Puppy on K6 233

[brooksby]

I have an old machine that was running W98SE. I was trying to decide if there was still life left in it so I decided to look for a more modern OS that could run on it. After much reading I decided to give Puppy a try. The machine uses a Biostar M5ATA motherboard, AMD K6 233MHz processor. 66MHz FSB. I splurged and spent $4 to upgrade it to 256MB RAM. The disk is 800MB. I partitioned it into 2 partitions: 512MB main (ext3) and ~288MB swap.

I've tried a variety of versions of Puppy. I had trouble with a couple of non-retro builds. I finally settled on a full HD install of puppy-4.2.1retro-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso. It's running XVesa.

It boots and runs, but here's my experience. It seems almost painfully slow. For example, seamonkey takes, perhaps 30 seconds to load. When it's up it seems to run ok. Not lightning fast like it does on my >2GHz machine, but it's ok. Abiword takes maybe 20 seconds to load. When typing in Abiword the keyboard response seems slow, especially on the backspace key. Firefox installed, but won't run.

I also tried TeenPup 1.0.0. It too seemed slow.
I tried DSL-N and it was pretty fast, but not as refined as Puppy and a few things seemed less stable.

The conclusion I'm coming to is that this hardware is just too old to run any modern OS. W98 was snappy but insecure, unstable and no longer supported. Puppy, while more modern just requires too much of this old H/W to run with any speed. Is this the right conclusion or is there something else I should try? I hate to put this old dog down.

Thanks for any help.

[Bronco Billy]

I have an old machine that was running W98SE. I was trying to decide if there was still life left in it so I decided to look for a more modern OS that could run on it. After much reading I decided to give Puppy a try. The machine uses a Biostar M5ATA motherboard, AMD K6 233MHz processor. 66MHz FSB. I splurged and spent $4 to upgrade it to 256MB RAM. The disk is 800MB. I partitioned it into 2 partitions: 512MB main (ext3) and ~288MB swap.

I've tried a variety of versions of Puppy. I had trouble with a couple of non-retro builds. I finally settled on a full HD install of puppy-4.2.1retro-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso. It's running XVesa.

It boots and runs, but here's my experience. It seems almost painfully slow. For example, seamonkey takes, perhaps 30 seconds to load. When it's up it seems to run ok. Not lightning fast like it does on my >2GHz machine, but it's ok. Abiword takes maybe 20 seconds to load. When typing in Abiword the keyboard response seems slow, especially on the backspace key. Firefox installed, but won't run.

I also tried TeenPup 1.0.0. It too seemed slow.
I tried DSL-N and it was pretty fast, but not as refined as Puppy and a few things seemed less stable.

The conclusion I'm coming to is that this hardware is just too old to run any modern OS. W98 was snappy but insecure, unstable and no longer supported. Puppy, while more modern just requires too much of this old H/W to run with any speed. Is this the right conclusion or is there something else I should try? I hate to put this old dog down.

Thanks for any help.

I installed puppy 431 on p1 100mhz 128mb ram I booted the thing off a Stick...Amazingly everything worked.... But like you painfully slow...and like you.... Win 98 ran at an acceptable speed... I Curbed the machine and bought a$50 Russion Samba P2.4 from computer Geeks....Puppy Screams on the Samba.... Puppy 431 is the Best Linux Distro in the World..Have a Great Day...

[Bronco Billy]

I have an old machine that was running W98SE. I was trying to decide if there was still life left in it so I decided to look for a more modern OS that could run on it. After much reading I decided to give Puppy a try. The machine uses a Biostar M5ATA motherboard, AMD K6 233MHz processor. 66MHz FSB. I splurged and spent $4 to upgrade it to 256MB RAM. The disk is 800MB. I partitioned it into 2 partitions: 512MB main (ext3) and ~288MB swap.

I've tried a variety of versions of Puppy. I had trouble with a couple of non-retro builds. I finally settled on a full HD install of puppy-4.2.1retro-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso. It's running XVesa.

It boots and runs, but here's my experience. It seems almost painfully slow. For example, seamonkey takes, perhaps 30 seconds to load. When it's up it seems to run ok. Not lightning fast like it does on my >2GHz machine, but it's ok. Abiword takes maybe 20 seconds to load. When typing in Abiword the keyboard response seems slow, especially on the backspace key. Firefox installed, but won't run.

I also tried TeenPup 1.0.0. It too seemed slow.
I tried DSL-N and it was pretty fast, but not as refined as Puppy and a few things seemed less stable.

The conclusion I'm coming to is that this hardware is just too old to run any modern OS. W98 was snappy but insecure, unstable and no longer supported. Puppy, while more modern just requires too much of this old H/W to run with any speed. Is this the right conclusion or is there something else I should try? I hate to put this old dog down.

Thanks for any help.

I installed puppy 431 on p1 100mhz 128mb ram I booted the thing off a Stick...Amazingly everything worked.... But like you painfully slow...and like you.... Win 98 ran at an acceptable speed... I Curbed the machine and bought a$50 Russion Samba P2.4 from computer Geeks....Puppy Screams on the Samba.... Puppy 431 is the Best Linux Distro in the World..Have a Great Day...

Also I Bet Puppy431 is way faster than the Previous Incarnations.... Barry K Rewrote 431 from the ground up and from his Blog... Improved Memory management... Therefore 431 is Faster... Also the previous editions were Camels.... A Horse designed by a Committee.... Barry wrote 431 by Himself... The Man is from Mars.... Have a Great Day....

[mikeb]

Puppy 1 uses the 2.4 kernel..that would run better....puppy 2.02 was a fast one too using an older xorg....but you lose the ability to use newer (bloated?) applications.
Seamonkey is heavy...firefox 1.5 still handles the net just fine and ttuuxxx's firepup based on it would be a good move.
But to be honest get onto ebay and treat yourself to the fastest k6 it can handle...I had one using a 550MHz k6 and it was good for video playback and pretty snappy.
Extra ram always helps too..again for the sake of $2 its worth it. Another bottleneck would be the hard drive...modern ones have large caches and the difference is dramatic...or even a cf card on a ide adaptor gives you udma2 speeds.
You can overclock but only with decent heatsinking...10-20% is ok for k6's.

mike

[jpmtrax]

well i've got a similar computer (K6-2 3D 233 Mhz with 128 Mo sdram 133 Mhz)

I didn't tried your retro version (maybe i should ??) and tried i think one or two years ago the latest puppies but everytime i tried them my keyboard and mouses were blocked. I needed to desactivate USB in the Bios for make it work.

But i was really fed up with Windows 98. Always crashes, security problems.. that was enough. So I tried to Install Xubuntu 6.06, which is ok, very very slow sometimes on this system, but everything works (firefox, pidgin, open office, k3b, audacity...). What i've done is that i installed the alternate version of course, but i also downloaded another graphical environment lighter than xfce (fluxbox), and it works faster. But i'm still considering myself as a newbie and i'm discovering linux everyday ! The thing you must know and that i discovered is that you can change of graphical environment. I was a little disappointed at first time when installing fluxbox, but with some documentation, it appears to be very simple to configure a menu.

I also changed my hard drive without updating my bios. I had a 4go harddrive before, which still works but on a more recent computer with puppy 4.3 (not so recent computer, it's a celeron 533 Mhz with 256 Mo, the one i post with). But i have installed a 200 Go IDE hard disc which works very well on it. The only thing you have to do is to make a partition for the system which corresponds to the maximum authorized by your bios (mine is 8 Go). Then i installed Xubuntu system on it, and it recognized the whole harddisk during installation for data.

The only thing i couldn't resolve was the wifi connection. But maybe it will work someday.

I also tried Damn Small Linux who was working well on it. No mouse or keyboard problem, except for french users like me ! But i didn't succeed for wifi connexion . I will try Deli Linux too. Maybe you should try other systems, like vector linux also ? i don't think Elive Gem would work on your system, it was already very slow on my celeron, i tried a hdd installation and well it doesn't work properly, the system was running ok, but very slow like xubuntu 9.10 that i tried too.

I think puppy is still a good choice for that kind on computer, but if i were you i would try damn small linux which is very fast, and also deli linux. I will try one of them and i'll told you.

The very point is that you shouldn't forgive, except if you want to make some kind of video works i think. I also think that some video formats on web really really stinks like this ugly flash player you found everyday on youtube or dailymotion, why the hell people use that ????

i'm absolutely not a microsoft fan, it's most the contrary now, but when i watch tv on the net with puppy and gxine, i must admit that wmv works very well, and real media too, even on my old system, with running seamonkey, openoffice 3 and pidgin at the same time !!!!! ok it's a little bit slower don't dream, but it works, and it doesn't crash, or very few times.

So the message is don't forgive, with the hundreds of distributions which exists, you must find one which suits to your computer. But i know that it can be very long to find a good system (and to throw away windows !!). But even if you need windows software, don't forget you can install wine too. i don't use it for the moment, but it was working well with some of my 98 softwares.

Anyway, good luck.