Toshiba Tecra 8000 PII 366 on Puppy Linux
For those of you who have never tried Puppy Linux I can only say,
"Try it , you'll like it"!
It is simply shocking the difference in speed you get on these older
machines when you use this OS. I have now installed it on 3 laptops, an
IBM ThinkPad 770Z, and an IBM ThinkPad 600E,
this one being the 3rd. All 3 had the same PII 366mhz processor and
between 128 and 192 mb of ram. I bought this machine because it was
within my price range. Each machine of course presents it's own
problems for any operating system but with a little patience you will
find there can be a diamond hiding in that old lump of coal. Enough of
that, here are the details.
The first thing you will need is a copy of Puppy Linux with xfree86
drivers that support the neomagic video chipset on this machine. I
started by using the ultimate boot cd to format and partition the
drive. Since puppy was going to be the sole os on the machine I set the
whole drive up as linux native. I am sure other types would have worked
also.
To begin, I booted to the live cd and entered all the information I had about my display.
Neomagic
1024x768 16bit
horozontal sync 31-48
vertical refresh 50-70
I chose the options closest to those listed above and used options 432 for available resouloutions.
4 = 1024x768
3 = 800x600
2 = 640x480
The next step was to install to HD. Puppy makes this an easy task and
it only takes a few minutes including installing grub bootloader to the
master boot record. Just read everything, follow the simple directions
and reboot. This version of Puppy may be hard to find, A big thankyou
goes out to bladehunter for this compilation.
Once you have installed Puppy, you need to get online. Since I have a
broadband connection I plugged in my Orinoco Classic Gold card and was
online when I rebooted via a wireless connection. No muss, no fuss.
This is my "work card" so I decided to use a different one. I
downloaded all the dot-pup
files I wanted to install like the wifi-beta that supports many
wireless cards, WAG which allows you to connect to wireless acess
points and a couple other favorites like xmms and mplayer.
Folowing the instructions with the wifi-beta I was able to get a
linksys wpc11 v4.0 card working fine. The only problem I encountered
was not allowing enough time at boot between loading the drivers with
ndiswrapper and dhcpcd. Puppy has a very good wiki and an excelent message board should you need any more information.
The next hurdle was getting the sound working. I ran into a lot of conflicts before I found the configuration that worked.
modprobe opl3sa2 io=0x538 mss_io=0x530 mpu_io=0x330 irq=5 dma=1 dma2=0
Just a little heads up, there is a rotary voulme control on the front of this machine, just above the drive bay.
I added this and my wireless config to rc.d local and the little
Tecra boots a full 30 seconds faster than my 2 ghz machine with a full
install of libranet. Of course there are a couple things I can't do
with the little pup but not many.
