Ben Wise (hence WiseOwl). Though whether I'm wise by name and by nature is debatable!
Puppy user in Melbourne, Victoria Australia.

I used a Twinhead Laptop 233MMX 128Mb RAM, 40Gb HDD, Win98SE (and now of course Puppy) but have now upgraded to a 2nd hand Dell P4 and wow does puppy fly!

ICQ: 7901373
MSN: dotnet.3.wiseowl at spamgourmet.com

I was searching Telstra's bigpond file downloads area (at work would you believe it - looking for a new version of PHP to download) and I saw just by chance a small version of linux desinged to run on an old 586 and boot entirely from CD. "Wow!" I thought to myself. Made a mental note to look it up again when I got home. Did just that and got a friend who has Telstra BigPond to download it for me. Burned puppy 0.9.9 onto a CD and wham the system locked up the moment I moved the mouse. Hmmmm I knew this was a problem with linux 2.4 kernels and my laptop (yes I'd been fiddling unix of some sort since FreeBSD 2.2.2 - June 1997 according to the cd that I've just retrieved from my megre CD collection). I plugged in a serial mouse and it was fine. Now I wanted to use my TouchPad (does anyone else out there actually like Laptop TouchPads?) so I set forth on a grueling jouney to discover how to get the silly kernel not to allocate the same interrupt as the mouse. Finally I found pci=irqmask=0x8000. Yay! Mouse worked, puppy worked, ethernet card wizard worked - sort of, picked the wrong driver and so I had to pick 8139too .... Played gemgame for a while (it's fun in multiplayer mode, haha). Now I've played all the games in puppy... My favourite would have to be gemgame.

Infamous Fujitsu MPG series HDD dies. Friend phones, grave concerns, computer won't boot, data won't appear, data took hours and hours to compile (no not gcc), data nowhere else. Much research by yours truly. Order compatible HDD. Use Fujitsu MPG Series Data Recovery Program (copy ~99% of bad HDD to compatible HDD). Computer still won't boot - XP system files missing (~1% of data lost). Boot Recovert Console (XP CD-ROM). Run chkdsk. Computer still won't boot (still missing system files). Want to get files off bad computer. Puppy! Boots, accesses, zips (to USB Drive). Precious 48Mb files recovered. abiword loads recovered word doc (phew 1% of missing datawasn't inside that file). Hoping all files should be intact - will rebuild PC with new HDD and take image of old HDD onto new HDD using ext3 partition with, you guess it, puppy. Thank you puppy!

I once remastered the puppy cd on a PC with only 64Mb of RAM. T'was a Pentium (remember those) 133 with a 4Gb HDD and a 52X CDROM burner (ha, it can only burn ay 16x on that slow old thing). I had to tweak the remaster-cd script to create a ram drive with enough capacity as the tmpfs mount only uses a size of half the physical ram by default. I passed the size parameter to the mount command it to force it to be bigger (thus making use of the 500 Mb swapfile that I had on a loopback fs). I haven't tried the all new puppy 1,0,6, remaster script yet.

I ran a P233 MMX laptop (128 Mb, 40Gb HDD, 13.3" TFT, circa Jan 1999 with upgrades) as my main PC and had an older (but slightly faster CPU) P II 266 Celeron desktop with only 64Mb RAM and a 3 Gb HDD acting as a bookend for a few old computer magazines and covered in my yet to be filed away tax documents!