Starhawk's Eco Mod

S

starhawk

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Oct 4, 2004
Messages
8,908
OK, I'm putting this here because I don't think it goes anywhere else. I've never done this before, so I hope I'm doing it right. FWIW, I haven't quite finished the thing yet, so I'm pretty sure that this thread is in the right place.

Also, be warned that my graphic arts capabilities do not extend to the camera. My photos suck horribly, and I know it. I apologize in advance for my photographic blurriness.

Having said all that... on with the thread!
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While my belief system is environmentalist to a very severe degree, I sometimes have a hard time living up to those beliefs... (I'd like to learn to farm someday -- but good luck catching me anywhere near a shovel any time since I was about 8!)

Recently, I came across this thread in the FS/T Forum -- and the creative gears in my head started turning at furious speeds. Here was an opportunity, I thought, for me to make an ecologically-conscious computer.

It hasn't worked out to be nearly as environmentally friendly as I'd wanted, for a couple of reasons that will be discussed later on, but it's pretty darn close.

I don't have a picture of this system completely unaltered, but the specs are enough to make any [H]ard|Modder cringe in pain. I'm about 90% sure that the chipset is a VIA CLE266... I know that the southbridge is a VIA VT82C686B, but the northbridge heatsink is epoxied down and I don't feel like risking the system just to find out a chip number. The original RAM in the system was a 64MB stick of PC133 SDRAM. nesuser2 was kind enough to chuck a 256MB stick in there, but it's still going to be deplorably slow. For the record, the system is capable of accepting a maximum of 512MB RAM.

As for the CPU, it's a VIA Eden, "Samuel 2" core. It's a very old version (at least two generations behind, even in its own line) of a processor that was designed to be as low-power as possible. Although I wasn't able to check the actual speed of the CPU before I started hacking this thing apart, I will tell you that it is at maximum a 600MHz CPU.

The "hard drive", or, rather, what passed for storage on this little Campbell's can of a computer, was a 16MB DiskOnChip with just enough room for an obsolete (and very stripped-down) version of Windows CE and a copy of IE6. I'm still figuring out how the company that made this thing managed to fit both of those items into a 16MB space, with room left over for a boot splash screen on top.

The power supply is nonstandard; it's actually designed more for industrial equipment and is of the type commonly referred to as "open frame" which means that it doesn't even have a housing. There are two wires that go between it and the motherboard, courtesy of a very odd connector, and that's it. I've seen a connector of that style before, once, and it was on the side fan of a computer that originally ran Windows 98.

<digression>
That system was a full-tower AT box that its owner abandoned to the mercies of the local Habitat For Humanity store. (Stephanie the Architect Somewhere Near Pittsboro, NC, please remember to wipe your hard drive next time.) When I got it from Habitat, they told me that it was so old that they couldn't put a price to it. So it was free.
</digression>

OK, back to reality... or at least what passes for it in my house, anyhow. Here is a pic of the computer before I started doing much to it...

In that picture, you can see that I've unplugged the DiskOnChip and the mainboard power connector. I haven't actually done anything yet.

NOTE: I'm gonna do this as a series of consecutive posts... I don't know what the maximum number of characters in one post can be in this forum, and I don't want to find out. I know that it's not normal to do things this way... but it's hella easier that way.
 
The first mod I did to this thing was to the power supply wiring. I needed a way to get power to... well... something ;) In order to put an OS on this heap, I had to have a way to do so. That involved power, and that involved a challenge: the only power-carrying wires in the entire computer go from the power supply to the motherboard, and that's only two wires: +5V and GND. There are no other power wires in the entire computer, and no other way of getting to them.

Hence my "modding" of the wiring. I hacked it. It's quick and dirty, but I'm about two steps above "Burns Self With Soldering Iron" :p so something that looks good isn't gonna happen. Instead, I stuck to the tried-and-true technology of... wire nuts.

Each of the two power wires is split two ways, to the motherboard AND to a "modified" Molex power connector (read: I hacked off the +12V and 12V_GND wires).

Now it looks like this...


Now for a discussion of the most unique challenge of this system: its power supply rating. A standard desktop these days runs at least 300W. I've seen more than one kilowatt-plus power supply reviewed in CPU Magazine.

This system has a maximum power output of precisely twenty two and one half watts. <record scratch> My ASUS netbook is rated for just under twice that much.

Obviously, this necessitated a hard look at common data-storage mediums and a thorough audit of their power requirements -- especially since I couldn't tell how much of that power was required by the nonstandard motherboard and components thereof.

Much to my disappointment, even a standard 2.5" form factor notebook hard disk consumed around 2W on read/write. Too much.

Then I remembered about CompactFlash cards. They happen to use a special pinout (50pins IIRC) but are otherwise IDE in protocol -- and they use somewhere south of 50mA of current -- at 5VDC, that's about a quarter of a Watt! (For the record, CF cards are usually dual voltage -- they can work at either 5V or 3.3V.)

My father gave me a Transcend 32GB CF card for Christmas, at my specific request. Around that time, I purchased a CF-to-IDE adapter from Mini-Box[dot]Com, along with the required power cable. This purchase totaled less than $15.

Now all I needed was an IDE cable and an OS. That's in the next post.
 
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OK... the IDE cable was more of challenge than you might think. Most motherboards newer than about 1998 have a "key" (a missing pin) in the IDE connector. Not this system. So I couldn't use the first, well, about seven cables that I came across. Argh!

Still, I was able to find a few that fit, and here's a pic of it with the cable and CF adapter attached. For you copy cats out there (nothing wrong with that), the adapter is model # CF-200 at Mini-Box. Note the white electrical tape -- the case is metal (this is important for later).


Now... for the OS, I had two contenders. I was originally going to use WattOS, but their support forums were at the time basically empty. Many people had recommended Puppy Linux, and I found the folks at their forum (http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/index.php) to be extremely friendly and helpful. They recommended a subset of Puppy called Wary.

After much experimentation and not enough patience, I had a working install of Wary Puppy 5.0 (as of this post, that is the latest version) up and running!

It is important to know that (as far as I can tell) the boot ROM (I'm pretty sure that it's not a real BIOS) on this system expects a FAT partition of some sort on what it boots to.

So, there is a 64MB FAT16 partition (hda1 in Linux-speak) on the CF card, and then an ext3 partition with Wary on it. The FAT16 partition contains the OS bootloader, a variant of a common Linux bootloader called Grub4DOS. *shrug* Hey, it works.

Here's how it looked at this point:



...and then... DISASTER. While messing around with the cable (which is really long and doesn't fit very well in the case), the CF card suddenly made a sizzling noise. I suddenly realized that the system was still plugged in, and that having the thing turned off didn't necessarily mean that power wasn't still flowing to the drive. I quickly unplugged the card and I'm fairly certain that nothing else got damaged.

I'm still not sure exactly what happened, but when I told Newegg that the drive had fried like a strip of bacon, they agreed to send me a replacement. I'm fairly certain that the unshielded bottom of the CF adapter shorted out on the case and cooked the disk, but I'll never know for certain. Still, I stuck some electrical tape on the bottom of the adapter, just to be safe.

That's where I am now.

Once I get the replacement CF card, I'll format it just like the last one, and I've got some work still to do in other areas. I need a shorter IDE cable for certain (I might have one that works still hiding somewhere), and I'm going to need to do some customizing in Puppy. Puppy uses a fork of Firefox called "SeaMonkey" which I really don't like.

The only other item of business is getting Internet on this thing. I know that's kind of odd to say, but the connection at my house is kind of odd to begin with. Mom and I live a mile outside of a small town (Siler City, NC) and we use a Verizon MiFi. (For the sake of civility, I won't air my opinion of Verizon's coverage in rural areas.) The MiFi device broadcasts a wireless LAN, and the only way to get that on this system is through USB. My last USB WiFi adapter was an original Belkin F5D7050. I say "was" because it is currently lifeless.

So the final summary of things to do:
(1) Rebuild the system with a shorter IDE cable and the replacement CF card.
(2) Get a new --and cheap!-- USB WiFi adapter. (Any suggestions?)
(3) Customize Puppy.
 
OK, I knew I was boring, but really... almost 100 views and not one comment?
 
I am totally watching your log. Maybe not as outwardly sexy as is the norm here...but this has more actual HACK to it than most of the high $ sparkly neon stuff that we see so much of.

Please continue.
 
BTW... if anyone has an old keyboard or mouse lying around... I'm looking to replace what I'm using right now. Here's what I'm looking for...

- Both keyboard and mouse should be beige, white, or light-to-medium gray... I'll take black if I have to, but I prefer beige (or similar) for this build, to match the case.
- Both keyboard and mouse *need* to be PS/2. This system only has two USB ports.
- I want an optical mouse with a scroll wheel. Current mouse is mechanical (ball type) and I hate it.
- Keyboard can be anything so long as it doesn't have a major computer brand label on it (HP, Compaq, Dell, eMachines, Acer, etc.) Personally, I like smaller keyboards (what Newegg calls "Mini") because I'm used to typing on laptops and netbooks... but any will really do, lol.
- I specifically want used and non-fancy equipment -- I'm trying to keep build costs (environmental and otherwise) to a minimum. Keep your Logitech G15. I want something boring.
 
Update time!

Haven't been able to get out of the house... I don't drive (I'm a silly person, don't ask) and Mom hasn't been feeling well. So the RMA hasn't gotten to Newegg yet... but I'm hoping it will tomorrow.

That doesn't mean that I haven't made progress... I managed to adapt a shorter ribbon cable to the system, and made a very ugly bracket for the CF adapter. The cable adaptation was simple but necessary and I'll talk about it first.

If you look at a real computer's IDE connector, and that computer was made *after* 1998 or so, it has only 39 pins -- one of them is missing, making a "keyed" connector. Ribbon cables made after about the same time have the corresponding hole covered up. It's still there, it's just covered. This means that those keyed cables won't work in my thin client, because the idiots that designed it used all 40 pins! (It's not keyed.) Well... ten minutes of experimentation with a very short but keyed cable yielded nice results. Wound up using an "exacto" knife, and it worked just fine.

Of course, I can't test actual functionality until I get the new CF card...

The bracket was a pain in the butt. I don't have proper tools for working metal or plastic, and the last time I worked with metal, I got a really ugly gash on my finger and the metal refused to apologize. I decided this time to try and work plastic instead.

I found an old binder of mine from college; it's made of about 1/16in or so plastic of unknown chemistry. I tried to cut it with "parrot beak" clippers (what everyone else seems to be calling diagonal cutters these days) and didn't get very far, but the tin snips did a nice (read: messy as all-get-out but effective) job of hacking out a chunk.

The next question was: how the #@!! do I bend the stuff? A quick call to My Father The Know-Almost-Everything Handyman And Craftsman yielded an interesting suggestion: heat it in the microwave and then try to bend it against a piece of properly angled metal.

I think that piece of plastic must have spent at least five minutes (total, not consecutive) in the nuker -- and another ten minutes of me bending it, mostly with pliers because the metal-angle idea didn't work very well. The result was... ugly but satisfactory. It worked. Not well, but enough to be functional.

At least I didn't have to drill the case -- there were two small holes in the punch-out expansion slot cover, so I just stuck sheet metal screws through them and got a screwdriver to do the rest. The CF adapter mounts to the bottom with two smaller pointy screws (not sure what type screw they are, since they didn't come from the same bin).

<shamelessplug>
If anyone on here is disgusted by my poor workmanship and wants to *donate* a metal bracket, PM me for measurements and I'll give 'em to ya.
</shamelessplug>

In the meantime, have a picture of my lack of skill that still somehow gets things done...
 
In Chapel Hill (NC) instead of my usual, slightly more rural haunting grounds. Note to the Mods: the different IP is due to being on my mother's 6yrs ancient Vaio VGN-S360... >.< she doesn't even use Firefox... ack.

Finally got my busted CF card off to Newegg... hope it gets there by the 29th (sent FedEx Ground to Whittier CA)... I'm gonna have trouble if I can't get that RMA.
 
starhawk said:
BTW... if anyone has an old keyboard or mouse lying around... I'm looking to replace what I'm using right now. Here's what I'm looking for...
.
Click to expand...

I have a few keyboards but i have a suspicion that shipping them from Norway to you would cost more than buying one :/
And i would not be to worried about the bracket :p
 
Considering that shipping from the UK is already like US$50 you're probably right, lol.

Not sure what you mean about the bracket.
 
i have a beige optical mouse id give you for the cost of shipping. i think its a microsoft. also have a keyboard and another optical mouse, but theyre both black and dell-branded. :/ any of these are free+shipping to a legit modder like yourself!

as for bending plastic, i just read that part and had an idea. since microwaves work by exciting the water molecules in whatever, the plastic probably didnt heat up very well since there isnt really any moisture in it. you MIGHT be able to dab your finger in some water, and run a line along where you want the bend, and then try nuking it. no idea whether or not this would work, but its possible!
 
draw me up the bracket you want and I will fab it for you out of aluminum
 
jojo69: I've got a *.pdf for you, and no way to upload it. Would you please PM me with your email address, so that I may send it to you without spending 45 minutes trying to find some place on the 'Net that will hold it for me...?
 
Just got word from Newegg that the RMA went through, and they will send me a new CF card in the next couple of days. Yay!

EDIT: forgot to mention... I found a keyboard that will do for this mod... it's a white Mitsumi POS, and the little clips that hold it up have fallen off, but it was free from the local computer shop so I guess it's OK. Can't beat free, right? (Of course I haven't tested the bugger yet...)
 
Sweet, hey, I'm a little concerned about the 3/8" dimension for the short side of your angle. It gives the long side a lot of lever and makes the short side rely solely on 2@ 6-32 threads in aluminum.

If that is all that will fit fine, but if we can lengthen that side a bit without interfering with anything else I would recommend it.
 
1/2in *should* fit, but the holes need to stay where they are, i.e. 3/16in from the top.
 
Thank you, Kyre! That really makes me feel good.

I've got a little secret side project I'm working on for this, which will stay unrevealed for a while. Suffice to say that it will be a major part of this mod, in an area that you folks probably won't expect.

I'll give one hint, though: it has to do with the OS, which will stay Puppy Linux.

I'm not saying another word about it until it's done and I've confirmed that it works.
 
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Just checked tracking, and my father has received the new CF card :D can't wait to get it... although I probably will. I don't see him again until next Thursday.

...and the surprise is almost done ;)
 
Ok, a rather loose interpretation of "next week" but it is still Friday and here is the bracket.

I could have polished it up...but that is time and energy and the thrust of your build is as little investment as possible, so I decided not to feed salmon to my air compressor just making it shiny.

 
Oh, that looks very, very pretty indeed :D sweet stuff. I just fired off an email with my address for ya.

Hope you don't mind but I'm going to need to modify it just a touch -- I didn't want to bother you with putting some sort of nonconductive coating on the bracket, so I've got some of those stupid clear rubber bumpy thingies (not to mention a roll of electrical tape) to keep the adapter from shorting out on that shiny awesome aluminum.

@all: my father stuck that replacement CF card in the mail this morning; I'll have it tomorrow. However, I'm not revealing that secret until I get the bracket in place and everything's done.
 
BIG AWESOME NEWS!!
This project is essentially done!

I received the bracket yesterday, and I'd gotten the CF card a few days before. That bracket looks fiiiine :eek: :D especially since jojo69 was kind enough to wrap the business part in some wide electrical tape. FWIW, electrical tape = PVC = not good for environment, but no worries, it's not enough to make *that* much difference, so (as I often say) no [H]ard|Feelings. Seriously, it's cool, dude.

Here, have some bracket pictures:


jojo69 did a master job on the bracket -- he even tapped the screw holes for standard case screws (for those of you taking notes, that's 6-32 thread; M3 is the standard for drives) and rounded the corners and edges slightly -- I am very, very impressed with his work. Seriously, dude, you're way awesome in my book :D

Installing the bracket went smoothly. I discovered during that process that the CF adapter was probably designed for M3 (drive) screws, as the fit of a case screw was... a little tight ;) That said, the board didn't crack, so again, it's all good. I stuck a foam grippy-pad (meant for chairs, not computers) on the bracket as insurance -- the thing is mounted through two holes in a pop-out PCI slot cover (the kind that's spot-welded to the case).

Here, have some more pics, this time of the bracket and adapter installed:


Now for the unveiling of the big secret. Screw the drumroll -- I want a fanfare :p

I made my own custom version of Puppy for this project.

Those of you who have used versions of Puppy in the past know that there is no actual distro named simply "Puppy Linux". The most official versions are called "Lucid Puppy" (for newer systems) and "Wary Puppy" (for older systems). In addition, there are over a dozen so-called "Puplets" (other versions of Puppy), each with various strengths and weaknesses. The man who created the first version of Puppy, a genius named Barry Kauler, incorporated a tool called "CD Remaster", which was also of his own invention.

Good Mr. Kauler also had another idea, which is central to using Puppy -- when you install Puppy, you can (sometimes) choose to do a "full" install, which sets things up similar to, say, Ubuntu, in that you have a filesystem on a disk. There is another sort of install, called a "Frugal" install, where the computer simply copies over the files from the CD and the user drops a bootloader on top -- and that's it. When you boot up, the machine takes the single SquashFS file (containing essentially the entire OS) and unpacks a virtual filesystem. Your changes get saved to a special file that is also mounted on bootup.

The advantage of a frugal install is that you can load extra SquashFS files -- just place them in your /mnt/home directory, run a (dead simple) boot config wizard, and reboot. Presto! Your new program (or set thereof) is installed.

Now, that CD Remaster Tool is even more awesome. It takes all the changes that you've made to your copy of Puppy (whatever Puplet you use) and dumps it all into one new SFS that has everything in it -- just the way you had it. Well... sorta. It has a little trouble with gtk themes and icon themes.

Enter Woofy, created by a fellow who calls himself sc0ttman on the Puppy Linux forum. Woofy is a tool that makes the CD Remaster process even better. It takes any version of Puppy (as an *.iso CD image) and makes whatever changes you want to it. You can add packages (called *.pet files -- "PET" stands for Puppy's Extra Treats :p ), you can delete discrete files, you can set up default apps, edit the file system, and change the CD boot menu around. It's awesome :D

So I started with a very pretty Puplet named Puplite 4.0, which is based on (original) Puppy 4.2.0. It really looks nice -- the default desktop has no icons on it, so your wallpaper really matters. The systray and a second tray (for drive icons) really do everything for you, and there is a shell script (called -- not kidding -- Poor Man's Conky) provides relevant system stats by emulating the popular app of the same function, Conky. (Those of you familiar with D*mn Small Linux and DSL-N know of Conky's predecessor, Torsmo.)

I took Puplite, and I added some significant functionality to it -- a lighter-weight version of OpenOffice called OOoLight (made by a French group whose name I don't recall right now; they are quite separate from OpenOffice), a couple of lightweight games, and a nifty little app that allows a user to dynamically scale the frequency of the system's CPU(s). I also got rid of some programs that were made redundant by my addition. I had originally included Java as part of this new setup, but it didn't work right and I had to take it out. No problems resulted from this; apparently OOoLight includes everything it needs to work correctly (without any further dependencies).

Being an artist and all (in addition to a nerd) I couldn't resist making a few aesthetic changes as well. The new OS has different wallpapers (four of them) and iconset. I added a tray to the top of the screen with a few popularly-used programs. I swapped out Poor Man's Conky (aka PMConky) for the real Conky as well.

The result: GreenPup 1.1.2, the Eco-Conscious Puplet :D . It's awesome!
[shamelessplug]If any of you folks want to try it out, the download thread is here.[/shamelessplug]

So, having done all of this, I loaded up my CF card with a 16MB FAT-16 partition (with a bootloader called Grub4DOS) and a 1GB swap partition and installed GreenPup on it. It worked!! [Note for you Windows users out there: Windows has a page file. Linux has a swap partition. Same function, different way of doing it.] I did customize the wallpaper and trays for my own personal system, of course.

Here's the rest of the pics, including two shots with a soda can.


Fresca is an awesome grapefruit-flavored soda, folks. I'll argue with Coke later over the licensing rights.

A crappy shot of the screen, and a screenshot of what it actually looks like (taken later):


The wallpaper is something I found on the 'Net -- I'm a serious fan of the Myst games, and the picture (a shot of the windmill from the Channelwood Age, as seen in RealMyst) seemed a natural fit for the concept of this computer.

One final picture, the "money shot" if you will:


BTW, for those wondering, the keyboard was rescued from the local computer shop's "free stuff" pile; it's a Mitsumi model that lost its feet. Fixed it with more of those grippy-foam chair-pads :p

There's still a little more to do on this system, but by and large it is done. I've purchased (for price of shipping) a 512MB stick of PC133 SDRAM; we'll see if it works in there when I get it. On the wish list is a USB Wi-Fi adapter and an optical, beige PS/2 mouse.

As for me, it's 2:45am here and I feel sleepily triumphant. Off to a well-earned good night's sleep for me ;) I'll see you guys in the morning, if I'm up that early :p
 
Great work dood, following your thread over the last few days (weeks) reminds me of when we ran Skole Linux at my school on cobbled together borrowed / stolen hardware. Any thing from thin clients to old 233 MHz beige boxes.

It warms my hart to see old stuff re purposed, and to see people really consider what they need and not what they want!
 
very impressive

Don't know if you caught this on hackaday over the weekend, very different approach but made me think of your project.

So your puppy... a few questions;

Will it fold?

Can it support alsa drivers and something like envy24 to run an MAudio soundcard?

What about non open source video drivers?
 
Heh. Very different approach indeed. To answer your questions:

(1) I don't think folding would do good things to this system. The CPU is a VIA Eden ("Samuel 2" core) running @ 533MHz. It's designed to brag about having a tiny power consumption and fanless operation, rather than how many gigaflops it'll turn out. As it is, this machine is very, very slow indeed.

(2) ALSA is built into every version of Puppy I've used (more than a few!), but the PCI card connector on the mainboard is a proprietary pin header and the expansion slot is taken by the CF adapter and your lovely bracket. I don't know what envy24 is, either. FWIW, the system does have onboard audio that is recognized by ALSA and (at least when I did it) configures properly.

(3) No clue about non-open-source video drivers. Puppy runs on top of Xorg or Xvesa (the first works fine on about 99.9% of machines, and the remainder work with the less capable Xvesa). So I guess my answer is, you don't really need them.
 
lol, I wasn't talking about your hardware

Here is the situation, venerable PIII tower here, folds 24/7, acts as our audio server in the house, used to run Win2K until it mysteriously started randomly going to its hard drive for no apparent reason. Drive LED would flicker, audio would stutter, couple times a minute. This was very wierd as it had operated pretty much flawlessly n this configuration for a couple years previously. Couldn't get to the bottom of it. Ended up paving the OS drive and starting from scratch. Worked for about a week when it developed the same symptom...most unacceptable in an audio server.

So, I ditched windoze and loaded up a hot off the presses (at that time) ubuntu studio 9 with the realtime kernel, which runs great, but now ubuntu has moved on and I'm not getting updates anymore...and the hardware will not run ubuntu 10, I have tried twice.

So, I'm wondering if your superpuppy might not be my next OS
 
Puppy is really intended for use as a desktop OS, not a server OS. One can (probably) make a server version, but it would be difficult. I'd recommend going with pUPnGO (a very, very tiny version of Puppy) and adding in a bunch of server type stuff.

Somewhere in my big post above (I know, tl;dr) there's a link to the Puppy forums. I'm on there too, but the others can help you more than I can... and it's a *lot* friendlier than most of the Ubuntu forums IIRC.

EDIT: as for folding, I'm not sure if that could be done... there are tools to turn a *.deb or *.tgz file into a *.pet file (Puppy's package format) but they don't always work...
 
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starhawk said:
EDIT: as for folding, I'm not sure if that could be done... there are tools to turn a *.deb or *.tgz file into a *.pet file (Puppy's package format) but they don't always work...
Click to expand...

Is the source not available for download for the folding client? You could easily just compile it yourself if it is.
 
gcc is not natively part of most Puplets. You need a special, large package called a "devx" (it comes as a *.sfs) to do that. For Greenpup, you would need devx_420.sfs -- go to the Puppy Linux forum and search for a thread about Puplite; that thread has the right file for you in the 1st post.

BTW, you need the devx package to make/makefile or compile anything.
 
jojo69 said:
lol, I wasn't talking about your hardware

Here is the situation, venerable PIII tower here, folds 24/7, acts as our audio server in the house, used to run Win2K until it mysteriously started randomly going to its hard drive for no apparent reason. Drive LED would flicker, audio would stutter, couple times a minute. This was very wierd as it had operated pretty much flawlessly n this configuration for a couple years previously. Couldn't get to the bottom of it. Ended up paving the OS drive and starting from scratch. Worked for about a week when it developed the same symptom...most unacceptable in an audio server.

So, I ditched windoze and loaded up a hot off the presses (at that time) ubuntu studio 9 with the realtime kernel, which runs great, but now ubuntu has moved on and I'm not getting updates anymore...and the hardware will not run ubuntu 10, I have tried twice.

So, I'm wondering if your superpuppy might not be my next OS
Click to expand...

Why not try your hand at arch linux? great distro, and great way to learn! :D
 
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