POPpup: Slugs and snails? Puppy “dog” tales

Curse you, Puppy Linux!

I recently had to reinstall Win98SE on a refurbished computer system – when compared to my ubernoobie-level dabblings with puppy the experience felt exactly like a visit to the dentists and KNOWING I was having the wrong teeth extracted.

Alright, I wouldn’t be fair comparing the two platforms directly on that basis – separated as they are by a decade of technological advancements – and I did “hot up” Win98 with unofficial service packs provided by those brave crusaders at MSFN, so that now it reads USB2.0 ports as well as run software designed specifically for WinXP. (Curious place, that MSFN: it’s very much like Bizarro-puppy world over there.) Nonetheless the experience was not painless even given the vintages of the respective OS's. I then repeated the experience (I know - beggars belief) for one of my scrap-heap socket-7's so that I might dual-boot it with various versions of Puppy for performance comparisons. More on that later.

That diversion with Micro$oft isn’t the only reason for my sluggardly update on the POPpup project: my oldest socket-7 motherboard finally flat-lined no matter what combo of CPU’s or RAM I tried to revive it (the SL586V-PLUS Rev1.1, Pentium /200MHz CPU, 4x32MB EDO RAM/ 2x64MB SDRAM banks (128 MB max), from the now-defunct Fong Kai Industrial company). Even the P.O.S.T.card read like a lonely obituary. RIPieces.

Meanwhile, I slipped up on an online auction while looking for SDRAM to “max out” my three remaining Socket-7’s. Due to my oversight in not asking for more detail other than the provided photo, I am now the proud owner of 8 sticks of RAM for that other branch of the evil empire – Compaq/Dell/HP – and no mbo to match...

On the upside, my other Socket-7’s are all doing well, and by the way all can boot from SD and CF cards with IDE adaptors and run quite quickly and silently with them. Their current configurations don’t quite match up with the modularity aspired to by Puppy linux, as I have now only one CD burner and one usb2.0 PCI card to share between the lot… Nevertheless, I'm very happy with what I can get out of my "scrappers". Beige case-by-case experiences to follow in my next posts.

Reduce, reuse, recycle, rowlfe.