I just find Puppies package management system to not be as robust as I would like. I also have not totally wrapped my head around the running in root thing.

That being said I have some really old machines that I can only get performance out of with Puppy or DSL and I much prefer Puppy.

Now before someone asks why not DSL, just let me apologize now. Maybe it's just the looks.

However, back to what you said. I can see you getting a ton of speed benefit replacing Ubuntu with Puppy, there would be no comparison.

Correct! Especially w/ some older equipment.
The DSL thing, Is probably as you say "just Looks" but DSL is again faster than Puppy [the newer versions anyway] and on truly antique boxes.. only DSL will even work!!
The Root Thing?? Nothing makes me more angry than for a box that I own [bought and paid for] tells me I don't have permission to do absolutely anything that I wish!! I hereby take responsibility for my own actions and if I break it... OOps, If I crash my vehicle... same OOps! But w/ my computer, It aint life and death, If it were... well, I hope it don't come to that!!
RP

We have an ancient laptop that will not run DSL, at least not without a WHACK of frigging around just to get it to boot IF it even gets installed. This laptop won't run much of anything, and has a hard time even booting many if the CD's and DVD's I've tried to use.
But Puppy installed without a hitch on it, and works great for what it is. It gets my vote for ancient laptops -- better than disposing of the laptop, if there's no good alternative.

Do Tell! Never heard the like. While I do like puppy lots, I have an old toshiba lappy 75M clock and 16M of ram, It sort of runs puppy.. but I can't change the bios for the pcmcia slots to 16bit/cardbus, from pcic compatible.. so, no network w/o dial-up! That one gets DSL. For some reason DSL finds the network pc cards while puppy won't. Oh well I don't mind terribly as there is no puppy for Macs' either [yet] so I get along w/ Debian OK.
BTW you did have a swap partition didn't you?
RP

Ours is a Toshiba too, though by the sounds of it, not quite as decrepit as yours

Ours is a 4090-XDVD Satellite with ~128 Mib of RAM shared with the Trident onboard video, and IIRC a 400Mhz PII in it. Puppy Linux even has a driver available for the onboard Agere Win-modem, for which I would otherwise build a Martian driver.

I should clarify: I *have* had DSL installed and working, and also have had at other times EasyS Linux and Zenwalk installed, both working pretty well.

But, last time, before we discovered Puppy, I had DSL on it (yes there was a swap space at most times) and it worked, UNTIL the roommate asked me to see if I could get the bootloader to see the DOS partition she had elsewhere on the HDD. I messed with it for too long, and gave up when the thing wouldn't boot ANYTHING anymore.
Upon trying to re-install DSL fresh, we discovered it wouldn't install, it was hanging up somewhere mid-install, something to do with the shared memory IIRC, and I tried all the kernel options I could think of, but no go.

Then, we downloaded Puppy.. Knowing nothing about it (and judging the book by the cover) I didn't hold out much hope, but-- Puppy booted live, and using the desktop installer option, we had it installed in literally about 5 minutes. I rebooted, and presto! Been working great ever since.

Sasha

The 40Gb hard drive has probably been split into 2 partitions, which is why you are seeing two 'drives'.

With the specifications you mention (1GHz Pentium-M, 256Mb RAM, etc), it sounds like it is probably a Toshiba Portege R100 or similar model. It would be about eight years old, but they are a nice little machine.

It can be a bit tricky doing an install, because there is no internal CD drive, and the BIOS may be too old to boot from USB. However, the older Porteges are able to boot from (some) PCMCIA based CD drives, and from a USB floppy.

You have a few options, but none are particularly straightforward:

1. Use an external USB floppy or PCMCIA CD drive (which means getting hold of one).

2. Remove the hard drive and put it in another machine that has a CD/DVD drive (this works well with Linux distros, because most of the drivers are installed).

3. Use a network install via a PXE boot (which means setting up another machine on the network as a server).

The default Debian desktop setup is Gnome, but there is nothing to stop you using more lightweight desktops (such as xfce or fluxbox). With only 256Mb of RAM, you will want to conserve as much as possible. You will find that X consumes a fair bit. With applications running as well, it is likely to get slow.

The issue is not so much processor speed as running out of memory (which will bog the machine down, as it pages to the disk; WinXP will be having the same problem).

If it is an R100, it will be able to take more RAM; with 512Mb you could run any of the general purpose distros you wanted.

Otherwise it might be worth considering one of the very light weight distros such as Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux Not (which use xvesa instead).