Puppy Linux on Old Laptop PC

Various light-weight distributions of Linux are promoted as options for extending the usefulness of older PC hardware that cannot be used easily or economically with today's Windows software and applications. I'm in the process of testing this concept on a 14-year old Dell Inspiron 3000 laptop that came with Windows Millennium Edition. This PC has 48 M of RAM and a 4 GB hard drive partitioned into two drives of about 2 GB each. I left Windows on the C: drive for now, and used the nearly empty D: drive (partition) to install Puppy Linux, a popular distribution for older hardware with limited memory.

The PC is now set up as a dual-boot Windows / Linux machine with the Puppy Linux branded GRUB boot menu as shown in the screen photo below (click on image to expand).


The Puppy Linux desktop is shown in the next photo that includes a part of the PC keyboard.



The next photo shows the main menu list and the top submenu expanded.

Additional work is needed to get the PCMCIA network card recognized and working in Linux. Three of the many available drivers were loaded, but a connection was not established. Also not yet working is the PC's USB interface. Both of these interfaces work correctly under Windows.

During the Linux exploration I also tried out the very slim Damn Small Linux, which works very well running from its (pocket sized) boot CD. This provided some good opportunities to review Linux / Unix filesystem concepts and commands, and to see the usefulness of this very compact distribution as a maintenance tool for any PC that can boot from a CD.

Other Linux presence in my household includes Ubuntu installed on two desktop PCs.