'Puppy' Linux Corner.....

Hi, HolyCowz.

Come march I may be getting rid of a intel core2 quad cpu q6600 2.40ghz still pretty fast for its age lol I'll keep you in mind (free of course). 

 

Do, please!

That's a very generous offer. I may take you up on it; I've always been one for running older stuff, anyway. To my mind, too much still perfectly serviceable 'elderly' hardware gets tossed in the trash, simply to keep on filling the coffers of a few large, greedy corporations.

It's a cycle that needs breaking (as often as possible!).....as I mentioned to Dave, further back in the thread. And of course, with Puppy being the distro of choice, all I'd need to do would be to swap my main drives over, connect everything, power-on.....and Puppy'll be off & running. None of this ridiculous crap you get with MicroSoft, where the install key MUST match the one generated for the motherboard & hardware.....jeez, talk about 'vendor lock-in'..!

The most I might need to do would be to reset some of my sym-links.....and re-run the Grub4DOS bootloader. About 10 minutes work, all told.

Keep me in mind! From the GMT time-zone, it looks as though you're here in the UK, yes?

Mike. 

Edited by Mike_Walsh, 07 December 2016 - 07:07 AM.

Yes I'm UK. Might be a few more bits to I offered it to the kids to learn to rebuild pc's but they don't seem to interested at the moment so by march if they don't want these bits they are all yours if you want them. More interested in ps4 lol.

It's old stuff but still functions well enough.

ASUSTeK Computer INC. P5N-E SLI main board

NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT

4.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3

Sounds good to me.

The Compaq desktop was rescued from its journey to the tip; it used to belong to my sister. She only ever used it for eBay and 'The Sims'.....it had a very gentle life. When XP went EOL, like most 'non-techie' types, she bought new with Win 7 pre-installed.

The CPU's at least 4 years younger than mine. The Compaq started life with a single-core Athlon64 3200+; I upgraded to an X2 3800+ 'cos the mobo would take it.....and it's made a world of difference to Puppy. She ran OK on it before.....but with the dual-core she just multitasks so much better.

And I see it's got an IDE port, too. Excellent; that means I can still use my PATA/IDE KingSpec solid state drive. Nice one!

Never used a graphics card. I bought an Nvidia Geforce GT210 for it, but then discovered that there were damaged pins in the single PCI-e slot, so couldn't use it.....and it's the very old 1.0a standard, anyway. I use a USB 3.0 adapter card, that sits in the top part of the slot, which 'misses' the damaged pins.....and for what I do, it's more useful, TBH. Makes transfer times to the 1TB external USB 3.0 Seagate 'Expansion' quite fast..! The onboard ATI Radeon Xpress 200 graphics chip still produces pin-sharp pictures for my graphics work.

I've never used anything other than DDR1.....although it is dual-channel.

It'd fit in nicely with my policy of 're-cycling', too..... 

One question, though; does it have on-board graphics.....or must it have a graphics card? The spec-sheet doesn't say.....

Mike. 

Edited by Mike_Walsh, 07 December 2016 - 09:12 AM.

I think it needs a GPU  I have never tried without. I'll look into it in the morning and get back to you.

Hi, HolyCowz.

I think it needs a GPU  I have never tried without. I'll look into it in the morning and get back to you.

 

Okay. Sounds good. Let me know what ya find out, please. 

Mike. 

It doesn't have a built in gpu, unplugged the card and booted it................@  it had no screen.

Mornin', HC!

No worries. Just have to get used to the whole business of graphics drivers, shan't I? (*Ooh, boy...*)

Okey-doke. Well, as I said; keep me in mind, please. I'll be more than happy to give it a new home... 

Catch ya later.

Mike. 

I tested it with puppy today it all works fine just to let you know pretty fast.

Hi again, HolyCowz.

Oh, you didn't have to go to all that trouble. (Mind you, it's very much appreciated.) Intel-based systems tend to be more straight-forward when it comes to Linux, luckily!

Mike. 

Intel-based systems tend to be more straight-forward when it comes to Linux, luckily!

Exactly why I went Intel based with onboard video when I upgraded my Desktop and laptop.
 
My Puppy loves my Desktop. Do I actually need swap? Never know might run out of ram.

Edited by NickAu, 08 December 2016 - 09:39 PM.

Installing Slacko 570 to a USB drive

Afternoon, everybody.

This is one thing I feel is best illustrated by a video. You can describe stuff until the cows come home, but it's never quite the same as seeing it for real (!)

I hope this is to everybody's liking. I've been working on this for a couple of days... The video itself was pretty straight-forward; record it with Simple Screen Recorder, and .....Bob's your mother's brother; job's a good 'un.

The audio, however; auugh! Talk about jumping through hoops.....

For some stupid reason, in Puppy, the sound chip on my big Compaq desktop refuses to record (either internally or from a microphone) at anything like a 'normal' speed. It always sounds like I'm talking through a mouthful of treacle; slow as hell. On ye ancient Dell (Intel-based, so yes, I agree with Nick in the previous post!), it works perfectly. So, I've recorded the 'sound-track' on the Dell, while watching SSR's 'playback' on the Compaq (to get my timing right..!) I then transferred the sound track across to the Compaq, and used OpenShot to combine the two into a watchable video.

(And it is only recording that seems to give problems; in every other respect, the Compaq's sound output is stellar. Quite outstanding for its age..!)

It's my very first proper attempt at video-editing.....and my first time at transcoding, too. OpenShot allows you to export your video in YouTube-ready format, all set correctly for uploading. I'm quite pleased with the results, I gotta admit!

This video shows me performing a USB install from an existing HD install, thus using the files from /mnt/home/ rather than off the LiveCD. I may do another of these, to illustrate the difference.

See what ya think..... (And don't laugh; I'm one of these folks who just sounds awful whenever they're recorded!!!) 

I'm under no illusions; this is pretty amateur. I've a long way to go yet, to catch up with the likes of Spatry!

But for a first attempt, well; it's not bad....   

Mike. 

Edited by Mike_Walsh, 15 December 2016 - 07:09 AM.

Good job Mike, clear and easy to follow.

Hi, Gary.

Ha! Using SSR was actually the easy bit. Recording the sound track wasn't hard, either; takes a wee bit of figuring things out in Retrovol (which is Puppy's GUI front-end for ALSA-Mixer), but there's not so many choices you can make.

It was combining the two together that was the fun part! I've been messing around with OpenShot for some time, but that's all it's been; messing around. Finally, it was time for a crash course in using the thing properly... 

Found the on-line user manual, and.... Well, I must confess; OpenShot's pretty intuitive really. I figured half of it out before I even looked at the manual, so.....

It's a sight easier than Cinelerra, say.....even though a lot of folks seem to rave about it. Cinelerra's very 'technical', if you like having billions of settings to play about with. Me, I just wanted something nice'n'easy...!! And OpenShot fits the bill......

As long as the video's easy to follow, that's the ticket.

Mike. 

Edited by Mike_Walsh, 14 December 2016 - 03:58 PM.

I think its very good, very clear and well explained. Your the David Attenborough of the puppy world haha

I think its very good, very clear and well explained. Your the David Attenborough of the puppy world haha

Hah..!! I wish.....      Of course, it is possible to be too self-deprecating, y'know...

Mike.