Puppy loads in about a minute and a half

I finally broke down and saved my Puppy Linux configuration to the hard drive so I don't have to type in the various paramaters every time I boot. Now Puppy loads from CD-ROM in under 2 minutes. I'll have to do a more geeky, exact-second count later, but for now, it's all good.

Tip: When printing, the LaserJet 5 driver doesn't work. Pick Generic Postscript instead.

Puppy services working tally: Ethernet, sound, printing. In short, everything works on the Dell 3 GHz PC.

on This Old PC, Ethernet works. I haven't gotten sound yet. That machine's sound card is not PCI, hence not plug 'n' play. It's an old ISA card, and I'll have to spend a little time (or spend $9 for a new sound card, but I'd like to make the old one work). I'm getting close on wireless. It turns out my Airlink 101 AWLH3026 PCI Wi-Fi card has the Ralink 2500 chipset. Puppy knows its there and suggests the rt61 driver. But then when I try to do anything, the Network Wizard dies and can't be resurrected until the next boot.

Is it possible that I can't have Ethernet and wireless running at the same time? I'll have to try that. Since the driver is right there -- a Linux driver, mind you, it should work.

Funny. In Ubuntu, I can even see the neighborhood routers, but nothing in Firefox. At least I know that Linux and the Airlink are speaking, if not fully.

I'm thisclose to getting printing on This Old PC (parallel port, old LaserJet). Add sound and wireless, and I will have both systems working completely.

P.S. the mount/unmount tool in Puppy saw all my drives -- both CDs, Zip, USB flash, HD and floppy. The neat thing is that when you mount a drive, a file-manager window of what's on it pops up automatically. Neat and quick.

And have I mentioned in the past three entries or so that Puppy 2.13 comes equipped with Flash. It's a must for any Linux distro, but few include it. And even though it's not open source, Flash has taken over the video world. You can't watch YouTube without Flash (or most anything else, for that matter).

I wasn't feeling too charitable about the progress in my live-CD Linux "project," as I couldn't get much done on This Old PC, but since I've gotten everything I need out of This New PC, i.e. the Dell, I'm pig-in-shit happy today.

This Old PC tidbit: In Windows 2000, Internet Explorer 6 loads in about 4 seconds. Firefox takes about 20 seconds. That's why I cling to IE. Word 97 loads in about 5 seconds, too. I wonder why it takes about 30 on This Old Mac to load Word 6.0, and would I see any improvement with Office 98 (which I have on disc), or would things get worse?