john biles wrote:Hello richard.a,
Feedback on what Hardware TEENpup runs on would be good.
As promised, I have replaced the previous post with my evaluation of about half a dozen different desktop hardware items (mostly old) and two laptops, all old - in live mode. I've tried it so far on a bunch of them.
Evaluation:
Here are the results of my testing of TEENpup2009, in Live mode, on a bunch of boxes...
Throughout I used an H-P M900 19-inch precision monitor (2000 vintage) - previously used for AutoCAD - and scanner checks used a Canoscan USB N670U (Plustek) in all 3 scanner software applications provided on two or three of the computers only.
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Laptop 1 - Toshiba Satellite T1800 - Celeron 896 with 256 (max) SD RAM, Swap partition 933Mb
XP Home native. approx 7 or 8 years old at a guess.
video Trident video accel CyberBlade XP Ai1 v6.4020.22ICD onboard
TEENpup2009legacy Live pfix=RAM stalled probing Xorg and Xvesa
TEENpup2008 Live pfix=RAM stalled probing Xorg and Xvesa
IRQPOLL boot parameter tried also, no difference.
The earliest puppy I have ever got running on this laptop was ver4 - Macpup 4.11, and vanilla 4.12 installed along with LinuxMint Cassandra 3.x with kernel 2.6.20-15-generic
It has also run Sun JavaDesktopSystem v2 (based on SuSE 8.1) and PCLinuxOS2007.
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Laptop 2 - Toshiba Satellite T2140 K6-2 450 with 128 (max) EDO RAM, Swap partition 643Mb
win98 Home native originally, perhaps 10 to 12 years old,
system removed and larger HDD fitted.
not sure what audio onboard,
NIC in PCMCIA is bad news on many Linuxes.
S3 Virge VX video onboard 800x600 LCD,
TEENpup2009legacy Live pfix=RAM kernel panic could not complete loading huge .sfs existing, runs ReactOS (Alpha), Puppy 4.12, Vesta 3.01, have tried several others.
Desktop in Xorg at 640x480 only, and works in XVesa at 800x600 (and 1024x768 for external monitor support). IRQPOLL boot parameter needed.
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Laptop 3 - Twinhead pentium 250M MMX/64 (max RAM) EDO RAM
Desktop 800x600 and 1024x768 for external monitor
Not yet tried, suspect insufficient RAM. support.
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Desktop 1 - Compaq Presario 3200 slim desktop/minitower Celeron 700 MHz 256Mb SD Swap 1020Mb
video onboard audio onboard PCI NIC not known
Everything worked for TEENpup2009legacy
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Desktop 2 - Compaq Evo D51S slim desktop/minitower Celeron 2 GHz 760Mb DDR Swap 1020Mb
Intel video onboard SoundMAX audio onboard IntelPRO ethernet onboard
Everything worked for TEENpup2009legacy
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Desktop 3 - HP Pavilion 6617 compact minitower Celeron 566 MHz 256Mb SD Swap 1020Mb
intel video onboard intel audio onboard NIC PCI Realtek works on earlier pups
if another NIC works, then this would likely be a goer. Everything else seems to work.
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IBM Aptiva K6-2 380/196M SD 803Mb swap, BIOS date 1999
video ATI Mach64 with 8Mb of RAM onboard
audio onboard
Runs 2.14 with EZ-pup upgrade
Karamba desktop widgets slab crashes on launch.
Everything worked for TEENpup2009legacy apart from Karamba, may be fixable
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IBM Netvista (Aptiva mini-tower in black) Celeron 766/256M SD 803Mb swap, BIOS 1999
video SiS 630 Display onboard
Realtek RTL8139 NIC onboard
audio SiS 7018 (AC97) onboard (not in ALSA database) (No sound)
(412 config's Trident audio out of choice of 4)
Runs up to 2.11 without IRQPOLL, needs IRQPOLL for later.
Apart from sound, everything worked for TEENpup2009legacy
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Homebuilt MSI KM266 with Athlon 1100MHz and 2x 512Mb sticks of DDR RAM, swap
video S3 ProSavage onboard DDR
ethernet VIA Rhine onboard
audio Realtek onboard AC97/VIA
Everything worked for TEENpup2009legacy
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Homebuilt MSI 64-bit K8MM-V with Sempron 2600+ and 2x 512Mb sticks of DDR RAM, swap
video VIA S3G IniChrome Pro
ethernet VIA Rhine onboard
audio VIA onboard (AC97)
start-up music theme looped
apart from this, everything worked for TEENpup2009legacy
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Observations
A nice usable distribution. The points below are not so much criticisms but points that may need attention and polish
1. KSnapshot is nice to have, if you have used it before. Gnome afficionadoes probably wouldn't agree
2. I had personal difficulties with maximised application windows as installed - browser is one example.
3. Some people may prefer 24hour clock time, and a help file on editing ice-wm prefs menu might help there. Also with the location of the Karamba slab menu - how to reposition it, change to 24hr clock, etc. I'll work something up shortly for this thread.
4. There seems no automatic selection of Karamba themes vs desktop size. I found out the hard way there are 3 provided by manually editing the default 1024x768 version of the config file to suit 1280x1024 - after doing the editing, lol. Windows users would have difficulty.
5. How easy is it to enable the window outline being shown when dragging?
6. I find the default filemanager is not easy to use. Glad to see MUT is a choice, and it is not in ver 4.
7. Realplayer says it needs wget installed to complete setup. Using VLC instead works nicely for .ra and .rm files.
8. Pure-FTPd server does not set up correctly (nor on 4.1, and 2.14R1), whereas I never had problems with BetaFTP. This seems to be an application-related problem, not the OS-related.
9. And of course, large pup_214.sfs (600megs) slows live operation down considerably, before you have the pup_save and .sfs on the HDD.
10. I could not find a locale setting on the menu. And I can't check it in console because I don't know the command to run lol
11. Important to note, exclusive to puppy later than 2.11 there are missing NIC drivers, so this isn't a TEENpup problem. I use 3com PCI NICs almost exclusively where no onboard exists, as do many other people because of their being easily obtained and inexpensive. I tried a Realtek NIC with the same result. I don't have any others.
12. note to/from me: added VNC Server (.pet) to complete the job; Audacity is already there.
Summary
Altogether an excellent job, John.
Thank you so much for all your hard work; it's really good.
Also I put a post on the green tech girl's website at
http://greentechgirl.com/e-waste/puppy- ... omment-353
Thank you, John