Amazing...seriously!

[Mike_Walsh]

Evening, gang.

Without meaning to sound like I'm parroting many others on here, I have to say I'm pretty amazed by Porteus. This is the v5.0 KDE 'flavour'.

I originally set this up on my big desktop rig, where I didn't anticipate many issues, if any. Straightforward Ethernet connection, no 'funny stuff' to speak of, etc.

I thought I'd give it a try on the Dell lappie this evening. Posting from it now, in fact.

We originally bought a Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop, all the way back in 2002. P4, a gig of DDR1, Intel 'Extreme' graphics, etc. It gave sterling service until the middle of last year, when the graphics adapter finally gave up the ghost. It was 32-bit only, anyway, so.....I thought it was time to drag myself a wee bit further ahead in time, and treated myself to a refurb'd Dell Latitude D630 with 4 GB RAM, a 120 GB SSD (which some fool had shoe-horned Windows 10 onto!), and an Nvida mobile chip. This runs a Core2Duo, so more modern SSEs, along with being dual-core AND 64-bit into the bargain. Wicked!

Windows got the chop straight away, getting "nuked" with extreme prejudice. A pair of Puppies almost immediately took up residence in the newly-vacated 'kennels', and.....all was serene.

--------------------------------

Now; this thing comes with the dreaded Broadcom BCM whatever adapter built-in. I don't use it; instead I use a NetGear PCI ExpressCard network adapter, which I originally bought as a 'period' adapter for the anciente Inspiron. The Latitude also has an ExpressCard slot just above the internal drive 'caddy', just as the Inspiron did, so I use it instead.....it's always been dead reliable, no drop-outs, etc. I was expecting Porteus to try connecting to the Broadcom, which is always a PITA to set-up (when aren't they?) Lo & behold, it connected immediately to the NetGear ExpressCard; no messing about with wrong attempts, no faffing about.....just straight away on the correct wifi adapter, and settled down immediately. Lovely!

You've done a bang-up job with Porteus, guys, and you are to be commended for this. It truly IS the closest thing to a 'portable' OS I've ever found (with the exception of Puppy, that is! Well.....what else would you expect a long-term veteran Puppy fanatic to say? )

All joking aside, this is an amazing little OS. Well done, guys!

(Unlike poor old 'unknown' - currently posting in the Newbies section - wifi has been unbelievably straight-forward for me. *shrug...* )


Mike.

[Rava]

Hi Mike, a welcome from me.

I moved the topic from General chat to Porteus Praisers.

Thanks a lot for your kind and detailed praise.

[Mike_Walsh]

@Rava :-

No worries. I did wonder if it was the right place for it. I moderate over on the Puppy forums, and if summat's in the wrong place I generally just move it. Although you're also using phpBB here, I don't have that ability on your forum, of course.....

Cheers.

[Rava]

I don't have that ability on your forum, of course

I am but a mere moderator, no admin, so you can hardly call it my forum.


But good to know we have a fellow moderator who also knows moderating around a phpBB based forum.



Added in 6 minutes 28 seconds:
And the praise is so much more worth (to me personally) when I know it's from a Puppy power user, since Puppy is especially about extreme slim live distros (perfect for really very old hardware) while Port supports recent and older hardware but tries to have all major DEs as part of its system. And with heavier DEs you cannot be that efficient for very old hardware compared to a live system that is based on an extreme slim X client (e.g. older Quirky NOP using JWM/ROX while the newer version now switched to XFCE)
I only have experience with Quirky NOP via JWM/ROX - amazingly quick and slim, but the DE is nothing compared to a full featured DE.
Still, Quirky NOP via JWM/ROX was well balanced in its own way, in my book.

[Mike_Walsh]

@Rava :-

Heh. Actually, I learnt the 'craft' over at BleepingComputer. I got invited to join the staff there very early in the pandemic; one of the other mods had gone AWOL, they like to maintain a nice round staff complement of 10 mods (to cover all the time zones), and apparently a couple had been watching me for a while and liked what they saw?

They use software from IP Board, which I've never seen elsewhere...

We had to more or less re-build the Puppy Forums when John de Murga died a couple of months later of a heart attack. First we knew of it was in mid-July, when the site went into permanent "Maintenance" due to unpaid bills.....

Our present Admin, rockedge, had set-up a phpBB 'test' forum in late 2019 to investigate why new members weren't getting their confirmation emails.....which turned out to be all down to the fact tht the old Forum was 'http'-ONLY. Of course, everything is now default 'https', so the email providers were just binning everything into the Spam folders (that's if they weren't simply bouncing them back again).

We needed more mods there, and since I had some experience by then I volunteered my services.....which Erik was only too happy to accept!

It was quite a miracle that Erik was able to migrate the old Forum over to modern 3-series phpBB. The old one was a heavily-patched early 2-series, dating all the way back to 2006.....and the database - some 20 GB in size - had well over a million posts, apparently. One of the guys at the phpBB forums said they'd never heard of anybody ever being successful with such a huge migration from such an old version; a testament to Erik's patience, determination AND skills.

(You're right about ONE thing. phpBB does take some getting used to, after more 'advanced' forum software. Personally, I like it. Simple, and to-the-point. But there ya go. That's enough "off-topic" waffle from me!)


Mike.

[Rava]

It was quite a miracle that Erik was able to migrate the old Forum over to modern 3-series phpBB. The old one was a heavily-patched early 2-series, dating all the way back to 2006.....and the database - some 20 GB in size - had well over a million posts, apparently. One of the guys at the phpBB forums said they'd never heard of anybody ever being successful with such a huge migration from such an old version; a testament to Erik's patience, determination AND skills.

That's amazing indeed.