Bit of a surprise

Don't know about you, but I tend to like decent surprises.

But I'll save that for a moment.  On to other, more mundane surprises.

I'd switched the Thinkpad T30 over to Precise Puppy 5.6.1, and had no problem with it.  However, I've recently developed a strange interest in the Slacko side of the Puppyverse, so...

Yeah, I did the whole download/burn/install "thing" on the T30, ending up with an install of Puppy Slacko 5.6.  (Actually, there was a whole "going south" scenario, which involved faffing up the "Save" file creation, leading to me having to do a delete and recreate...  Leave it to me...)

Everything is working fine now, but I find myself just...not happy with it.  I mean, yeah, it runs fine, and looks OK, but...  I notice the fan now cranks much more than usual.  I monkeyed with the processor regulator (no, I can't remember what it's really called), and set it to "Powersave" mode for my running things off battery.  That seemed to help a bit, but...

I don't know.  I think I'm developing a serious case of Everything's-Wrong-OCD...

Anyway, I'm still giving Slacko the big chance.  I toted the system with me down to the local Historical Society session, but never got 'round to using it.  (Damn, that little thing is heavy, especially when compared to my T410s.  But when you compare the build quality of the two...  Well, let's not talk about "heavy", shall we?)

While I was downloading Slacko, I also grabbed a copy of Carolina Linux 1.0.  For those of you who don't know, Carolina is a fork off of Saluki Linux.  I've been considering Carolina ever since noting that Saluki was no longer being developed.  My main concern with Saluki was the seeming lack of an up-to-date web browser.  (I think the latest version that I'd then found of Firefox was 10.0 in the Saluki repos.)  I was really a bit concerned about using Saluki on my Thinkpad X60s.

So, through the download/burn/live boot cycle...  I had problems on the T410s.  It just seemed like Carolina didn't like booting from CD.  So, after some more of my famous faffing, I got it booting, and then decided to do a USB thumb drive install.  I had a 16 GB Kingston drive I'd gotten on the cheap from Amazon, so...  Instead of doing the quick-n-dirty install I normally do, I partitioned the drive with Gparted, then used the Puppy Universal Installer included with Carolina to install to the USB drive.

And then had the boot problems again on T410s.  Not sure what that was.  Teething problems..?

Anyway, I had the USB drive version working, and had dragged the X60s out to recharge, when I decided to check through Saluki again, to see what files I'd left on the computer, etc.  While I had Saluki booted up, I decided to give a run through the Package Manager, just for giggles.  I didn't, however search under .SFS packages, but under the standard Puppy packages.

The fact that I'm now typing this under Firefox 24.0...  Well, I'm just going to leave it at that...

Faffing, indeed...

Needless to say, Saluki is staying on this system now.  I did test boot of Carolina here, and it worked perfectly.  (A slight sound problem that required a couple quick clicks under the ALSA setup to fix was it.)  So Saluki will stay as the main OS, and Carolina will be backup.  A nice surprise for the evening.

I can handle those...