I have an old Dell Latitude L400 notebook in my office that I’ve used to test various Linux distros over the years. However, while 256MB RAM and 10GB hard drive space seemed like a lot back in 2001 or so, it is a bit on the small size for many current distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.). So, I decided to give Puppy Linux 3.01 a try.
The installation was quick and painless. Pay attention to the dialog boxes as they appear though. One advises to install Grub on the MBR instead of the dialog box suggested area. This is what worked for me.
The only problem for me was the usual one when installing Linux on a notebook: Wireless LAN configuration. Puppy Linux saw the inserted 802.11b WiFi card. And, I was able to enter in the required configuration information. But, after repeated tries is did not connect to either of two wireless access points in my test area. Fortunately, the wired Ethernet connection went painlessly and I was on the network.
The notebook is responding very nicely for an old Pentium III 700MHz box with 256MB RAM. It probably boots faster than any other notebook I have running Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Mac OS X. The 7-year old notebook went from a clunker to a useful tool again after installing Puppy Linux.
I have been using puppy linux on my laptop for about 6 months now and am quite happy with it.I is nice that it worked for u too.
U might want to try installing
1,puppy software installer(PSI)-installing this first makes it easier to install other programs,check for dependancies etc.
2.abiword dictionary plugin
3.osmo-an excellent small personal information manager
4.wxweekdaynotes-a note taker for each day of the week
The reason I mentioned this is that the information for puppy linux about apps etc is distributed across many forums,wikis and such .As a result one is forced to look up each app in google to see what it means.
I am using firefox (deer park) 1.5.0,3 instead of seamonkey with adblock plus and download helper(that reminds me -this is the plugin to download if u want to get videos from youtube) and flashplayer plugin beta 9 is needed for some websites.I then downloaded ffmpeg plugins(can be obtained using PSI) to watch the videos in gxine.
Hope this helps and thank you for speading the word about this great distro.
Thomas
India
I did a search of blogs related to Puppy Linux and I saw yours. I put Puppy Linux on an old Dell Lattitude CPX and it worked well, I used Puppy LInux 2.15CE for that particlar Laptop.