I hear ya. I think I will just load Puppy on the Laptop. I knew he was going to try to sell me a new laptop by the way he was telling me of the cost I was getting into with the old laptop. I got atapi.sys error on the laptop. The laptop said on the outside to load with windows xp professional edition or windows 2000. I just had the one class with laptops and notebooks like the one class with linux. The friend said his 17 year old boy had the laptop and we spent most of the morning cleaning up his boy's room and then we found the ac/dc power cord for it. I am thinking the battery is not rechargeable but do not know for sure. With the atapi.sys error and it not reading the xp I had for dells that the cd/dvd rom might be broke. So I just told the repairman/computer parts seller to check it out. A lot of the time he will just give me old memory and parts to get me out of his place. But then I do some legitimate shopping there, too. People think because I am there that his shop must be open. the laptop has 192 mb memory and I wanted to see if he could put more memory in and upgrade the 8 mb video. But then there is always linux if he can't upgrade the software.

I found another cool version of Puppy. Seems like there is more than one. It is called LegacyOs. It used to be called teenpup but they redid it just for older computers.

Legacy OS
Last Update: Friday 3 September 2010 13:12 GMT

* Based on: Puppy
* Origin: Australia
* Architecture: i386
* Desktop: IceWM
* Category: Desktop, Live Medium, Old Computers
* Status: Active


Legacy OS (formerly TEENpup Linux) is a distribution based on Puppy Linux. Although the original concept was to create a flavour of Puppy Linux with more applications and a more appealing desktop aimed at teenage users, Legacy OS has now grown to become a general purpose distribution. It comes with a large number of applications, browser plugins and media codecs as standard software. Despite these enhancements Legacy OS is still perfectly suitable for installation on older and low-resource computers, as well as modern hardware.

It has a cool fluxbox and you can choose window managers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASZm1aHDh_k

This will perfect for my laptop once I get back out of the shop.

Now I know why they call it CAOS Linux. What a trip! I had such high hopes. It actually does good but I would have to go back on a refresher of using Linux through bash. I was ready to bash the screen.

I had to look up caos linux, too. (where do you find all this stuff?!) Their webpage says they are geared toward servers, which would explain why there was no gui to click around in.

Was there something in particular you were looking for from your mega distro hoppage?

I was just checking if there was a good American made free distro. I am checking into this Mac Pup that just came out. I have been wanting to try the E17 Enlightment window manager and Mac Pup is supposed to have it on it. I set up XP all day on one of the hard drives.

I just love this Grub4dos. That is what I was wanting. MacPup uses ext 3. I didn't like ext 2. LegacyOs I loved but didn't like the ext2. Which was one of the things I didn't like PCLinuxOS and the old Debian Lenny. Ubuntu is working just fine on ext4 on the SATA 1TB drive. Windows XP is working just fine on NTFS on the 80 gb Western Digital Drive. And now MacPup is working beautiful on ext 3 on the 40 gb Seagate drive. And I can boot to any of them through MacPup. MacPup 5.20 came from Lucid Puppy 5.2 which came from Debian and Ubuntu. Puppy just isn't up to ext 4 yet but it works great with the different operating environments. Enlightment E17 is cool. But I also have the switch windows managers if I want to run Fluxbox, ice or jvm.

I really like this systemrescuecd. It is made by Gentoo. I think it is better than Fdisk. It has a XFce desktop and I am online with it right now. It loads fast and it has some really partitioning programs.

I am trying this PartedMagic to see what it is like. With the Ubuntu grub2 it detects Ubuntu and XP okay but calls Puppy an unknown linux distribution. I am curious about this supergrubdisk on PartedMagic.

I am as techy as they come but dude your in a class by yourself if you want to grub download ubcd5.0.
Itruns off the cd easy peasy lemon squeezy for multiple os without formating vmware gonna be your best bet.creates a virtual machine in windows and runs other os's in them

At the risk of coming off as a dick and your taking offense;
The time you've spent installing all those linux distros might have been better used working with one or two distros, learning the ropes and making them your own. I think, with that knowlege, you are better equipped to hop around and make a final decision as to what distro you land upon. After all, the kernel and software we use is all the same stuff, no matter what distro you use. Sure, the different distros have their own little tweaks and mods, but with a little bit of real working knowlege you can make any distro work like the next.
Again, I don't mean to offend. Just slow down and smell the roses.
I say, start with one of the big ones* and just learn for a while. (give it a good few months)

* Slackware, debian, gentoo, sabayon, suse, mandriva...

Now that I'm being a dick, I'd better post this;

http://www.zdnet.com/photos/exotic-linux-distros-can-come-in-handy/6205307

Thats all true, and distro hopping is a hobby for some. I used to do it for the fun of doing it - not with any notion that it was a time efficient way of experiencing the world of linux software.

No offence taken. Debian I tried for a long time. Just read about Slackware. Sabayon seems interesting. Suse wasn't my cup of tea but I did try it. Mandriva was okay. Keeping Ubuntu on the main drive and WinXP on the second one. Ubuntu I have been with 7.4 when Canonical sent me the free CD. Puppy now I decided to give up on except to just run off the cd. Same with Knoppix. I just have to tell you that this Lunar Linux I just couldn't figure out. Been reading a lot up Gentoo. What a really big download though.

It is a fun addiction. I remember with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and watching the OS load up. I think that is when I first got hooked. Unless you count DOS, of course. I started with 2.0 and found out it was really just a start up disk. DOS 4 was fun. DOS 5.0 even got more interesting. Then moved up to 6 and 6.22. I got 7.10 on a CD, the Linux version with the GPL on it. Abandonedware dot com was cool. I had the Vetus site with the old OSes. I think that is where I got the 7.10.

That's cool, man. Just didn't want to stand here and not say anything while you were looking for something that wasn't there.



Yeah, I read it every day- folks sizing up different distros... and enjoying it Like I said above, though, I just wanted to throw 2 cents in, in case he might have been hunting for something that was going to be a 'fix' for something that wasn't to his liking, when he could just tweak a file or two or grab some firmware, etc.
Maybe this is one of those times my nose got to where it wasn't supposed to be. It was with good intentions.

I'm glad you did!



I think you made a good point about that.

Got another laptop. I had the Dell Latitude. The computer guy couldn't fix it. I took the hard drive out and jammed it back in. Then it worked. But he sold me another laptop. This time a HP Compaq nx9020. He had to order a charger for it. It has Windows XP Professional by default. I had success tweaking with Shiki Colors. It changed the Ubuntu theme from orange to blue. Made Ubuntu look like Fedora. Ubuntu and Debian worked well together but then I just had to add Sabayon to the mix. It seemed like all was going well but had trouble with grub and extensions. Had Ubuntu and Squeeze with grub2 but Sabayon just didn't like grub2. Sabayon is built from Gentoo. Ubuntu and Squeeze both Debian. Debian said Sabayon was still there but Ubuntu wouldn't even acknowledge Sabayon. Debian said Sabayon was still there but once Debian over wrote it Sabayon couldn't boot. Bodhi and Sabayon looked a lot alike. Ubuntu calls Puppy an unknown file system. Even the one called Lucid Pup built like Ubuntu. I wouldn't call it any of it wasted time. I sure learned a lot. What I learned I am not sure I could retain though. Talk about anomalies and strange happenings. Wow. Still the strangest ones out there have to be BSD derivatives and Lunar Linux. I am not sure which one is stranger though. The second time I loaded Sabayon I did with the graphical interface where I could try to understand what it was doing. It really takes a very long time to load up. I think Squeeze takes longer though. I just about went through a 25 pack of cds from burning the isos. I think vicariously I could come to the same opinions as Jesse Smith on the Distrowatch.com site. I would love to have his job. I am glad I can listen to him on og and read his reports. I have came to similar conclusions. I think I will just read what he has to say and hear what he has to say. Wasn't it Greyhound who used to say, "Go Greyhound and leave the driving to us."? My curiosity would be appeased with less down time.

If you want to learn about what's under the hood, gentoo is a good learning experience. I used it for a few years, up to shortly after drobbins left. That's been a while ago, now, but I still see people saying that they still have a good forum for when you break it. (yes, you [italic]will[/italic] break it :-)
It could make a neat project for one of your many laptops you got over there As long as you have another main box, it won't be frustrating when it breaks. A 'take your time, have fun and learn' kind of thing.



Sometimes ya gotta let em know who's boss!

Cheers!

I guess I am not the only one who likes to tweak - The HP Compaq computer notebook. Actually to find out what I thought were laptops were notebooks. We just had the one class with laptops and notebooks in college. And it was like back in between 2000 to 2002. Then took Networking between 2002 to 2004. They rushed it during my computer repair class just almost as fast as they rushed Linux. Anyway, the Compaq has a wireless connection which works great if I was next to a signal. But the Nic port doesn't show up in Control Panel so I can't home network. I tried the direct connect by taking out the Cat 5 on the main computer and put it in the Notebook. No recognition either way to get Online those ways. The computer guy said the Nursing Home had restrictive wireless and he should know since he put it in for them. So that was why I couldn't connect at work. Got Ubuntu on the SATA drive and XP on the 40 gb IDE slave drive. Nothing on the 80gb IDE master drive. The configuration on the other ribbon is with one CD-ROM master and the Omega Zip 250 MB IDE drive which the computer reports is SCSI. Got the San Disk 4gb and San Disk 16gb clean out, too. Parted Magic is awesome and so is SystemRescueCd. I prefer Parted Magic. That is so cool how it loads up in RAM and ejects the disk. I like Parted Magic even better than Puppy. I mean I can go Online in just RAM even if I screwed up all my hard drives.
I will eventually download Gentoo. I got 8 computers in the house and 2 more out in the pumphouse. Not counting the 2 notebooks.

Sounds like a real computer junkie!