OK.........

Here's the story...

A while back, I tripped across a junker Toshiba Satellite L305.  The price was right, so I snagged it.  It's a decent system, 2 GB RAM, 320 GB hard drive, 2.19 Ghz Pentium III Xeon/Celeron processor.  Decent for what I wanted.  Physically a little thumped up.  (A bit more ominously, I discovered that it won't go into the BIOS.  You can only get into the Boot menu...)

My intention was to install a version of Majaro on it, and just use it as a sort of lab rat computer.  Which I did.  Installed Manjaro with OpenBox.  And I liked it, alot.  A very solid system.  Fast, fairly light, and pretty easy to use.

However, I found myself not using it that much.  I tended to grab one of the Thinkpads, usually with a Puppy thumb drive...

Then, along came the Sony Vaio (the backstory of which everyone is painfully aware).  I've been lost on that for the last several days, fooling with an actual install of Precise Puppy.  So...

Well, it's kind of a rainy day here, and so I've got a good bit of inside time on my hands.  And I started thinking...

Oh, why not?

I pulled out the Toshiba and the Linux Lite 1.0.6 disk, wondering if Lite would recognize/properly map the keyboard on this system...

As you can guess, it did.  Linux Lite runs fine on the L305.  So, in one of those impulse things, I hit "Install", and...

I think the Manjaro report will be put off for a while.  So far, I think LL is going to actually do a good job on this system.

I'll do some customizing work on the system, get it to where I like it.  I might use this one as my main system for a while, with the Vaio assuming it's place as a tote-about subsidiary (stepping into the roll the X60s has been admirably filling).  We shall see how that works.

So far, so good.

OK, here we go.......

And a followup

Yep, so I really got tired of turning the Vaio on and off over and over again when I needed to be doing something other than playing with my new Puppy.  So, I broke down and downloaded/installed Acpitool.

Acpitool is a command line tool that gives you some awesome power management capabilities, one of which is a suspend function.  Just pull up the terminal, type in 'acpitool --suspend' (or 'acpitool - s'), and voila!  The computer snoozes.  Works like a charm on the Vaio.  I think I may download this to my various Puppy thumb drive setups and give it a whirl.

(I may even be sneaky and try it on the old Thinkpad R40 that was giving me so much trouble a while back.  It's been sidelined with the infamous "old Thinkpad sleeping sickness" problem.  Maybe Acpitool can help...)

Of course, Acpitool has a myriad of functions, and I haven't even begun to think about how to use it.  I'm going to go over the help page again and again to get it through my head on how it works and what it can do.

As for a followup on Puppy Precise on the Vaio, well...  Wow.  It's been flawless.  I've been using it all day, on and off, for long periods and short.  Mail, web browsing, blogging, heavy YouTube-ing...  It's taken it all in stride.  And I still, even as late as it is, have a decent charge on the battery.  Granted, I wouldn't want to do intense, day-long word processing or spreadsheeting on the 10" screen.  But for casual use...  This one's a winner.

To be honest, on this machine, Puppy Precise has ran circles around Lubuntu.  I'm glad I made the decision to do the install.

I'm happy.  It's been a good evening...

Of Vaio's and Toughbooks

Well, it's been a morning.  After one of those nights...

I noticed that there was something missing from the Vaio last night.  The PC card slot cover was gone.  I knew it had been there before, but...  Well, I found it, laying where I'd dropped the Vaio...  Sigh...

This lead to some desperate repair attempts at c. 1am, which is not a good time to be doing such things.  Alas, no success.

A quick trip to the Computer-Shop-Across-the-River this morning provided only partial relief.  The door simply would not go back in properly.  Oh well...  I remembered some PCMCIA USB cards I had, and thought that might be a good thing for the Vaio, given this system only has two USB ports, and one of those is under a cover...

After some bouncing around, taking care of other matters, I came home to find a nice surprise:  The replacement CD/DVD drive for the CF-29 had arrived.  A quick swap with the old unit, and...  Yes!  Worked fine.  Excellent!

To do a quick check, I popped in an old copy of Precise Puppy 5.4.3...  Oops!  That's PAE enabled, and the CF-29 isn't.    But Precise 5.6 doesn't have a PAE requirement, and it booted perfectly.  The touch screen still goes wonky, but otherwise...  Great!

OK, the CF-29 taken care of, back to the Vaio.  After some digging, I found one of the USB cards, and popped it into the card slot.  Booted into Lubuntu (now set in "Notebook" mode), and...

Nothing.  It's not seeing the card.  I insert a USB thumb drive.  Nothing...  Not seeing/mounting the drive...  Check for drivers.  Nothing...  Check for settings.  Nothing...

  OK, re-insert the card....  OK, reboot...

Nothing.

Deep sigh.  Think zen thoughts.  Reach for the Precise Puppy 5.6.1 disk, newly burned last night.

Reboot.  Set up everything.  Insert the thumb drive.  Look...

Hey...  is that a USB thumb drive showing up on the screen?  Click to mount...

It works!  Perfectly!

That does it.  On impulse, I fire up Gparted, repartition the drive, and hit the Puppy Universal Installer.  Within minutes, I have a Puppy "frugal" install on the hard drive.  My first.  Reboot, do the setups and checks...

Perfect.

I can live with the no suspend mode for now, and with the USB card jutting out of the side of the machine.  Everything's working, so I'm happy.

We'll go from there....

Been there...

Yeah...  Great day...

I've been deciding the OS fate question of the Vaio for some time.

The short answer: Lubuntu 13.04.

But it was a long, twisted, and unhappy road getting here.

I finally decided against any of the Puppy family due to the lack of a Suspend function.  (Yeah, I know there's a workaround, sort of...)  So, I went ahead and grabbed an .iso of Lubuntu, and burned it.

But, then, I got an idea.  (Those of you in the know are cringing right about now.)

In a word...  Linux Lite.  I'd heard good things about it.  It sounded decent, so...  Off I go, downloading and burning a copy of 1.0.6, the latest. So far...

Oops.  Things start to take an ominous turn when I live boot on the Acer desktop.  The keyboard mapping is wonky.  Type a "i" for instance, and you get a "5" instead.  And so on...

Oh, that's no problem, I tell myself.  When I do the install on the Vaio, I'll correct this when I set up the keyboard...

And thus are sad fantasies made of.

Let us just say that Linux Lite 1.0.6 AND 1.0.4 (yeah, I eventually downloaded it, too) do not like the the keyboards on the Acer, nor on the Vaio.  This after fighting with setups and settings and whatever else I could find...

1.0.6 does like the keyboard on my Thinkpad T61, however.  Which does me no good, as I don't want it on the T61!

This has been VERY good for my soul.

So, two perfectly good blank DVDs wasted on an OS that I will probably never use.  Joy.  I am now stuck with Lubuntu, which doesn't really do it for me.

The whine-o-meter is starting to crank...

Though, there was an odd side note to all of this.  While digging out the extra DVD to burn, I came across an unlabeled disk on my desk.  Assuming it was blank, I stuck it in the machine, only to find that it was an .iso burn for GhostBSD.  This triggers some tiny, distant warning bells, but what the hey?  The evening really can't get any worse, so...

After the 10 minute ++ boot up on the T61 (!?!), I finally get to the desktop.  Which is pretty much worthless, as I can't seem to get the system to do anything.  I can't remember what the default password is for root access, and really don't feel like guessing.  And then the damn thing won't shut down.

Yeah...

I want my MacPup...

Strays...

It's been one of those days...

I picked up another stray today...  Yep, a little Sony Vaio, one of the "just above netbook" models.  I got it for a decent price, and it arrived today.  A nice little system.

It has its flaws.  Won't give me a boot from USB option.  And the button on the optical drive is freaking tiny.  But it's not bad.  The screen, for something this small (c.10" range) is quite clear.  Even my bleary eyes appreciate it.

It came with WinXP onboard, and the seller actually took care of updates.  He installed FireFox, OpenOffice, and Avira, all of which work well.  (I have zero experience with Avira, but I've read some good things...)  Of course, XP isn't going to last too long...

The two contenders I had in mind were Lubuntu and/or Xubuntu.  I was leaning towards the latter, as I've not used it on any of my other systems, and wanted to give it a whirl.  (I briefly had Lubuntu on my X60s, and liked it.)  So, to do some testing, I pulled out a couple .iso burns I'd made a while back.

Xubuntu booted up well, but it seemed like it took forever, even giving it the delay for a live boot.  Then, to my surprise, even though it was telling me it recognized the wireless card, and saw networks available, it wouldn't give me the wireless icon.  All I could get was the "edit wireless profile".

Rubbish.

I rebooted, and put in Lubuntu.  In this case, everything worked fine.  No problems at all.   However, the latest version I have is 12.10, not having bothered to download 13.04.  And I further remember having to manually install Flash on Lubuntu.  Not that that's a problem (and maybe it's been corrected since I had to do it), but my inherently lazy nature rebels...

So...

Right now, I'm doing a battery test, and decided to not fool with running XP. Instead, I live booted into MacPup 5.2.9.  Again, everything works perfectly, including Flash.

So...  Hmmm...

I'm seriously considering installing my first working Puppy-to-hard-drive install.  It's very, very tempting...

But I'm going to think about it.  May try a live boot of a couple other distros, just to see how they work/look.  (There is an aesthetic quality I'm looking for, too..)

We shall see...

Odd...

No, this isn't about the Manjaro write-up.  That will come eventually.  Honest...

Yes, this is about me throwing a fit.  But I threw it about 2 hours ago.  I've fixed everything since then.

I've been trying to get all the distros I'm running updated on their individual systems.  And I've been trying to get some time in with all the USB installed systems, seeing if I need to do reinstalls, etc.  Today, it was MacPup's turn.

I had been thinking that the version I had was 5.2.8.  Don't know how I got that in my head, but I was making mental notes to download a new .iso, etc.  However, a quick check of my "hard" copy (ie, on CD) showed that I had 5.2.9, so, OK then...

Did a quick boot-up on my T61, which was the test computer for the day.  (I'd already done all the updates on Ubuntu 12.04 on the HD.)  So, I inserted the USB stick, fired the system up, and booted into MacPup.

Everything seemed copacetic, till I got interrupted and had to shut the system down.  When I came back later, I noticed the clock, which had been right on the last reboot was waaay off.  OK, not overly surprising.  A quick jump into the desktop menu, a reset, and off we go.

Then I tried to hit YouTube, and noticed no sound.  OK, not overly unusual.  I went for the ALSA board... 

My nose really hurt after hitting that wall...  The system seemed to be telling me that it didn't recognize the sound board...  Huh?  Well...  Uhm...  Several minutes of fiddling got me nowhere.  Option after option got me nowhere.  It wasn't working...

(It was, strangely, as this moment that I realized that I'd never installed the "systray" module in the MacPup IBar.  I was never a heavy MP user, and the system had always worked so well that I never really needed it...)

I shut down the T61, and grabbed the T400, which I'd used MP more than most of my systems, and rebooted.

Nada.  Different set of oddities, but same outcome:  No sound.

OK, on to brute force tactic no.1.  I went in and deleted my Save file.  Extreme, yes, but I really had nothing stored in it, so...

That seemed to work. MP was forced to do recognize hardware on its first bootup.  Everything seemed to be back to normal.

And then I bolluxed up the Save file.  Instead of creating a new file, I hit the "save to..." feature which uses the whole partition rather than setting up a specific Save file.  I've accidentally done this before, and it really didn't bother me that bad.  Yeah, it makes backups a pain, but I use MP so infrequently, and usually not for anything major...

At least the thing was booting properly, and had sound on both the T400 and T61.

Then, just to check, I booted onto my X60s, the "Mikey" of my computer line up (it works with everything).

Kaboom.  No sound.  ALSA not working.  No way to get sound.

Which brought me, reluctantly, to brute force method no. 2:  A complete redo of the USB stick.  Completely erased, repartitioned, and reinstalled.  I'm on my "first" boot on the T61, and all is going well.  When I shut it down, I will create an actual Save file, too.

In all truth, I'm sort of suspecting problems with the USB stick.  It's an older one which has seen heavy usage, so it might be trying to tell me something...  Like, "LOOK OUT BELOW!!!"

And, by the way, I enabled the "systray" module in the IBar.  Do you know strange those standard Puppy icons look next to those cool Enlightenment icons in the 'bar?

Now, on to my next hat trick...

half and half

50-50.  That's the score of the great USB experiment.

The TC1100 and the Acer Aspire 3000 both boot from USB thumb drives, no problems.  The Acer desktop and the Panasonic CF-29 do not.  I'm actually using the CF-29 right now, and have been fiddling with it for the better part of an hour.  Did a quick bootup, system BIOS test, and there is no option to boot from USB.

Oh well.  I have a new CD/DVD drive on order for the Panasonic, and that let me get on with Linux testing on this computer.  (Just prior to the drive dying, I'd managed to get it to boot into an older version of Puppy Precise with no problems, so I have good hopes.)

As for the TC1100, I'm thinking I might grab Unetbootin, and set up Ubuntu 12.04 on a thumb drive.  Give it a whirl, as I think it should boot.  (Why am I thinking there's no PAE requirement there?)  And Ubuntu has Wacom drivers installed, if I remember correctly...  (I am remembering correctly, right??)

Ah, the fun of it all...

Other than that, a lazy day.  Sort of.  I've been out fixing farm equipment, mowing, all that stuff.  It's quite warm out, so I've spent the latter part of the evening by the AC.  Good time to do computer stuff, right?

Actually, I think I'll be back outside in a bit.  A small, canine friend has appeared at my door, demanding attention.

Fun, fun!!

And as a follow-up

Ya Know...

Yeah, it's way too late, I'm losing valuable sleep, but...

I gots ta know...

My Acer desktop refuses to boot from a USB thumb drive.  In fact, it locks up if one is installed during bootup.  Weird.  And there is literally NO option for booting from USB in the setup...  Very weird.

The Acer Aspire notebook, however, works fine.  I'm in Puppy Precise 5.6, working away on it's old Sempron processor.  The only problem (if you can call it that) is Puppy starting with the ALSA settings all at zero.  The first time I used Puppy and had no sound, that was a problem.  Now it's habit to immediately check the settings the minute I boot on a new computer.

It was a bit of a problem, as I botched up which USB drive I stuck in the machine at bootup.  (I have a six slot case I keep my working thumb drives in.  One side for storage, the other for OS drives.  Perversely, I keep 2 identical drives opposite one another.  One is a 16 GB drive, for storage, the other the 8 GB with Precise.  Guess which one I grabbed first time 'round...)  When I force rebooted the system, it apparently reset the boot precedence.  So, I had to go back into Setup and redo. Then everything worked perfectly.

Sooooooo...  The adventure continues...

Ya know...

So, I haven't gotten back on the Manjaro thing, I know...  It is up and running, and seems to be doing fine.  But...well...  Hardware issues...  Let's just say, old Toshiba, hardware issues, etc.  I'll get around to it eventually.  Honest...

Tonight, however, is a lesson in not paying attention.  (Amazing that that would happen to me, eh?)

I have been trying to rehabilitate some of the older computers in the stable, including the Panasonic CF-29 clunker, and my uber-cool little HP TC1100 (on which I am typing right now).  This was slightly complicated by the CD/DVD drive on the Toughbook dying a slow death.  So, I moved on to experimenting with USB stick-based stuff.

The highly recessed, single USB port on the Toughbook makes it a pain to work with.  Some checking with a Targa USB extension showed promise, but I never got 'round to doing much with it.

On to the TC1100, which nicely has 2 fairly accessible ports on the side of the screen.  (Or the bottom of the unit, if you're using it as a tablet in portrait mode.)  (This is getting confusing.)  I did a quick check on trying to boot Precise Puppy 5.6 from my 8GB thumb drive.

No such luck.  I can't find the USB option listed in the bootup menu...  Odd...  Sort of disgusted, I pack the computer back away on my overloaded office chair and go on to other things.  (Reference the Toshiba bit above.)

Well, tonight. I somehow ended up on YouTube, watching a video of someone booting an older version of Ubuntu on a TC1100.  From a USB thumb drive.

Hmmm...

Out comes the TC1100, and into the System Setup I go...

And, yeah, I know there are folks out there chuckling right now, saying, "You found it hidden under the 'Hard Drive' option, didn't you?"  Well, yeah, I did.  Which irks me mightily.  But a simply click of the '+' key altered the boot precedence, and faster than you can say "Golly Gee, Willikers!", I was booting from the USB drive.  No problems!

OK, one problem:  Precise doesn't recognize any of the pointing devices on the TC1100.

But I can deal!  At least I know that I can boot from USB now, which makes me very happy.  (Yeah, I know...  Doesn't take much...)

This also opens up some new things for me.  I had some trouble on my Acer desktop, and the old Acer Aspire laptop, with finding a USB boot option.  Again, I never thought to look under "Hard Drive" in the setup. 

Hmmm...

Absences