Edupup : Education-tailored Puppy Linux

I decided, at last, what to do with that old HP Omnibook I recently got. I'm going to stuff it with educational software, I have a nephew or two who are of the right age to learn while having some fun even with a such old computer.

Edupup

I had Puppy Linux already installed on the Omnibook but, since I had found a education-tailored distribution on this Italian LUG page, I decided to install it over the (still unused) previous installation. The distribution is a bit old, last update is in 2010, but is not a vital detail since my computer is far more old than the distribution. Speaking of specialized versus general purpose distributions I often prefer to start with a general purpose one then install the software I need. In this case I instead I decided for installing a specialized one since I'm not fully used to Puppy installation mechanism and having a distribution with some software already installed could save me some time.

Installation

Puppy Linux installation is simple but sometime it might result tricky. My thirst Installation tentative concluded without error messages but it refused to start in any way (even by booting from Edupup CD) I suppose that it was because the previous Puppy installation on the same disk that the installation wizard did not clear. I formatted the disk and then repeated the installation, everything went eventually fine.

What would you do with a HP Omnibook XE2?

Sometimes I bring home old computers like other people bring home stranded pets. I've been given from a friend an old HP Omnibook Xe2 laptop. It's a 333 MHz Celeron based computer with 64MB RAM and a 12'' screen. It was a decent hardware configuration … twelve years ago. Of course the first question that came up has been: “Can I run Linux on it?”.

Wary or Lupu?

Speaking of old computers Puppy Linux is probably the most famous solution. Two version are actually available at Puppy's download page: the Ubuntu-Lucid based “Lupu” (V.5.2.5) and the more traditional “Wary” (5.1.2). I downloaded both but, unfortunately, while testing the distributions in live mode from CD Lupu showed some problem locking the system every now and then. I so went for installing Puppy Linux “Wary”.