So a little back ground on this one.
I’ve been working for a local POS company since April of 2006.
I started there doing support for an old MS-DOS based POS named Rapidfire. This POS was so old it required a CRT display + light pen to properly function
However we were winding down support of this POS as we had already been shipping a couple of versions of another PHP based POS.
So with this newer POS we supported devices named KPS or Kitchen Print Screens.
Basically a web browser based thin client, or really any device that could support a current gen web broweser.
The initial KPS units were using what we now call mini-pc’s or back then they really were thin clients running on an embedded OS, hence Puppy Linux came into play.
We had a few customers using these devices as they didn’t require any production printers in the kitchen, hence why they are named KPS units, they displayed the orders for production, then you bumped the order using a bump bar with a few buttons on them to clear the current order and move to the next one that came in.
These devices booted from pcmcia cards or what even bootable media could be installed on these devices like say sd cards etc…
Puppy Linux didn’t take much to run for sure, but the fun was only starting for us.
We had this freaking 30+ page setup guide just for getting an old version of Firefox to run properly with the POS.
It was really a slog getting through the setup process so we always emailed the guide to let the customer print it out to follow along and get things working.
We did setup most of them before shipping but on occasion a reimage had to be done so this is where we gave them the choice of sending the unit back and we could do this for a small fee or they could work with a tech to do this process.
Once really good customer had a couple of these units in the kitchen area, one of them was always a bit problematic and needed to be reimaged a lot, even after sending it back to us for servicing.
We even replaced it but the same thing happened with the replacement, we think some other device/devices on the same AC circuit maybe causing this but could never find out what it was.
My guess was it was near the walk-in cooler and it was sharing the same ac ciircuit and the compressor would eventually cause the corruption.
IF a mod thinks this should be place in another category then please feel free to do so.
I figured this may give some peeps a look into older distro’s I don’t see mentioned here on the boards.