The also-rans

I’ve mentioned a few candidates for the 150Mhz, 32Mb machine, which I keep on hand to deliberately confound with software written 14 years after its creation.

A few things have proved usable, but only in the slimmest, narrowest definition. Slitaz is the big winner, of course, and the age-old TinyFlux got a small nod. And of course, an outdated Ubuntu console.

But not everything gets a smilie. Here are a few that I tried but didn’t get much out of. For reasons that will be explained. …

I don’t remember how I came to find TurboPup, but it was a bit of a challenge to install. Installing Puppy Linux, for some reason, occasionally confounds me.

After fighting with emulated systems and installing from live USB drives, I finally got one TurboPup system written to an image, transferred it across, and started it up.

And it claims it can’t find its critical pup_420.sfs file. Oh well, I tried. Maybe a straight installation of Puppy, instead of a backdated derivative would be a better idea.

As a side note, if I could suggest one thing to the people who make Puppy Linux, it would be to cut down on the wordy dialog boxes. Pretty please.

I don’t want to speak for everyone, but it’s a bit tedious to skim through two paragraphs of narrative to find that there’s really only one button that matters.

It’s not a crime to put one terse sentence beside an option, and use a help button to explain in detail. 😉

Vector Linux, like I said before, wanted a seemingly immense 6Gb or so to install properly. It went against my grain but I went ahead and gave it that space, with the intention of moving the system across by way of a full-size external drive.

I was expecting a transfer time of over three hours when it moved across the Mebius’s USB1.1 port, which is pushing my limit. But it never came to that, because the installer kept freezing after the partitioning sequence. I took the hint.

I should mention that I did try Mandriva too, but not really with the purpose of pushing it onto a Pentium machine. Doesn’t matter, because it wouldn’t boot for me, either in an emulator, from USB or from CD. I must be doing something wrong. (And yes, I verified the checksums.)

Since Ubuntu 10.04 refused to boot, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Linux Mint Fluxbox built from a recent Ubuntu also refused to boot.

LMF relayed the same error messages about “real mode pages” and “loading a kernel first,” in its failed efforts to satisfy. I hold no grudge here though.

Because honestly, this was a bit of a dream. My previous efforts with Linux Mint cast from Ubuntu have told me that I really should be seeking out lightweight distros, not just distros that use lightweight window managers.

What I could really hope for now, is for some enterprising person to take the Linux Mint Debian system and trim it down to bare essentials. Now that might have hope at 150Mhz. 😈

That’s all for now. I have a couple more candidates on the list, and the image transfers only take up about an hour at a time. So my search certainly isn’t exhausted yet. And neither is the hardware. 🙂