it beats Opera slightly when it comes to start time.

But in OpenBSD, Opera is a standout for some reason, starting in about a third of the time that Firefox takes to start. Opera works with Movable Type much better in OpenBSD, with no stalled-script messages.

Question: Is there any way to run Mozilla browser code faster than Firefox? I need to test Firefox in Puppy (and, if I had the space, Seamonkey in OpenBSD) to fill out the data.

Conclusion: Application startup and response time is extremely critical with older machines. Since most of my computing time is spent in Web browsers, I welcome the speed and functionality of Opera in OpenBSD; it has pretty much given this OS a proverbial "new lease on life."

You might ask why I'm spending so much time figuring out how to best configure a Compaq Armada 7770dmt — a laptop with an ancient 233MHz Pentium II MMX processor, feeble 144MB of RAM and smallish 3GB hard drive.

For one thing, I almost never abandon a machine that can be used. And this one definitely can be.

Plus, I like the Compaq. It has a nice screen and keyboard, I like the fact that its power supply is totally contained in the laptop case. The thing's pretty solid.

And I remember my long search for a laptop. Just about everything I saw on the used market was overpriced and lacking essential parts (hard drive, power brick, CD drive, memory ...) but still selling for too much.

When I found this laptop for $15 and only had to add a CD-ROM drive that cost an additional $10 and a WiFi card I already had, I was hooked.

The build quality of this 1999 Compaq is much better than my 2002 Gateway, and I expect the Gateway to die long before the Compaq.

And with Linux, I've learned that a nearly 10-year-old PC can be quite usable. That means This Old PC, with a faster Pentium II processor (333MHz), more RAM (256MB) and which uses cheaper desktop IDE drives — and which at 11 years old is even longer in the tooth than the Compaq — is also still quite usable.

The fact that I searched long and hard for one laptop, came up with nothing from Craigslist and eBay, but then ended up with two laptops within months, getting each for next to nothing, was an opportunity to learn about hardware, software and what it takes to get things done in a variety of operating systems (I've run many versions of Linux, plus FreeBSD — including offshoots DesktopBSD and PC-BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, a couple of projects based on OpenSolaris, and yes, even Windows).

Even if I had $500 or so to buy new laptops every couple of years — and believe me, I don't, there's a lot of nobility, fun and plain old value in keeping these PCs running. And running well.

I guess you could call it a hobby.

I could do a lot worse, no?

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls

I tested quite a few versions of Puppy Linux in recent days on my 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt. The bad news is that version 3.01 wouldn't configure X properly. Any attempts to do so and then start X crashed the box.

The other bad news is that while Puppy 4.00 loads fine and runs fine, for some reason the load time for Abiword went from 8 to 10 seconds in previous Puppy builds to 30 seconds. That's quite a rollback. On a more positive note, start times for Seamonkey were about the same.

I don't really use Abiword all that much, but that kind of performance hit is disturbing. It could be due to the new way packages are being compiled for Puppy but is more likely something specific to Abiword, since Seamonkey appears to be unaffected.

I tried Puppy 2.17 just to see how encryption worked. It did fine. And I discovered that in the case of multiple pup_save files on a single system, the ones not in use during the current boot can easily be opened in Puppy.

One bone (pun there, intended or not) I have to pick with newer versions of Puppy Linux is the lack of the Dillo browser. I use it quite a bit. I could still add it from packages, I suppose (and I definitely will), and if the slowness of Abiword wasn't bothering me so much in Puppy 4.00, I'd be using it right now.

As it is, I will continue testing, but for now Puppy 2.13 (hopefully with Firefox added for Google Gears compatibility) remains the front-running distro for the Compaq, especially if I'm able to remove the hard drive and replace it with a Compact Flash module and CF-to-IDE adapter card.

The fact that I can move files from one pup_save to another, providing that the non-mounted one is unencrypted, gives me more flexibility as far as upgrading from one Puppy system to another and creating a new, encrypted pup_save instead of using an old, unencrypted one.

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

As I say in a previous post on this very topic, there are many reasons to choose Puppy Linux as the primary OS on the nearly 10-year-old Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop.

For one thing, Puppy is ideal — and explicitely designed — to run as a live CD or easily upgraded frugal install, the latter either on a traditional hard-disk drive or a Compact Flash memory card mounted in a CF-to-IDE adapter inside the Compaq's hard-drive caddy.

With recent versions of Puppy (2.17 onward, I believe) the ability to encrypt the pup_save file that holds all of the user's files and configurations adds both a needed measure of security to a laptop installation as well as providing an equally easy way to back up the entire system by copying a single large file to just about any storage medium, from USB flash drive to CD-RW to hard disks in formats ranging from old-school FAT to NTFS to Linux's many types of filesystems.

Also in Puppy's favor is that recent versions have heightened compatibility with Slackware 12 packages, promising a greater number of sources for additional applications, should I ever want or need to add anything beyond what Puppy and its own repositories already provide.

To recap, in the time I've had the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop (again, with a 233MHz Pentium II MMX processor), I've taken it's RAM from 64MB to the maximum of 144MB, kept the original IBM-made 3GB hard drive, and run the following operating systems:

• Debian Etch "standard," with X and Fluxbox added
• Debian Etch Xfce desktop install
• Slackware 12 without KDE
• Puppy Linux 2.13
• Damn Small Linux 4.0, 4.3 and 4.4
• OpenBSD 4.2
• Wolvix Cub 1.1.0

Truth be told, I liked every one of these installs to one degree or another. While Slackware (installing without KDE but with everything else) took up too much space and offered too few applications I wanted, it still ran great.

Rolling my own X installation into Debian's "standard" install was an excellent exercise, but I just didn't have the expertise to really build it out. The Debian Xfce install was nice, but somewhat curious; all of the Debian desktop installs, even KDE, feature OpenOffice. Surprisingly, OO ran fairly well in 64MB of RAM and 233MHz of CPU. Strange, however, was the lack of GUI package management in the Xfce install. It did get me using Aptitude, so there was nothing lost there, but I got the feeling that Debian's Xfce just didn't offer what I wanted.

However, with Aptitude, Abiword actually installs the dictionary that makes spell-check work. At last look, neither Puppy nor OpenBSD do that.

I continue to enjoy Damn Small Linux, but the most recent versions just don't run as well as they should on this laptop. And little things like having Firefox renamed Bon Echo (why??) made it difficult to use Google Docs with Gears, which is one of the things I want to be doing fairly intensively, made DSL fall behind Puppy in the running.

Puppy has a great selection of apps, is fairly easy to configure, extremely familiar to me and runs great on this hardware. I find myself using this live CD more and more of the time.

Much of my feeling for 2.13 over other versions of Puppy is nostalgic. I first encountered Puppy with this very release, and most likely a simple move of the cute 2.13 desktop wallpaper to a newer version of Puppy would make me extremely happy. The fact that everything in 2.13 continues to work flawlessly, however, is a strong testament to how very well Puppy is put together. I probably will test and subsequently adopt a much newer version of Puppy for use on this laptop, if for no other reason than to use the encrypted-pup_save feature that will greatly add to the security of my data, since laptops — even ones well past their prime — have a way of falling into the wrong hands.

OpenBSD doesn't install with as anywhere near as many GUI features as ... any Linux distribution. Not that any of the BSD projects can't be configured to be as full-featured as any equivalent Linux distribution. It just takes time and effort. With a faster processor and a bit more memory, I'd really consider running OpenBSD as the primary distro on this laptop. On the other hand, hardware detection in OpenBSD excellent. It remains the only operating system to correctly auto-configure sound on this Compaq.

OpenBSD has well over 4,000 precompiled binary packages for i386 and even more software available through ports. It offers fewer packages than Debian or Ubuntu but way more than Slackware. And with the quality of the packages being so high and the tools used to manage them equally high in quality, OpenBSD remains an attractive alternative.

But again, Linux is just that much easier to use on the desktop. OpenBSD is no speed demon in X, and speed is more important when you're running ancient hardware than it is when you have, say, a PC from the past five years at your disposal.

And with OpenBSD, things like Adobe Flash are hard to deal with. And I don't think Google Gears will ever run in OpenBSD. I could be wrong on both counts (since OpenBSD can run Linux apps), but I do know that both are easier to do in Linux.

A bigger drive that could multiboot Debian, Wolvix and OpenBSD, with Puppy running either in a frugal install or as a live CD, is one way to go.

But running only one or two of these systems at a time seems to be more realistic, manageable and ... sane. Using multiple hard drives, like I do with my test box, is another way to go. That way the pain of dual-booting is avoided, as is the tedium of continual reinstalls.

Since OpenBSD offers much of the software I want and is an intriguing diversion from Linux, I could 'll probably leave it on the drive for the near future. In my 500MB or so Linux partition, I will probably grow my pup_save file and update Puppy. Now that I have Firefox 2 running on one of my other Puppy installs, I'll probably begin doing the same with this laptop, and that way I'll be able to use Google Docs with Gears. I can probably even figure out how to make Gears work with Seamonkey, but it's not imperative.

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")