Compaq Presario

Recently in the forum I saw the title "Presario not Puppy friendly?", this thread:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=39042

I didn't read the thread at the time, but yesterday as I was driving home from Perth I stopped at a little "opportunity shop" in one of the country towns, run by a local church. Hey, they had a Presario sitting there, so I bought it, A$20 including 17inch monitor. It's model 7594, specs here:

http://www2.shopping.com/xPF-Compaq-Presario-7594-189713-163
http://www1.dealtime.com/xPF-Compaq-Presario-7594-189713-003



Now, all I need is some bench space to put it on...

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Comments

Compaq
Username: Sage
So, presumably, like the initiator of that thread, you also missed the endless previous discussions about Compaq machines? You got a bargain. They all work perfectly with all distros. Just watch out for the hidden partition on the present hard disc that can contain part of the BIOS files. If they're missing, just d/l again, avoiding, of course, the siren voices to send large sums to HP for the CD s. But folks who use a complete wiping utility can often get an immediate boot on other distros. If not, discover the [b]real[/b] manufacturer (MSI?)of the board and force flash the generic BIOS file using the /F switch (ensure you use upper case). It ain't Woomera science...

Cpq
Username: Sage
"Try this: http://www.motherboards.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=18805& also look on Wim's BIOS website pn hpw to do it?

And
Username: Sage
"http://www.s87841630.onlinehome.us/model/bmw/bmwr.html Can't remember the exact fate of Mitac, but, as you know, if you dig hard enough, most stuff is on the InterWeb.

compaq PC difficult to dual-boot
Username: Raffy
"It's always a challenge to dual boot a Compaq with its two-partition setup. I had success with one (with SATA HD) only by using live CD for booting. BTW, Barry, please check out the donation button and page at http://puppylinux.org. Let me know if anything needs to be changed.

Donations
Username: BarryK
"Raffy, I had a quick look at the information about donations. I think change it as you see fit, to distribute money to whoever needs it. Maybe more than one donation button, so people can choose different recipients? Thinking ahead, my original plan was that when I got my superannuation in 2010, I would wind my involvement in Puppy right back, maybe even totally retire. The current status is although I have pulled back from the frontline of developing the next Puppy, I'm still working flat-out on Puppy-related stuff. I'm happy to receive whatever donations come my way for now, but early in 2010 that will have to be reviewed and donations distributed elsewhere. I was thinking, even if I get involved in other stuff, like my long-awaited gem/opal finding safari, I'm still likely to take a laptop along and keep up some kind of Puppy-related work, much more curtailed though. I'll probably keep maintaining puppylinux.com I think, so financial help for that would be appreciated in 2010+.

How about a Server?
Username: nic2109
"I too had a Presario for years until I out Puppy on it and gave it away on Freecycle. Fine machine. Do I recall you saying a while back that doing a full system "make" took hours and hours on your laptop? I'm not surprised as they aren't optimised for I/O intensive work such as building an OS. So if you ever see a Compaq/HP Prolinea at a give-away price then snap it up and use it as your development build box. There are millions of them in data centres round the world that are steadily being replaced by blades. Given loads of RAM and cache and SCSI disks it would make short work of your builds. Regards, Nick.

Tags: puppy