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> Puppy Linux Xvesa works and uses about 1/3 the RAM
> of the Xorg savage server (18 instead of about 40M).

For the whole GUI with icons and menus.  Savage MX chip.

> It has five additional dependencies, all glibc 2.3.
> I copied over the dependencies (symlinked) and
> Xvesa to BL2 and typed Xvesa.
>
> New errors.  vm86 failed.  This is some bug related
> to S3 savage using vm86, whatever that is.

I installed Puppy to hard drive (works with loadlin and initrd).
It still boots by unpacking a 100MB file.

I cannot get Xvesa or Xorg working after installing to hard drive (won't 
load automatically, the wizard comes up and finds no usable X).  Xvesa has 
the vm86 error, and Xorg gives a colored grid even at 60Hz refresh and 640 
res (which is not usable due to large menus).  Not sure Xvesa was working 
from live CD - switching from Xorg to Xvesa may have failed and Xorg 
reloaded automatically.  Strange.  I tried both loadlin and their boot 
floppy.

Apart from Abiword, BL3.5 works in X (Xfbdev) on this computer, with the 
'big' kernel (framebuffer support).  So does BL2 with various framebuffer 
kernels, about half the size of the Puppy kernel, which has no framebuffer 
support and offers only Xvesa (not tiny) for 'most video chips' that don't 
work with Xorg. And wrongly auto-detects monitor settings (it offered me 
800x600 as the max for a 1280 monitor, and either 640 or 1280 for one that 
does 1024).  It responds rather slowly even at 300MHz and 128MB RAM. 
(DamnSmallLinux does much better - less RAM, Xfbdev, Firefox 2, but no 
Netsurf.  Someone else tried to compile Netsurf with framebuffer instead 
of GKT2 for Slackware and gave up due to not finding one dependency 
anywhere).

Puppy Linux comes with flash 9 already.  I never did get Flash working 
with BL.  Needed for online games.

My latest computer order is for grandma to do email and read PDF files 
from CD, and the kids to play games.  She will try linux.  I advertised it 
as booting faster and no viruses.

Would today's kid know how to play xrunner, xdigger, xfreecell and lincity 
with whatever instructions come with these games?  I have about 80 old DOS 
games that the kids could use, with a DOS menu or under Win95.  Simpler 
than dosemu.  Boot to linux with loadlin from DOS.

A 'linux games for kids' search got me 17 million hits.
Most linux games have a lot of dependencies now and are large.
That was a real feat finding five that work with BL3.

Sindi