Lightweight distro to dual-boot with Ubuntu Karmic?

I've been experimenting with dual-booting Puppy and Ubuntu 9.10. I've got a frugal install of Puppy on its own 2GB partition. Puppy and Ubuntu use the 1GB swap partition. Everything I've tried so far is working just great in Ubuntu; not much is working right in Puppy — wireless sometimes works, but mostly not; sound is stuttery; sometimes have to restart the X server immediately after starting up, just to get the desktop environment to render at all. The damnable misery of it is that everything DID work when I ran it off a live DVD, so I didn't think it'd be any problem. Go figure, right?

So, I'm looking for something lightweight like Puppy to replace Puppy with on that 2GB partition. Puppy is fast, no doubt. I like the fact that it loads completely into RAM, and that I can boot into it if I break something in Ubuntu (which I'm bound to do eventually). I've glanced at Knoppix, DSL, DSL-N, Feather Linux… I'd just like to be a little better-informed this time around, so I don't go through a week of configuring and still not have everything working right.

Any suggestions, or experiences with the ones I've mentioned? I like the idea of having two Debian-based distros on the same machine, but I'm not locked into it.

 

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

[/crickets] [/tumbleweed]

 

Kuki Linux is worth a look - it's based on Ubuntu, but with a custom kernel specifically for the AAO. You can also just use the kernel (I run Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 with the Kuki kernel bolted on, and it's lightning).

If you're up for it, Arch Linux would do you, but it's a bit of a mission to get installed!!!

 

There are only a couple of minor problems I've noticed with the Karmic UNR install (battery status applet doesn't work, and you have to boot with a card in the right side reader if you want it to work). What's the Kuki/sickboy kernel do differently for the AAO? I see lots of people talk about using it, but I haven't seen a detailed run-down of what's different about it. Will that kernel update with Update Manager? I'd consider running Karmic UNR with the Kuki/sickboy kernel…

As for Arch Linux, what does "a bit of a mission" mean? Lots of configuring to get everything working, or lots of configuration and everything still doesn't work?

I guess what I'm looking for is a fully-functional (all hardware supported) super-light (>512MB installed) distro I can use for a rescue distro and as a cheap downtown mistress to my main squeeze, Ubuntu. I don't mind doing a fair amount of command line work to get there, if I know I can get everything working.

 

Arch is a bi*ch to install and configure, but reportedly is works just fine after that.

I've been using Crunchbang and Linux4One - both are worth trying, though the latter is quite buggy. These are not lightweight, however quite fast too.

 

try ArchOne, from last release it's installable

 

Take a look at xPUD, http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=19206

 

Doesn't look like it's quite ready for prime-time yet. There was something in the forums there about it not playing nice with GRUB2. Something about GRUB2 only allows the loading of one initrd, so you'd be unable to load any media or images in xPUD. That's hardly "fully-functional". Of course, it's possible I've misunderstood what they're talking about.

The search continues…

 

Some versions of Puppy are better than others. Getting wireless to work on my AOA150 with kernel-2.6.25 required use of the madwifi driver.The atheeros ath5k driver in kernels 2.6.29 and up has worked well for me.

 

I realize this thread is a couple of months old, but I just tried Debian Squeeze (6.0) LXDE spin. It looks promising. The live disk only uses 88mb ram, and most things seem to work out of the box.(screen resolution, sound, video, touchpad and wireless) I have not yet tried the card readers or the webcam. I am not sure about the how much space it needs on the hard drive.

The link below is for the ISO.

http://live.debian.net/debian-cd/6....id/debian-live-60alpha1-i386-lxde-desktop.iso