Your mileage may vary, but I REALLY like Puppy. On most computers, you just plug in the CD and go. But, on this 10 year old design, it took much of my Linux guru knowlege to get it almost fully functional. I could still use help getting my PCMCIA/IDE CDRW to be recognized by cdrecord. Neither the old wizard, the new wizard, or my own best efforts have done anything but make it inaccessible even as a reader. It works great as a CD-ROM drive. It's a an EXP CRW-880P. Also, I can switch back and forth between the built-in mouse (a ps2 device) to a mouse attached to /dev/ttyS0 but I'd sure like to be able to use both at the same time. All the new Linux distributions and Windows do this automatically for me, keeping both built-in and USB mice working simultaneously on my "big" laptop, and I like that.

I started out on this machine with the 0.99 Firefox flavor, but I've ended up using 0.99 Unleashed (which I created on my desktop computer - also running Puppy) with the following web browsers: Links, Opera, Firefox, and Dillo. The reason for this is that Firefox is deadly slow on this computer. Links is now my primary browser because it works fast and works on most sites. If I need a more capable browser, Opera, though somewhat slow, seems to work fine. I'm keeping Firefox if I need it. Also, I kept Dillo, because Help didn't work without it, and I didn't feel like tracking down the problem. I ditched Amaya which seemed to be good for nothing. I also ditched a number of other programs I don't use, keeping the footprint of my installation still quite small. My usr_cram.fs is 52,793,344, and my image.gz is 6,692,385.

The trick to this very successful low RAM implementation is probably that I started with a 32 meg swap partition already set up from an earlier installation of Mandrake 7.1. My hard drive configuration is, more or less: hda1 1.3 gig vfat for Windows 98SE and a Type 1 Puppy Installation. The rest of the drive is an extended partition, about 770 megs, with the following logical partitions: 738 megs hda5 ext3 for a tpe 2 Puppy, and hda6 32 megs swap partition.

I can't boot from my PCMCIA CDROM, but I can run it from DOS or Windows, so I started out by installing the files vmlinuz, image.gz, and usr_cram.fs from the CD to /dev/hda1. I made tye type 2 installation to /dev/hda5 from that initial installation. I experimented extensively with Lilo (which I know well), Loadlin, and tiny.exe and had them all working to some degree (tiny.exe is very slow), but finally bit the bullet and implemented Grub (which I'm growing to love) by copying the /boot/grub files from my desktop computer, tailoring the menu.lst file which all goes in /dev/hda5 at /boot/grub and then installing Grub to the master boot sector from a Grub boot floppy that I also made on my desktop. Here is my menu.lst:

color cyan/blue light-cyan/black
# Boot automatically after 30 secs.
timeout 30
# By default, boot the first entry.
default 0
# Fallback to the second entry.
fallback 1

title Puppy on /dev/hda5
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5

title Puppy Linux on C:
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 PFILE=pup080-none-65536 PHOME=hda1
initrd /image.gz

title WinDOS
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Note that on /dev/hda1 I only have a 64 meg PFILE (root partition/file). For now, that seems to be more than enough space.

I had to manually get my built-in sound and PCMCIA going by loading them with the following additions to the /etc/rc.d/rc.local0 file:

#Andy's Changes
#sound card driver modules
modprobe opl3 io=0x388
modprobe opl3sa2 io=0x370 mss_io=0x530 irq=5 dma=1 dma2=0 mpu_io=0x330
/usr/bin/setvol 4 90 90
#PCMCIA driver modules
modprobe pcmcia_core
modprobe i82365
modprobe ds
/sbin/cardmgr -c /etc/pcmcia
#line below moved down from 17 lines above where it is commented out
/etc/rc.d/rc.network
#Replacing fstab with personal fstab
cp /etc/fstab.bak /etc/fstab

That last line is to restore my personal fstab file which Puppy overwrites each time Puppy boots up.

I've also implemented a number of other tweaks to suit my own taste, but the biggest was to get the US dictionary working. It seems that the .99 Puppy is hard wired to the language AU, and won't change permanently to anything else no matter what I do to configuration files in /usr (on my type 2 installation) and/or in /root/.abiword. I finally gave up and renamed the american dictionary files to british and placed them in /root/.abiword/dictionary.

I hope this information is helpful to someone.
:-)

Feel free to write to me for clarification, or I will also respond to questions here if I can.

I typed this up using Beaver on the subject Libretto and posted them here using Opera.