To the Dogs

So, it's an ungodly hour of the morning right now, I should be asleep, but I'm up fooling on the 'Net.  Yeah.  Another good night.

Actually, it's not that bad.  The major reason I'm up fiddling this late is...  I was working on a computer.  My old Acer Aspire 3003 WLCi, to be exact.  AMD Sempron processor at 1.8Ghz, 512 MB memory, and a 60 GB hard drive.  Blessed with a crotchety version of XP.

I mentioned before that I was thinking of putting Zorin OS Lite on it.  Well, I got to looking at Bodhi Linux, and then a few other distros.  I've got both Bodhi and Zorin sitting in the download folder of of my desktop here, waiting to be burned to CD.  But that hasn't happened yet.

I got a wild hair to back up all the junk that was still floating about on the Acer's HD.  Now this laptop was my sole machine for a couple years, and I'd done everything on it, from personal stuff, running a small business, and doing private contracting work.  It was packed with stuff, and took me forever to get it backed up.

AFterwards, I decided to do some testing with some liveboots, to see how the system would react.  The results were annoying.

Lubuntu 12.10 gagged and died due to something in firmware it didn't like.  An old version of Ubuntu 10.04 I'd downloaded to try to work with the Thinkpad R40 booted fine, but wouldn't see the wireless card.  (Well, it did see it, and identified it, but couldn't get the proper driver to load.)

I started to pop in a copy of Xubuntu 12.04, but better sense got to me.  I dug out a copy of Puppy Linux  4.4.3 ("Precise Puppy"), and put it in.

Worked like a freaking dream.  Booted fine, saw and activated the wireless, went right on line without a hitch.

I'd been peeved with Precise Puppy due to it's PAE requirement when I'd tried it on the R40.  But it totally redeemed itself tonight.  I now have a fallback system in case nothing works out with Zorin/Bodhi.  (I was going to test Damn Small Linux 4.4.10, but it's just too late right now.)

Did take the time to look up a new battery and a 1 GB memory upgrade for the Aspire.  We'll have this old gent up and running full duty before long!

And, on that note, I'm going to bed!