Retro-Precise Puppy
Please use the "normal" Precise Puppy, unless you have a specific need for Retro-Precise.
The "normal" Precise Puppy requires an i686 (or greater) CPU that is PAE-capable.
Some early Pentium CPUs, such as some of the Intel Pentium-M series, are
not PAE-capable. All later CPUs are, including those made by AMD.
Those Pentium-M's were manufactured around 2001 I think.
If you try to boot the "normal" Precise Puppy on one of the PAE-incapable CPUs, it will fail to boot.
Some other differences
- Retro does not have the 'nouveau' open source nVidia driver. The simpler X.org 'nv' driver is present.
- Retro is able to boot from true SCSI hard or optical drives, as it
has SCSI drivers in the initrd. The "normal" Precise does not have any
true-SCSI drivers.
Note, if you have nVidia graphics hardware, in some cases the 'nouveau'
X.org driver (in the "normal" Precise Puppy) may not work. In that case,
you may find find success with the older and simpler 'nv' driver in the
"retro" Precise Puppy.
Though, the "normal" Precise also has the 'nv' driver, and you can fall
back to using the 'nv' driver if the 'nouveau' driver fails, except that
some users have reported difficulty with the procedure for doing this
-- somewhat difficult to know what to do when you just get a black
screen!
Regards,
Barry Kauler
December 2012