I'm typing this from Puppy running on a 1999 laptop. I actually made this old heap of junk useful.
(This is not an April Fool's joke. I promise.)
System specs & info...
Dell Latitude D300XT
300 MHz Pentium II CPU
Intel 440BX Chipset
128 MB RAM (+384 MB swap partition)
20gb Fujitsu MHT2020A IDE Hard Drive
CD-RW/DVD-ROM "Combo Drive"
...at least the screen is XGA (1024x768)...
This system is still a One Task Harry... running the browser and anything else at the same time slows it down big time.
Keep in mind that the system is remarkably limited. The only instruction set extensions the CPU has are... MMX. I don't get SSE with this system, let alone SSE2. (SSE came out with the Katmai-core [first-generation] Pentium III, and SSE2 with the Willamette-core [first generation] Pentium 4's). On top of that, the CPU runs at a hair under a third of a gigahertz -- 29.3% of 1024 MHz (remember, everything in computers is powers of two, unless you're a hard drive manufacturer). The RAM this thing uses is of a kind that is no longer made to the best of my knowledge; it's called "EDO" (extended data output) RAM. In this system it runs at all of 66 MHz. Whoo. Since that RAM is now somewhat rare, it's also somewhat expensive. I've got half what this system can take, maximum, in it right now. (You read that correctly, it maxes out at a quarter of a gig of RAM -- 256 MB.) It's what I could justify paying for...
Oh yeah, and the spacebar isgimpy sometimes. LOL. (I don't trust the battery, either.)
I have put many different Pups on this computer and they all bog it down to bits. TurboPup XTreme runs okayish... but I can't stand the limits it imposes aesthetically. ClassicPup is obnoxiously slow. AnitaOS won't boot. Anything else is either really dang slow, really dang old, or (more likely) both.
In addition, this Dell uses a weird graphics chip (NeoMagic 2160B + 2 MB VRAM stolen out of the main system RAM) that plays tricks with the screen (dang thing always reports itself as 800x600, ugh) and a very very odd ISA audio controller (Crystal 4237B) that has not functioned in Puppy since somewhere around Pup412. Not kidding -- in later versions of Puppy, the driver changed in some way and so Puppy is one mute dog.
Until now.
Inspired by a post of rokytnji's -- I installed Precise 571 Retro from CD. Frugal install to the hard drive. Added Slimboat (I actually wanted to try SlimJet -- ah, but it requires SSE2, oh well), Claws Mail, and SoftMaker FreeOffice 2012. It works!
Hurdles --
(1) Precise did not want to save session. (By which I mean it utterly refused.) Workaround: use SimplePupSave to create an empty savefile, and patch init to force PupMode 13 so that the savefile would always be used. (Remember to disable the 30min save-to-ram bit -- having that there really bogs things down when it kicks in!)
(2) Screen reports itself as 800x600 and consequently looks truly horrible -- everything is badly pixellated and the screen doesn't actually fill the screen. Fix: edit xorg.conf to reflect the fact that the monitor is a 1024x768 setup with 16 bit color depth. Delete all xorg.conf versions other than the one specifically named xorg.conf. (For example, xorg.conf0 has to go.) Then, and only then, restart X (either Menu > Shutdown > Restart X or CTRL+ALT+BKSP and 'xwin' [ENTER] at the prompt). That *will* fix the screen.
(3) Audio. For once, not much to do here! Although I should note -- the audio playback checker in the Sound Wizard (initial dialog from Menu > Setup > ALSA Sound Wizard) does NOT work, but playback through eg pMusic does.
(4) It's old and slow. Nothing fixable here
![Razz :P](./images/smilies/icon_razz.gif)
This system runs acceptably as a light web-browsing system (I have not gone to YouTube with this heap yet! that's next...), and would be almost perfect, if not actually perfect, for someone who needed a super cheap word processor with limited Web/email capabilities. It's also eco-friendly, since it's not rotting in a landfill or being reduced to valuable periodic elements and slag in some rural Chinese town by chemicals that would make an EPA investigator barf, faint, and/or commit suicide.
So there you have it. In conclusion, get off my lawn
![Razz :P](./images/smilies/icon_razz.gif)