{"id":2261,"date":"2013-06-06T17:24:41","date_gmt":"2013-06-06T23:24:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=2261"},"modified":"2013-06-06T18:29:50","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T00:29:50","slug":"slacker-puppy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=2261","title":{"rendered":"Slacker Puppy"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my hobbies, I guess, is extending the usable lifespan of my first PC.\u00a0 This is a vintage 1998 Hewlett Packard Pavilion 8260 with maxed out RAM (384MB) and a Pentium II clocked at 266 MHz.\u00a0 It has run Windows 98 for most of its existence, and over the last half dozen years or so, I’ve installed some “lightweight” Linux distros on it too just to see how they shake out on that hardware.<\/p>\n

The first to be tried was Fluxbuntu<\/a>.\u00a0 Then Xubuntu, then LXDE on Xubuntu (before Lubuntu really existed).\u00a0 I also tried running Damn Small Linux<\/a> on that, but I couldn’t get a network connection to work so I didn’t bother with that.<\/p>\n

Lately, I had packed away that computer.\u00a0 But I brought it out again because I just can’t leave an old piece of tech alone.\u00a0 And I also needed an actual installation of Windows 98 for something.\u00a0 But I left it set up and decided to update my LXDE\/Xubuntu installation – which was Xubuntu 10.04.\u00a0 Well, Xubuntu 10.04 is no longer supported, so no more updates, no more repositories and no more networked package management.\u00a0 I have a snazzy little USB wireless adapter that I wanted to install drivers for, and that turned out to be impossible, so it was time to nuke and pave.<\/p>\n

So I got to thinking about lightweight distros again, and I immediately thought of Puppy Linux.\u00a0 I have come to love using Lucid Puppy<\/a> on my netbook, and it runs very smoothly and very fast off of its SD card.\u00a0 That’s one of Puppy’s strengths compared with other distros.<\/p>\n

So I downloaded another version of Puppy and gave that a try.\u00a0 This time I downloaded a version based on Slackware<\/a>, called Slacko.\u00a0 For those who don’t know, Slackware is the oldest Linux distribution that is still actively maintained.\u00a0 Actual Slackware is too hard for a guy like me to configure and use, but Puppy Linux does things the way I like – with English readable GUI elements.<\/p>\n

I first tried out Slacko<\/a> on a USB flash drive that I had decided to sacrifice.\u00a0 Protip: Don’t ever buy anything branded “Hipstreet” from Walmart.\u00a0 Fucking garbage.\u00a0 Anyway, I liked Slacko and found it to be even more appealing and polished than Lucid Puppy when I had first tried that.\u00a0 So I booted the HP8260 and began tinkering with the settings.<\/p>\n

I was relieved to see that Slacko detected my wireless USB adapter right away, and connecting was hassle free.\u00a0 Other setup options were easy to find and make, and very soon, I had things customized the way I wanted them.\u00a0 Now I was ready to install.<\/p>\n

Puppy has a “Universal Installer” which gives options for any kind of installation you could want.\u00a0 ALl the way from minimal (or Frugal) unstall to an SD card or flash drive to full install like a regular Linux distro on an internal or external HD, or even a floppy or a SCSI drive.<\/p>\n

So I clicked my way through and chose to install on the previously-formatted-for-Xubuntu 10GB hard drive.\u00a0 This took about 30 minutes, and oddly the screen showed no status message or window.\u00a0 And it’s a good thing I had the sense to know I needed to install the GRUB4DOS bootloader, because that wasn’t automatic too and I have two hard drives inside that machine.\u00a0 The first one contains Windows 98.<\/p>\n

I rebooted and waited.\u00a0 But something had gone wrong.\u00a0 I don’t remember what the specific error message was, but I googled it.\u00a0 And I found out that when Puppy installs itself to a hard drive partition, it doesn’t automatically reformat it first.\u00a0 So all of the old Xubuntu files were still on there and had fucked up the installation somehow.\u00a0 Great.<\/p>\n

So I rebooted and went through the installation process again.\u00a0 And this time before I installed, I used GParted to format that 10GB hard drive.\u00a0 That did the trick.\u00a0 Once I rebooted, I was met with a fresh installation of Slacko on the hard drive.\u00a0 And as I used it, I noticed right away how fast it operated compared to when I had run it off a CD before.\u00a0 And I can report that it is the fastest Linux distro that I have ever run on my first computer.<\/p>\n

So aside from a bit of confusion over whether the installer would reformat, It was a good experience.\u00a0 Were I ever to rely on that computer again for certain tasks, I dare say I would find it usable!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my hobbies, I guess, is extending the usable lifespan of my first PC.\u00a0 This is a vintage 1998 Hewlett Packard Pavilion 8260 with maxed out RAM (384MB) and a Pentium II clocked at 266 MHz.\u00a0 It has run Windows 98 for most of its existence, and over the last half dozen years or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,7,26,398],"tags":[348,434,470],"class_list":["post-2261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-linux","category-lxde","category-windows","category-xfce","tag-my-first-pc","tag-puppy-linux","tag-slackware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2261"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2263,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261\/revisions\/2263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}