I want to praise the Rev-Ed team on all the hard work they've put into the AXEpad software. I'm know you get lots and lots and lots of questions for help and a fair bit less praise. I recently installed LinAXEpad on a Compaq Presario 1810 running Puppy Linux 5.2.5 and was quite surprised when it actually worked! Considering that this computer has only 64MB of RAM, it is essential that any programs running don't use too much memory. You guys have done an excellent job on the Windows Programming Editor and AXEpad! Most IDEs nowadays strain even newish hardware, but not the Picaxe software! Keep up the good work!
For those interested in how I got LinAXEpad working on Puppy Linux (i.e. poor students) and an old computer I've written a bit on it below.
First off, I installed Puppy. The computer doesn't have a CD drive and the USB drive wouldn't boot properly even when I used Plop so I pulled out the hard drive and temporarily installed it in a computer with a CD drive. Once I installed it, I trimmed down Puppy by removing all the desktop icons and toolbar icons so that it would boot faster. Then I extracted LinAXEpad onto the hard drive, added a desktop icon and was set to go! That's really all that's necessary just so long as your computer has at least 64MB of RAM.
I've read that a swap file space on the hard drive will let you boot Puppy on computers with little RAM, but it increases the frequency of hard drive write/read operations and thus reduces it's already limited life span, which can be quite a problem on 10 year old computers. I've attached a screenshot of LinAXEpad and system process manager running and a (trimmed down, but still lengthy) hardware spec sheet just to prove that it actually does work
. Just rename the .txt file to .html; the formatting will look a lot better that way.
View attachment Slim System Report.txt
For those interested in how I got LinAXEpad working on Puppy Linux (i.e. poor students) and an old computer I've written a bit on it below.
First off, I installed Puppy. The computer doesn't have a CD drive and the USB drive wouldn't boot properly even when I used Plop so I pulled out the hard drive and temporarily installed it in a computer with a CD drive. Once I installed it, I trimmed down Puppy by removing all the desktop icons and toolbar icons so that it would boot faster. Then I extracted LinAXEpad onto the hard drive, added a desktop icon and was set to go! That's really all that's necessary just so long as your computer has at least 64MB of RAM.
I've read that a swap file space on the hard drive will let you boot Puppy on computers with little RAM, but it increases the frequency of hard drive write/read operations and thus reduces it's already limited life span, which can be quite a problem on 10 year old computers. I've attached a screenshot of LinAXEpad and system process manager running and a (trimmed down, but still lengthy) hardware spec sheet just to prove that it actually does work
. Just rename the .txt file to .html; the formatting will look a lot better that way.View attachment Slim System Report.txt