A Little Follow-up

I said in the last post that I was running through all my Pups on thumb drives.  Well, some of them just didn't make the cut.  The old copy of Precise Puppy 5.6, and the 8 GB drive copy of Saluki didn't pass the muster.  For some reason, Precise was having trouble with the sound system on the X60s.  (Very unusual, as I'd had no trouble in the past.)  And, obviously, I had multiple copies of Saluki floating around, so...  (The copy loaded onto the X60s, and a copy on a 32 GB thumb drive that's my Virtual Box testbed.)  So, GParted did its brutal work, and I soon had 2 blank 8 GB thumb drives to play with.

My first idea was fairly practical.  I did up a new copy of PhatSlacko 5.5.  My current copy is on an old PNY thumb drive.  It's the smallest thumb I have (which was sort of amusing...  you know, Phat Slacko on a small drive...  yeah, never mind...)  It's also the most fragile of the bunch, not even having a metal cover over the business end.  And I've had it for ages.  So I figured I ought do up a newer version, which I did.  I now have a version on a much newer Sandisk, which I feel a bit safer with.  I just tested it on the T60, and it boots fine.  (Though, yeah, I botched the shutdown, and didn't specify my save file properly.  Have to work on that later.  What I get for being impatient...)

The second thumb got a bit different use.  Let me preface by saying that I usually always download an .ISO, and then burn it to CD or DVD.  I'm not a big Unetbootn user.  And I usually burn all my Puppy .ISOs, just so I'll have them on CD.  It's a bit expensive in the number of CDs used, but...

Well, I changed my SOP this time around.  I was searching for another Puppy Distro to try, with an eye towards the Panasonic CF-29 I just fixed up a while back.  While doing so, I ran across UPUP Raring, which looked rather interesting.  I noticed it didn't have a PAE kernel, which would be necessary to try to run it on the CF-29.  So I downloaded the .ISO on my Mint desktop, booted into PhatSlacko from CD to do that particular installation, and while I had Slacko up, mounted my desktop HD, and the UPUP .ISO, and did an install to the other other thumb drive.  A run through with Grub4Dos, and...

It worked.  Very well, as a matter of fact.  I am running it right now on the T60, and it actually did its initial boot better than Slacko.   I had to set up the trackpad under Slacko (scrolling and tapping), but UPUP had it set out of the box.  Granted, the desktop has a cartoon-y, BeOS-ish look to it, but I don't mind.  In fact, I kind of like it.  Like the old Puppy days, it's distinctive.

I'm going to be doing some more fiddling (can't really call it testing), but I'm pretty sure this one is going to get burned to disk.  May be a good choice for the Panasonic.  We shall see...

For now, I need to reboot the T60 and upgrade its copy of CrunchBang.  (Yes, I still have #! on here.  It runs sooooo well, I just hate to replace it.)

And then...?????