Why Somebody Still Use Old Puppy Version?

[Sage]

What I'm waiting for is the next killer version that I can burn onto a CD-R and use on the oldest junk, which accumulates at an alarming rate even during deep depressions. I guess this is more or less what Md is calling for. So far, contenders have been v1.0.8R1, MeanPup and v3.01.

Things went from bad to worse after that.

Now we're up to v4.x, rapidly approaching 100Mb .iso with resource demands ~256Mb - and a far greater selection of 'features' emerging daily which require ever greater patching & fixing way beyond the abilities of the majority of putative converts. Stop this mutt, I wanna get off.

Time to get a grip all you derivative-developers as our own Dear Leader has disappeared into the cosmos uttering coding instructions beyond the ken of mortals.

K.I.S.S. me? Hardly.....

[_MegadetH_]

@Bugman, it's nice to know from your experience there aren't slowdowns from 1.07 to 4.12. I'd like to try puppy 3.0 to better understand the differences with newer one. Anyway, do you have a full hd install or not?

full, both times

i cannot swear there is NO slowdown, but if there is i have not noticed it

i take that back--occasionally, if i have a zillion big things going on at once, a new app might open slowly, and i don't seem to remember that in 1.07

overall, nothing i can't live with

Ok, I should try older version to realize how they run on my pc. I'm not having problems with 4.12 but some apps such Gimp run slow on my pc. Anyway I can't complain too much Puppy gave new life to my Pentium 3
thanks

bon giorno

I'm guessing from your nick you might like the sort of windows games called 'shooters' , but since these are pretty much all about the candyeye&ear (and directX and lots of other differences in both soft-and-hardware) .. with some effort you could very likely get a bit of luck playing games on your system - try this thread for a flight sim that may get you into some fun without too much effort. There's lots of puplets and heaps of info and some users who take their fun seriously, but it can get technical to the point of strange and perhaps more learning than mindless fun with a joystick

GL&HF+yvw

Thanks I should try that game. I hope It's not very difficult as "flight simulator" for Win. There are too much buttons and commands for me

[ecomoney]

for older computers i would suggest 2.14r, this is a rivised and updated 2.14 with many of the new features from 3.x and 4.x "backported" to it. it can be downloaded [irl=http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=24574]here[/url]. 2.14r has support for .pet and the older .pup packages by default so a lot of programs will work on here also.

There were changes to the kernel made around the puppy 2.10 series that reportedly made a few models of computer non-bootable with puppy. If your going back here you may need a pre-210 puppy. It was also about this time that ISA sound card support was lamentably dropped. You may need this to get your sound working. Old laptops also used to have ISA sound cards built in (ESS Audiodrive etc).

Puppy 1.09ce was a superb community edition, but does need more RAM than most puppies because it included firefox (i.e. more than 128mb to run in RAM).

If you want a pre-built and pre-tested puppy linux, with a great many packages pre-installed and configured for you, you may wish to give Ecopup a try. Its based on 2.15ce so has good support for old hardware. It was the de-facto puppy for a long time so there is much written about it on the forum. You can get ecopup from the link in my signiture.

Puppy linux 2.16 onwards was the first puppy with the standard CUPS bilt in, although it could be added as a .pup on prior versions. If printing is your thing you may try this.

Version 3, to my mind, was rather unstable, and only continued to version 3.02 (or is it 3.03?) before the internal archetecture was radically overhauled again for version 4.

[Sage]

It was also about this time that ISA sound card support was lamentably dropped

Is this true? The familiar menu detection system was changed, but I seem to recall running ISA sound cards fairly recently? Other ISA cards were never supported in Puppy - use DSL. The basic functionality is within the kernel? After that it's down to the drivers.

[DMcCunney]

Ok, I should try older version to realize how they run on my pc. I'm not having problems with 4.12 but some apps such Gimp run slow on my pc. Anyway I can't complain too much Puppy gave new life to my Pentium 3

What do you mean by "running slow"?

I have Puppy 4.12 on an old Fujitsu Lifebook p2110 from 2002, with an 867 mhz Crusoe CPU and 256MB of RAM, and ATI Rage Pro grahics with 8MB of RAM. It's a Full install on a 7.5GB partition on a 30GB HD.

The Gimp runs well enough here once up, but takes about 90 seconds to load in the first place. The culprit is the Toshiba HD, at 4800 RPM with about a 20MB/sec transfer rate. It's one of the slower laptop drives in existence.

Monlolithic apps which are largely one big eecutable fare better than apps that have lots of libraries and other files they must access on startup. For example, Opera 9.63 loads in about half the time Firefox 3 does.
______
Dennis

[ecomoney]

It was also about this time that ISA sound card support was lamentably dropped

Is this true? The familiar menu detection system was changed, but I seem to recall running ISA sound cards fairly recently? Other ISA cards were never supported in Puppy - use DSL. The basic functionality is within the kernel? After that it's down to the drivers.

What? Is there a way of still using ISA sound cards? Ive send many to oblivion over the past few years. They were really useful as many had inernal audio amplifiers built in, meaning you could wire an old pair of hi-fi speakers in with an old headphone plug and get reasonable sound quality/volume without having to buy any expensive p.c. speakers. I would really like this clarified.

[davec51]

"Why people still use it? Do they have an old system? "
Some people drive their old cars (mine's a 2000); some stick with their old wives (mine's a 1934 model). I dunno why, though it's true I do have an old system.

[Sage]

You sound like a latter-day Sage, eco!
I've been advocating what you suggest since the Ark.
However, the sound output from a directly driven sound card into hi-fi speakers isn't just 'reasonable' - it probably exceeds the quality most folks have experienced by orders of magnitude. Search my previous expositions on the subject. I will check 4.1.2 with my last liberated CT4180 tomorrow and let you know.

[ssme]

It was also about this time that ISA sound card support was lamentably dropped

Is this true? The familiar menu detection system was changed, but I seem to recall running ISA sound cards fairly recently? Other ISA cards were never supported in Puppy - use DSL. The basic functionality is within the kernel? After that it's down to the drivers.

What? Is there a way of still using ISA sound cards? Ive send many to oblivion over the past few years. They were really useful as many had inernal audio amplifiers built in, meaning you could wire an old pair of hi-fi speakers in with an old headphone plug and get reasonable sound quality/volume without having to buy any expensive p.c. speakers. I would really like this clarified.

the ISA sound (cs4237b) in my 9 year old laptop (thinkpad 560x) now works fine in puppy 4.1.2 retro, although i had to go the long way round to get there (copying the settings from puppy 1.0..

(i am of course assuming that 4.1.2 retro has a newer kernel than the 2.10 point at which you suggest ISA support was dropped... i haven't verified this!)

[Sage]

Yes, it was easier than envisaged.
I found a QDI Legend board with the last ISA socket still present. I fitted a CT4180 SB16 (VIBRA).
With the 4.1.2 Std. (not retro), I found the VIBRA card in the ALSA menu list, loaded it up and got 'woof, woof' immediately without any meddling.
So the answer is - yes, ISA is still operative, so you just need the drivers. Good OP levels, too. Genuine SB drivers have always been there. In previous incarnations, I've had difficulties with ESS cards, but that was no different to 'doze. I used to like Crystal and, esp. OPTI cards - always reliable.

[Aitch]

_MegadetH_

a P3 isn't that old - I have an IBM 560 [P2/225mhz/64mb ram] running 2.14R, & because it's THE most reliable Puppy I found at the time of multi-development, as mentioned, I haven't changed, though I tried others, but missed my gemgame & bubbles

Chewi has a Libretto P1/32mb running Puppy 4.12 with bluetooth & wireless!! & there are others with similar feats

However Puppy is about experimenting - it's not hard when the ISO is less than 100mb

For games, try

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=34037

and/or

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=29050

Good luck

btw no problem with old sound cards [c. P2/3] with 2.14/R - maybe I've been lucky?

Aitch

[Gorilla no baka]

I see in this forum there are users running old Puppy version as vers.3. Why people still use it? Do they have an old system?

in my case it was an old scanner, that got left behind [by kernel changes?] for a couple of versions

for whatever reason it works in 4.12, it is not recognized correctly, but it does work

go figure . . .

Well, in my case i use it because the 215CE version despite the fact that is bigger that it's brothers...It comes with a lot more programs and stuff and THE SOUND IN GXINE IS JUST AMAZING...THE CLARITY OF THE PICTURE AS WELL...Put it this way...on my 7 years old necLavie laptop..when i crank up the volume (without using any external speakers) the sound is so loud and so clear that whenever i play a movie my neighbours from up top call me to complaing about the noise...

The other versions are not so loud...

[ecomoney]

I have it on good authority (and that good authority is tempestious, the best authority there is on puppy drivers) that ISA is indeed still in!!!

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=38132

Apparently it was some malicious rumour that a now-banned forum "troll" started many moons ago. What modern linux distro still supports ISA? Puppy and DSL and thats about it. Go Puppy!!!

Im upgrading the standard install I do for puppy newbs around here from a 2.15ce based to a 4.2 based when it comes out. Puppy 2.15ce is superb, its just that it doesnt pick up many of the modern wireless chipsets/acpi configurations that come with the modern vista-burdened laptops, and it doesnt automatically put an icon on the desktop when something is plugged/pu in (puppy 2.14r does however, I would love to know how to backport that feature). Puppy 2.15ce has a lot of packages and support for it even now. Under the hood 2.14r and 2.15ce are very similar, but 2.15ce comes with the icewm window manager built in, which makes it a lot prettier and saleable for our commercial customers.

[Gorilla no baka]

What i really like about PUppys is the ability OF PLAYING DVD's out of the box...

[mmmrr]

faster by an order of magnitude; i used to have time for a power nap between
click and consequence...just for in-puppy activities...because neither of them
seem to have got the pcmcia cards for ethernet [d-link dfe-690txd] and wireless[airlink awlc3026] working in this elderly toshiba laptop.

i don't want to hijack this thread but am not sure where i should be for current advice about those cards, a drawback to the older version, perhaps. i'm using
another compu to fetch files the wizard asks for but which perl pupget does it want?

the screen goes black every three minutes or so but comes to life with a keystroke, [but not click or mouse move] which i would like to change to a longer period

is there a place where puppy displays version #?

i could install 1.0.9ce but it wouldn't boot until i added 'acpi=ht' and 'pci=biosirq'---from the boot parameters list in wiki

thanks in advance, mm

[Sage]

I have it on good authority

Don't you believe what I told you?! tempie is good on coding, I do the HW testing.
You should've been researching all this stuff, eco., - you're not new around here. When you do, you'll probably see me reporting that other ISA cards, notably NICs and scsi, won't work. The reasons were discussed at the time. In the case of NICs, it's not just missing drivers - I found them, installed them (successfully) but they still didn't work. I offered several guys a boxful but the offer wasn't taken up.
As you know, scsi was an entirely different can 'o worms.....

[Sage]

Now, as a friend and I realised a year ago, the problem is finding suitable boards with that elusive last ISA slot. There are a few about. However, it is questionable whether all the latest gismos will function. The trade, ably led by the Intel cartel is long practised in leverage. USB2 will require an add-in card, for example. Folks should not rule out resurrecting Slot1 boards for use with compact distros like Puppy. Most of them have an ISA slot, USB1.1 and PS/2 connectors, inter alia. SDRAM to run them is plentiful and 200W PSU s are adequate. I have several here - first come, first served, you pay carriage.

[_MegadetH_]

for older computers i would suggest 2.14r, this is a rivised and updated 2.14 with many of the new features from 3.x and 4.x "backported" to it. it can be downloaded [irl=http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=24574]here[/url]. 2.14r has support for .pet and the older .pup packages by default so a lot of programs will work on here also.

There were changes to the kernel made around the puppy 2.10 series that reportedly made a few models of computer non-bootable with puppy. If your going back here you may need a pre-210 puppy. It was also about this time that ISA sound card support was lamentably dropped. You may need this to get your sound working. Old laptops also used to have ISA sound cards built in (ESS Audiodrive etc).

Puppy 1.09ce was a superb community edition, but does need more RAM than most puppies because it included firefox (i.e. more than 128mb to run in RAM).

If you want a pre-built and pre-tested puppy linux, with a great many packages pre-installed and configured for you, you may wish to give Ecopup a try. Its based on 2.15ce so has good support for old hardware. It was the de-facto puppy for a long time so there is much written about it on the forum. You can get ecopup from the link in my signiture.

Puppy linux 2.16 onwards was the first puppy with the standard CUPS bilt in, although it could be added as a .pup on prior versions. If printing is your thing you may try this.

Version 3, to my mind, was rather unstable, and only continued to version 3.02 (or is it 3.03?) before the internal archetecture was radically overhauled again for version 4.

Hi ecomoney,
thanks for the suggestions! I am downloading Ecopup 0.7.3. I will take it a try I'll run from live cd saving to a usb stick. I hope it will detect each device. I'll give my feedback into the official Ecopup thread asap. I'm curious to try new puplets for me heeh

What do you mean by "running slow"?

I have Puppy 4.12 on an old Fujitsu Lifebook p2110 from 2002, with an 867 mhz Crusoe CPU and 256MB of RAM, and ATI Rage Pro grahics with 8MB of RAM. It's a Full install on a 7.5GB partition on a 30GB HD.

The Gimp runs well enough here once up, but takes about 90 seconds to load in the first place. The culprit is the Toshiba HD, at 4800 RPM with about a 20MB/sec transfer rate. It's one of the slower laptop drives in existence.

Monlolithic apps which are largely one big eecutable fare better than apps that have lots of libraries and other files they must access on startup. For example, Opera 9.63 loads in about half the time Firefox 3 does.
______
Dennis

hi DMcCunney!

yes, I meant Gimp takes a while to open it. Flash games run very slow when they are quite big (about 2/3Mb). If they are small there is no problem. Maybe my machine is not so new to run it smooth.

"Why people still use it? Do they have an old system? "
Some people drive their old cars (mine's a 2000); some stick with their old wives (mine's a 1934 model). I dunno why, though it's true I do have an old system.

Hi davec51!

Maybe it's just because It's better don't change what "works" well

_MegadetH_

a P3 isn't that old - I have an IBM 560 [P2/225mhz/64mb ram] running 2.14R, & because it's THE most reliable Puppy I found at the time of multi-development, as mentioned, I haven't changed, though I tried others, but missed my gemgame & bubbles

Chewi has a Libretto P1/32mb running Puppy 4.12 with bluetooth & wireless!! & there are others with similar feats

However Puppy is about experimenting - it's not hard when the ISO is less than 100mb

For games, try

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=34037

and/or

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=29050

Good luck

btw no problem with old sound cards [c. P2/3] with 2.14/R - maybe I've been lucky?

Aitch

Hi Aitch!
Thanks for your suggestions! I already know that links you sent me but I haven't tried yet Growler. Right now for games, I'm digging internet to look for flash games. They're nice and they don't need to be installed. I've collected a bounch of them If you need some java games I listed some of them here http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=275135
I'm planning to try some puplets like ecopup and the puppy version you're using.



Ps: sorry for delay. Lately I don't have much free time

[Aitch]

You may also find this useful. courtesy technosaurus

http://pupweb.org/desktop/

Aitch

[Sage]

Well, eco, following your blast of yesterday, I've been trying to run this SB16 ISA card on several other distros - without success. That includes MU's NYP- mini & macro. Trouble is that most HW detection systems only pick up the switched OFF onboard sound chip because Linux doesn't follow BIOS settings from choice like old W9x and earlier systems. Without manually loading drivers, not a task for the likes of YT, the ISA card remains inactive. Guess it would need some CLI checks and commands - yawn.