Place your Image/Text Ad here with a link back to your site for only $10.00US per month. Your Ad will appear on every news/review page. Just click on the Add to Cart to pay through PayPal and decide on how long to run your ad and we'll contact you. If you have questions just send a message.
Thoughts: Puppy Linux 4.3 on Older Laptop
Overview:
I have used Linux for many years. I use it on extremely fast machines and on some really slow ones. I am always encouraged when I test out a new release and find that it works on my older and much slower equipment. Puppy Linux 4.3 is just that. A stable Linux distribution that has all the tools to get that older machine running.
Puppy Linux 4.3
I have played with Puppy Linux before and have always found it well designed and smooth to install. The other day a friend gave me a call and was telling me that at our last LUG meeting ( PQLUG.ORG ) one of our members was trying to find a light weighted Linux that would work on her older Dell 5000 Laptop. Being that the meeting was a couple of days away, I thought I would give a test run of Puppy Linux 4.3 on my Dell 8100 Laptop.
My machine has the following specs:
Pentium III 866 Processor CD/DVD Drive 384 megs of PC133 RAM Hard Drive Size - Who cares only using 512 meg Puppy Save File sitting on a Fat16 Partition.
I downloaded the small ISO file of Puppy Linux 4.3 on another machine and made the CD. I already had my Dell 8100 Laptop set to look at the CD/DVD drive so booting up was no issues. After going through a couple of config screens that allowed me to choose my lang/Keyboard and timezone plus Video settings I was then sitting at a fully function Live CD desktop.
I use a wireless system in my home so I had to plug in my Dlink Air Plus DWL-650+ wireless network card. Puppy Linux did not recognize this so I had to go through the Network Control Panel. Puppy Linux makes this process very simple and if one reads all info provided they should have no issues getting there network card going. As I will mention later, The person with the Dell 5000 actually was using a USB Network Key and Puppy assigned it as wlan0 without any issues. I was not that lucky with my older DWL-650+ but by following the on screen menus it takes no time at all to get a wireless network card up and running.
When I first went through the network card setup it showed my network as eth0 which was the on board NIC so I had to load a module for my DWL-650+ to be seen by Puppy Linux 4.3. This card is old and it was configured to work on my XP system that sits on my Dell 8100 and this was a good thing. I had to use the NDISWrapper function that is built into Puppy Linux 4.3 and after going through a few menus and choosing the .INF file that was sitting on my XP partition I had a working wireless network system that was giving me the opportunity to browse the internet.
The desktop of Puppy Linux 4.3 has all the neccessary programs that you would need to browse the web, read email and compose a doc. What more does one want. If travelling the Wireless Control Panel is easy to use. Just click on scan and it searches out the available networks and tells you if encrypted or not. It is just that simple.
So we had our monthly pqlug.org meeting last night. So I brought the Dell 8100 to the meeting and showed everyone my running version of Puppy. We all decided that we were going to place it on the Dell 5000 so I just ejected the CD and away we went with the install. In about 5 minutes it was on her laptop and configured to work on the internet with a wireless USB key. All was well and she was very happy to have a light weighted Linux running on her older machine.
In conclusion Puppy Linux 4.3 works great! I am leaving the CD in my Dell 8100 and will be using it to browse the web and check my gmail account while I watch TV... :)
- Subscribe to RSS News Feed @ ReviewLinux.Com
