Continuing the Fun

After my last post, I found myself cruising around some of my old YouTube haunts, ending up at PuppyLinuxWorld.  The good IcyOS was one of my online mentors when I first started delving into the deep, dark Linux world.  His videos are well-done, and he has just the right off-beat sense of humor to appeal to someone as...well, off-beat as me. 

While cruising through his older stuff, I got a bit nostalgic.  (Me?  Noooo....)  Ended up plugged & charging my old Thinkpad X60s, which still has the ever-marvelous Saluki Linux installed.  of all the Puppy Linux descendents, Saluki is probably my favorite.  Of all the variants I've tried, Saluki always struck me as by far the best version to use for full-scale daily productive work. 

Alas, of course, Saluki is no longer being developed, and the last time I checked, it's repositories were getting a little long in the tooth.  I was able, some time back, to snag a newer version of Firefox to install, keeping the browser up to date, but...  Still, I haven't found anything that can replace it yet.  I've tried Lighthouse, which is nice, but is 64-bit, and won't run on older systems like the X60s.  (I also had some problems with the touchpad support when I installed it on my T410s.)  I've also tried Simplicity, which is quite nice, but just didn't quite click with me.  And, yes, I've been half-keeping an eye on Saluki's "annointed" successor, Carolina.  (In fact, I have the latest version stuck on a thumb drive to test on the X60s, but just haven't gotten 'round to it.  I did run it on my T430, and it ran OK, but I still have some issues...)  Still, none of these really "do it" for me the way Saluki does.

So, in my nostalgic mood, I dragged out the X60s, and fired it up.  Kicked up the copy of FireFox, and was quite happy when it did its upgrade to v.27.  That's cool.  And Flash still works, as I spent too much time watching the new Godzilla trailer on YouTube...  (I know...  But my Inner-9-Year-Old was quite insistent.)  I'd even forgotten I'd installed a conky showing all my system settings.  In short...  Well, it was like rekindling a romance with an old fling...

And I still have 51% left on the battery...

I did use Saluki to do a mass reset on my fleet of Puppy USB boot drives.  (Basically I just went in and erased all the "save" files.  I'll set up new ones when I next boot each of those thumb drives.)  However, I did not touch my 32 GB "monster" drive, which has (you guessed it) another copy of Saluki on it.  I'd set it up ages ago to do some Virtual Box testing, which I never really got around to doing. 

In any event, it's been kind of fun to spend some time with an old friend.  I may actually take the X60s with me when I go back out on the road, along with that thumb drive collection, and see if I can get some more quality time in.

We shall see...