Can Puppy run on Pentium 1 computer?

[alexham36]

I have read somewhere that Puppy Slacko can be installed on Pentium 1 computer and I would like to try it.
I have old IBM Aptiva Pentium 1 and Windows 98. It works fine, but when I tried to boot from Puppy CD, it started in Win98 and I could not do anything. Changing the CD as the 1st drive for boot up did not change enything.

Any advice would be welcome.

Thanks,

Alex

[hawnik]

Hi Alex

I have tried putting Puppy on a PC and it quickly fell off so let alone running on it

Seriously, I am by no means any expert with Linux as I only play with Linux live boot CD every now and then. If you are also using Puppy live CD then you may have problem related to the amount of RAM you have in the PC.

Search in Google with "Puppy Linux Specifications" and found 3 links that may interest you:

PuppyLinux: Minimum System Requirements
puppylinux.org/wikka/MinimumSystemRequirements

Is Puppy Linux a good option for and old computer? - Tech Support
www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f64/is-puppy-linux-a-good-option-for-and-old-computer-268503.html

Puppy RAM requirements - LinuxQuestions.org
www.linuxquestions.org/questions/puppy-71/puppy-ram-requirements-479538/

Hope the above helps but someone else more experienced in Linux should be able to provide better help than I can.

[vikingken]

I found out several years ago that PI motherboards were cracking up and usage had nothing to do with it. Take a new one out of it box and its not likely to run for very long, just technology of its day. To install anything, is a bit of a waste of time. You might get lucky and have one that runs for another 30 years, but I wouldn't bet money on it. They are experimenting all the time on materials, thickness of circuits, for this very reason. Although I'm not sure they want them to last too long even now. Unlike cars there are a lot of other technological reasons that motherboards will become useless, without actually falling to bits and they might last forever now. 

[alexham36]

Thank you Hawnik and Vikingken. I have Pentium 1 IBM with 128MB of RAM, so I will try one of the "bare bones" Puppy releases. Just as a project and if it does not work it would not matter all that much.

I am running Puppy-Slacko 5.5 off an 4GB USB stick. I am very pleased with it and if I could find a way to put it in "Suspend" mode it would be my main O/S.

I had bad experience with motherboards that you describe Vikingken, but it may be that IBM used better quality ones in their own machines. The one I have still working dates from about 1998, but it has been rarely used in the past 10 years.

Alex

[johnnybee]

Never been one for Intel machines, Alex, so I can't really comment; however I did build a few SECC P2 and P3 machines back in the early noughties, and found them to be slow but reliable.
You have to remember that USB was in its infancy when those P1's were about, so there may well be a problem with file recognition if you're using a live USB memory stick - those boards' CMOS chip don't recognise them as a bootable device.
You might try transferring the files to a CD, then use the CD as your primary boot device in BIOS - it might work!

[alexham36]

Thanks, Johnnybee. My machine does not have USB ports. It came with 2Gb HD, 16Mb RAM and Win95, which had some very good applications, but it kept crashing. I got fed up with re-installing, so I changed first to Win ME and then to Win98. I have 132Mb RAM, a floppy and a CD drive and a salvaged 10Gb HD. It's OK if you have all day, so I have not thrown it away because it can send faxes with a dialup modem. BIOS will let me boot up from the floppy, CD or HD.

Alex