Thin Puppy back in the game

Ever since its Compact Flash chip died, the Thin Puppy has been out of commission, but I managed to pull one of the two CD drives from This Old PC and meld it with the Thin Puppy (Maxspeed Maxterm thin client).

It's a TDK CD-R drive, 2002 vintage. I pulled the IDE cable from the CF adapter and powered the drive with the previously unused hard-drive power cable (from the fanless power supply in the thin client).

Since I was having so much trouble with memory while running Puppy from the CF card (the box has 128 MB), I thought I would try Damn Small Linux instead, but that CD wouldn't boot.

So I tried Puppy 2.13, and it booted fine. Except that I have a whopping 4.6 MB of memory left after booting. That's in contrast to about 50 MB when running from the CF drive. (Yes, the Thin Puppy has no HD storage, not even the 1 GB CF -- everything is done in memory).

Predictibly, the SeaMonkey browser was painfully slow, bringing the system to its knees. So I went to the much-lighter Dillo browser -- something I should've done before the CF chip was killed.

Dillo doesn't to half the complex things that "modern" browser do. There's no CSS or Java, for instance, but the result is a blazing-fast Web experience that barely taxes the CPU or scarce memory in the Thin Puppy.

And yes, I am posting now on Dillo.

I am disturbed, however, by Damn Small Linux's refusal to run on the Thin Puppy from CD. I'll have to try DSL-n, the original DSL's larger cousin, which is built on a new version of the Linux kernel.

The little DSL was running great on This Old PC over the weekend, although I didn't get a chance to connect to the Internet, and that's seemingly where all the real problems come in to play.