Puppy in Toshiba Satellite with 64 MB of RAM (Solved)

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vickyg2003 · #41 Post by **vickyg2003** » Tue 03 May 2011, 04:13

starhawk wrote:How big are they, filesize wise? If not more than a couple hundred kB, PM them to me and I'll test them in OpenOffice. Unless they have macros in them, they should work just fine. In which case, of course, you can kick Windows, well, out the window

Its the macros that make them excel only. They don't work in open office. Believe me we hear enough about this on the JP1 forum.

starhawk · #42 Post by **starhawk** » Tue 03 May 2011, 04:35

Looks like there are three approaches to this issue.

(1) Leave as is.
(2) Manually convert the macros. A simple Google search will pull up a tool that helps

(3) Build openoffice with the ability to read those VBA Macros.

All three options are somewhat painful. Regarding the third, you will need a special file called a "devx" that contains compiling software. You will also need a decently powerful computer and a lot of time and determination. You can find further information here: http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/58348

For what it's worth, I'd offer to help, but I've never used macros at *all*. I've a little bit of beginners' level experience with QBASIC (that dates to the early 90s and hasn't really been touched since) but that's the extent of my programming knowledge.

vickyg2003 · #43 Post by **vickyg2003** » Tue 03 May 2011, 13:01

starhawk wrote:Looks like there are three approaches to this issue.

(1) Leave as is.
(2) Manually convert the macros. A simple Google search will pull up a tool that helps
(3) Build openoffice with the ability to read those VBA Macros.

All three options are somewhat painful. Regarding the third, you will need a special file called a "devx" that contains compiling software. You will also need a decently powerful computer and a lot of time and determination. You can find further information here: http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/58348

Well, there is a 4th option, and that would be to rewrite the application into java or some other portable language. The problem is, it is so complicated that none of the other programmers will touch it.

Its a dissassembler/assembler that writes assembly code for 5 different processor languages depending on the specs you enter, and then lets you tweak the assembler and recompile for in the chosen processor. Its so difficult to understand that the author hasn't even brought it up to excel 2007.

For what it's worth, I'd offer to help, but I've never used macros at *all*. I've a little bit of beginners' level experience with QBASIC (that dates to the early 90s and hasn't really been touched since) but that's the extent of my programming knowledge.

Well, I'm not worried about that so much as trying to figure out what kind of network adapter to buy. It looks like the Linksys WPC600N might be the one to go with. It supports WPA2, its confirmed to be suppported by puppy. I just don't know if PCMCIA is a standard that a new card will work with equipment this old. I remember when I bought the PCMCIA card

I know surprisingly little about my PC hardware. I do remember years ago when I bought the PCMCIA card that I had to look hard to find one that would work with the PC, but that might have been because I was working with Windows ME, or it may have been because some PCMCIA cards were incompatible with the hardware.

I could go with a USB wifi, but then I've only got one available USB port.

starhawk · #44 Post by **starhawk** » Tue 03 May 2011, 16:11

That card should work with your laptop.

Regarding the macros, that really is some complicated stuff!

vickyg2003 · #45 Post by **vickyg2003** » Wed 04 May 2011, 02:13

starhawk wrote:That card should work with your laptop.

Well that one was a resource hog, so I ordered something confirmed to work with Linux, but not necessarily puppy. This will provide me with a real challenge.

I also ordered the memory for the secondary laptop.

Now to wait for the mail.

Is there any video capture pet or app or whatever to make video clips from screen shots?

wdm · #46 Post by **wdm** » Wed 04 May 2011, 23:22

Its the macros that make them excel only. They don't work in open office. Believe me we hear enough about this on the JP1 forum.

I don't know if this would be of any interest to you, but you may be able to run excel in wine. You would need to find a wine pet or sfs file that works with puppy 4.3.

vickyg2003 · #47 Post by **vickyg2003** » Sun 08 May 2011, 01:29

I received my Netgear WG511 v2 54Mbps today, but installing it was a real pain. Netgear has this wizard and it doesn't pull out the XP drivers if you are not on an XP machine. Since as of this writing the only support for this is with the ndiswrapper with the XP drivers this became a bit of a problem. However I was able to find a machine to install Netgear on and then pull burn it to CD, boot to my windows partition, copy the file off the cd, boot into puppy and install the with the ndiswrapper and now I have WPA2 security on my PCMCIA card!!!!

I haven't been able to get this to work in Windows. Its recognized and receives a signal but it will not show a IP address. I struggled with that longer than I struggled with Puppy

So now that I've got these XP files extracted is there a way to share them with the next guy? I assume its just the XP.SYS and INF that need to be available.

aarf · #48 Post by **aarf** » Sun 08 May 2011, 02:22

You can zip/archive things and attach them to your post.

ieee488 · #49 Post by **ieee488** » Sun 08 May 2011, 02:30

vickyg2003 wrote:
mill0001 wrote:Vickie,
I got a question, is there any reason for you to keep the worst operating system ever written by anyone (Windows ME) on that machine? If not you can save any data you want to keep from it and wipe the disk and make that a Puppy machine if you want to. Just think no more "BSOD" Heh Heh Heh.
Microsoft Excel.
I have 2 special purpose spreadsheets for writing remote control protocols that I need to have.

Microsoft Excel macros are nothing more than VBA (Visual Basic for Applications).
It can be converted by someone with programming experience.

I write programs in VB.NET that can wrote directly to Microsoft Excel files all the time.

ieee488 · #50 Post by **ieee488** » Sun 08 May 2011, 02:32

vickyg2003 wrote:I received my Netgear WG511 today ...
So now that I've got these XP files extracted is there a way to share them with the next guy? I assume its just the XP.SYS and INF that need to be available.

There are actually 4 dfferent versions of the WG511. The chipset inside them makes a lot of difference in the Linux world.

http://daemonizer.de/prism54/wg511/

vickyg2003 · #51 Post by **vickyg2003** » Sun 08 May 2011, 03:16

Oops, I've got to learn to be more precise.

This is labeled
54 Mbps Wireless PC Card
WG511 v2

Even though there is a space between the WG511 and the v2 it is the WG511v2 with Marvell chipset.

It only works with ndis wrapper and doesn't seem to work very well in Windows, but works very nicely in Puppy. I really wanted to use my PCMCIA slots, but trying to find something that was cheap and had anything other than plain old WEP security was tough.

The old card with no security was operating at 11Mbps, and was faster than my hardwired machine, and now this one flies.

vickyg2003 · #52 Post by **vickyg2003** » Sun 08 May 2011, 13:54

Now that I know to google for WG511v2 instead of WG511 v2 I'm finding all sorts of people with problems on this forum.

I have set this up 2x because the first time didn't save for some reason. I didn't find this to be intuitive, but its REALLY easy in pup-4.3.1-small.

I'd like to write up some documentation on how to do this because I can see a need. And this would give me a reason learn how to use my puppy tools.

How do I do a .zip file?

Edit: I had orginally also asked how to do a screen print. Can anyone say "mtpaint - snaptshot screen capture". It couldn't be easier.

But the zip thing is still totally confusing. I see the ZIP icon on the desktop, but can't figure out how to use it at all.

aarf · #53 Post by **aarf** » Mon 09 May 2011, 01:44

When you ask things that are too easy you may not get answers. Try drag and drop things into the open new archive. some archive type formats (eg. zip, tar.gz ) can and will do different things so test your output as well.
attached image is from possibly a different archiver but basically the same procedure. .
to add images to the forum they need to be scaled in mpaint to under 600 pixels wide else they will be attachments too.
add also your help in writing things here:
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/RecentChanges also good for reference.
good luck.

vickyg2003 · #54 Post by **vickyg2003** » Mon 09 May 2011, 17:40

aarf wrote:When you ask things that are too easy you may not get answers. Try drag and drop things into the open new archive. some archive type form
good luck.

Thank you aarf. I see that you added to your post. I'll give that a try when I get puppy reinstalled. I'm still at the studying stage.

I have some really extremely simple questions that I'm actually afraid to ask for fear of flaming. I'm really struggling here, but its a good struggle.

Please don't flame me too hard, I've worked on this for almost 2 hours.

I've taken a screen shot. It shows up in mtpaint. I want to save_As.

I see the \root file system, which I assume is the same as seeing a windows "documents and settings\admin"

There is a folder called "my-documents".

I'd like to save it in there, but clicking on that folder doesn't do anything.

I can only save to root, however, if I type my-documents in the address line, I can save it in the folder, otherwise its saved in root, and then I can move it with the file icon.

I know that a lot of things in Linux require a lot of typing. Is this supposed to work like this, or am I doing something terribly wrong.
Perhaps I did something wrong in the install.

I'm working at this, but it is slow going.

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Puppy in Toshiba Satellite with 64 MB of RAM (Solved)