In search for "something that works" - my Puppy 4 log

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

I had to pop up from time to time, didn't i?

I've been running a tweaked version of Windows Me on my laptop for a few months, and i like it. The guys over at MSFN have done great things for Windows 9x, unofficial service packs, a new skinning engine which allows XP-like theming without consuming any extra resources and without needing a process to run, and even kernel enhancements to run some XP software.

It runs great compared to XP and believe it or not it looks better, however it's still windoze 9x and has its quirks. The old disk caching system makes the system hang when copying files to a USB drive because of the slow USB 1.1 on my laptop. The cache fills up quickly and then it has to wait for the drive to finish copying the files, and the system is unusable till the copy completes.
When i do very network-intensive activity, everything stutters, from mouse cursor (not too bad) to sound (extremely annoying). This isn't as bad in Me as it was when i tried to run 98SE on this, however it's still present sometimes.
And to top it all, a glitch in Yahoo Messenger makes it crash in GDI+, sometimes taking Opera with it too, sometimes taking the whole system down and requiring a hard reboot. And having to reboot every few hours isn't too much fun.

So i decided to give Puppy a spin again.
What i noticed immediately:

The good:
It detected my Trident video out of the box, no workarounds required anymore!
I plugged in an USB mouse (ironically a Microsoft one) and it started working instantly.
My HDD is quiet now!!! I am running from a flash drive though.
It doesn't have that sluggish feeling that Windows has when opening up a lot of stuff at once.
It now has a battery status icon that works great.

The bad:
Gxine still crashed the whole system with severe display corruption, minutes after opening a movie. I remember that bug, going to get MPlayer now.

What's to come:

The tests.
I don't game much on this laptop but when i do, i run some simple but rather quirky windoze games. Let's see how much Wine has improved.
See if the video stutter bug is still there - after exiting an OpenGL app simple video operations such as moving or resizing a window would freeze the system for a few seconds. Required a X server restart to fix - very annoying as i had to reopen everything.

Let's hope this new Puppy will convince me to keep it. Expect updates...

[2byte]

If you are going to run Wine in 4.0 then use aufs instead of unionfs.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 18&t=31435

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

So where exactly do i set that?

Also if i do a HDD install (i'm not too fond of save files), will it still get corrupted?

Edit: Gave Wine 1.1.1 a spin. It used to run like poop last time i tested it (0.9.x), now it runs like semi-poop. An obvious improvement. However, unlike Vista x64 that i have on my main computer, Wine gets along nicely with older games as long as you install the M$ core fonts, big plus here.

It's enough to make me set up a separate partition for Puppy. I'll be doing a HDD install and using PLoP as my bootloader. Let's hope it turns out alright. Then i can have fun configuring the n+1 devices and functions of my laptop that should work, but of course they don't.

Later edit: Made the partition but it seems that Puppy won't install so i deleted it. But anyway, i probably have one of the lamest video chips ever - it's got so many issues with Linux i don't know where to start. And since the Trident driver is no longer in development and i have no idea how to modify it, back to windows me it is... At least 'doze doesn't hang when i try to watch a movie.