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  • From: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] Future of BL?
  • Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2009 17:08:10 +0000 (UTC)

It was suggested that I use a newer distro for more recent hardware (1997 and beyond). For support of USB and cardbus wireless.

So I am trying the Puppy Live CD on any laptops with at least 48MB RAM (because it won't run a graphical browser in less).

Puppy Linux worked fine on the 1.6GHz Compaq Presario R3000 with 256MB RAM. No floppy disk to try BL. I could try if from UBCD.

Toshiba Satellite Pro 4200 series, 258MHz, 320MB RAM, with S2 savage IX/MV video, worked perfectly with BL2 (framebuffer kernel and Xfbdev) and my FB version of BL3.5 floppy, but not with Puppy because savage does not do Xvesa and the Xorg part is screwed up. Puppy does not support framebuffer video. To be fair, it does work from live CD with Xorg but they use some other wizard if you boot from hard drive, which fails miserably. Damnsmall linux works with Xfbdev. Do any other small distros use it?

IBM Thinkpad 770M, 266MHz, which I upped to 212MB ECC RAM, works perfectly with BL3 but Puppy has some problem finding its files (on the CD - I even tried the boot floppy). Xvesa works. FB not supported. BL3 floppy version works perfectly. Trident Cyber9397 video 4MB video RAM. Damnsmall Linux works.

Winbook XLi, 300MHz, upped to 192MB RAM (non-ECC), boots Puppy Linux but the mouse does not work. Win98 complains about an IRQ conflict between onboard pointing device and PS/2 port. BL3 works perfectly with the PS/2 onboard trackpad and eraser-head mouse (I set it to use both).
Same video as the IBM, Xvesa but not FB. Did not try DSL.

So far BL has worked in three computers where a distro (Puppy) designed for circa 300MHz computers has failed. (It did work in a Micron desktop).
I think it helps that things are less automated. Maybe Puppy 2 (for older laptops) would do better?

I did not intentionally select laptops that do not work with Puppy.
In fact lots of people reported using Thinkpads with Puppy. Winbook is supposed to be very linux compatible.

I have four other laptop computers with enough RAM to test with Puppy,
with USB and cardbus support.

DSL is not much better than BL at cardbus/wireless but supports my two working D-Link Xtreme-G cards. (Not three other cards though).
Puppy supports all my cardbus and USB wireless cards in theory, but not on these three laptops since it won't boot on them.

The Gateway laptop is fixed (had corroded hard drive contacts) and I will use it (with BL and the wireless router we set up for the neighbor) to download kernel 2.4.37.5 and see if that fixes wireless cardbus (and maybe a later gcc if there is one that works with glibc 2.3.6 but not a later glibc because it needs kernel 2.6 which I hope to avoid for a while). Anyone have any better ideas how to increase the usability of my favorite non-buggy linux?

How do I set the Netgear router and the Aironet PCMCIA card to do WEP encryption? I can no longer access 192.168.0.1 from the attached laptop - nothing happens at all if I give Firefox (on a Mac laptop) that URL. Before it set itself up for the internet I could run dhcp (between my laptop and the router - no broadband) and ping it and use a javascript browser with it. The neighbors are afraid someone will use their wireless connection to download porn and they will get jailed. But they are happy not to need a 30' ethernet cable between cable modem and laptop now.

Do I use iwconfig to specify WEP?

Sindi




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