Re: [Hampshire] mandrake 9.1 and ibm thinkpad x30 laptop

Will Davies wrote:
>
> Since someone else started the 'lightweight' distro theme. I feel
> justified in adding my plug for Puppy Linux. I run it on an X30 and it
> is really snappy.
> There are obviously compromises involved in using such a non-standard
> distro but if it works for the tasks you want then the performance is
> excellent.
>

Hi Will,

Another vote for Puppy here - I run it off of a USB stick on my work
Dell D430 to get around the fact that the harddrive is encrypted and I
am neither permitted nor in a position to swap it out with my own. Using
Puppy in this way allows me to by-pass the harddrive completely and
still have a fast, portable machine to use around the house.

As well as the compromises you mention (I am guessing you are referring
to the single-user style of operation here), there's the odd glitch I
have encountered with versions 3.01, and more recently 4.00, that would
hold me back from recommending this otherwise excellent distro to anyone
not prepared to invest a little effort in working around them, should
they arise.

For instance I could not get the save-file encryption to work with 3.01,
which it did effortlessly with 4.00, and I could not get 4.00 to boot
using exactly the same install methodology as i did with 3.01! In the
end I had to reinstall 3.01 and upgrade to 4.00 as the fresh install
simply refused to boot despite several attempts to work around the
issues. By mixing and matching in this way I overcame the encryption
issue, the bug affecting WPA and the problems with getting 4.00 to boot
- so I am a happy punter now.

That said, it is only an 80Mb download for the live CD, so not a huge
investment in terms of bandwidth to try it. It certainly breathes new
life into older machines - my sister's old 500MHz Compaq laptop is once
again usable running Puppy!

Sean