Need help with Puppy Linux (GCC or Kernel 2.6)
 

Hello all.

I have an old IBM Pentium MMX 166 MHz with 64 MB of RAM.

I have another thread going right now helping me pick a distro that meets some specific requirements of mine.

Puppy Linux did not meet those requirements (either including GCC or kernel 2.6 out of the box).

It is imperative one of these are included out of the box. The computer is going to be using an external USB ethernet adapter. There is a downloadable driver for this ethernet adapter that compiles against kernel 2.4. The driver is bundled with most distributions for Kernel 2.6. This is why I need one or the other.

This thread is NOT about helping me choose a distro. That is what the other thread is about. If at all possible I would like to go with Puppy Linux, it feels extremely responsive on this desktop and has a nice gui (unlike DSL)

What I would like to know is if there is a way to somehow install Kernel 2.6 on Puppy Linux or to install GCC on Puppy Linux. Either one of these would make my day.

(BTW, the Puppy forum looks kind of dead, which is why I didn't post there).

I've never used Puppy but wow! The site is crammed with so much info it's amazing! From what I've gathered Puppy Linux comes with TCC. It's not GCC but it's a compiler and you shouldn't have any issues. Puppy also seems to use ulibc rather than glibc but that shouldn't be too much of an issue, if everything is set up right you won't even notice the difference.

http://www.goosee.com/puppy/developm...pilekernel.htm

There's a link to recompiling the Puppy kernel, there's a link to the config file he used for a 2.6.11 kernel so I guess that's what you're looking for. It also says you'll need to apply the squashfs patch. His reasons for doing so aren't convincing, if you plan on using your new kernel full-time I wouldn't worry about it unless you have some sort of special attachment to it... ;)

Hey. Thanks for all of the info.

From what I've gathered, Puppy doesn't exactly receive security updates, since it is pretty much a Live CD. Unlike Knoppix, which can receive updates from different debian repos, Puppy can't. I'm thinking I may just wait a while and then give Arch Linux or Debian Testing a shot on this computer, since this is going to be a computer on the internet and I don't want to have to reinstall a new OS on it every month or so.

Anyways, again, thx for all of the info. :)