Puppy Linux 2.15CE on an old IBM ThinkPad

Well, a friend of mine inherited an old IBM ThinkPad from his sister which had a 800 MHZ Pentium-III (not too bad), a 10 GB hard drive (small but usable) and 128MB of RAM. He could have bought more memory for the machine to run XP on it (forget Vista), but since you can buy a whole laptop like this on eBay for under $100, it seemed like a lot to spend $20-30 to push it to 256MB or 384MB just to run XP. The simple solution appeared just a few days ago -- a brand new Puppy Linux release (version 2.15 Community Edition)! Just a 130MB download and a fast burn onto a $0.20 CD and his old ThinkPad roared to life? The small 128MB is no problem, Puppy runs just fine with that. After installing it fully, the disk still had well over 9GB free since Puppy only took about 450MB (including AbiWord, Gnumeric, Firefox, XMMS, etc....) It easily detected his IBM EtherJet card (he still needs to find his sister's dongle -- but that sounds creepy!), my Dell branded 3com CardBus ethernet card, and even a Gigafast wireless 802.11b card I had. It has a nice looking desktop and easy to use Wizards to set just about anything up. Who needs stinking Windows XP or Vista? AbiWord will read/write Word files just fine, Gnumeric will cover his Excel spreadsheets no problem, and XMMS plays his MP3 files just fine! And with over 9GB left on his hard drive he can keep quite a collection of files on that little laptop. Just think if someone tried to install Vista and Office 2007 on a 10 GB hard drive. Would any space be left?

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