I pulled out the Compaq Armada 7770dmt, circa 1999, with 144 MB RAM (fully loaded), a speedy 233 MHz Pentium II CPU and the original 3 GB hard drive, the latter component of which I haven’t seen since I opened up the bay for the first and last time when I purchased this laptop in, I believe, 2007 for .

I had my CDs ready and loaded up Quirky and Wary — two of the latest Pups. As in the past, loading a live environment — even a Puppy environment — from CD on a 12-year-old laptop can take more than a little time. I was unsuccessful with the Xorg driver while running Wary. A reboot to use the Vesa driver was successful in getting an 800×600 display.

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I got a comment from BK (it could be Puppy lead developer Barry Kauler, or not …) about PPLOG, a flat-file blogging system that — like Bloxsom and Ode — consists of a single Perl script and very little else.

PPLOG comes out of the Puppy Linux community, and Puppy is a distribution that I’ve used quite a bit since I began messing around with Linux in late 2006/early 2007. I’m thinking of using it (again) on my 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt, which I recently upgraded from Debian Lenny to Squeeze. Squeeze is running great on it, but I think Puppy will allow me to squeeze (no pun intended) more performance out of this now-12-year-old laptop. The live CD will enable me to keep the disk entirely devoted to swap and storage, and Puppy is lean yet easy to configure — it’s not as bare as TinyCore.

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Ever since I first heard of Bradley Kuhn, formerly of the Software Freedom Law Center and now the [Software Freedom Conservancy], on Linux Outlaws, I’ve been interested in what he has to say about (did you guess it?) software freedom. I try to listen semi-regularly to his Free as in Freedom oggcast.

Here is an article from Bradley’s blog on why he returned to Debian recently after years running everything from Red Hat to Ubuntu.

The 2.6.37 kernel I got from Liquorix has made Debian Squeeze a nearly perfect distribution. The stock 2.6.32 kernel works great, except for sound, where plugging in my headphones doesn’t mute the speakers. This muting works with no configuration change in 2.6.37 from Liquorix.

I also finally have suspend/resume working for pretty much the first time ever in Linux, and I really like using it. The success of suspend/resume might be due to my installing the Debian nonfree firmware, which enabled DRI, which somehow factors into kernel mode setting. My understanding of the whole thing is a little vague, but what I do know is that suspend/resume works great, and this Debian Squeeze installation is running as well as anything I’ve ever used in the world of Linux and BSD.

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