freememapplet
Taskbar applet to display free memory in puppy.
In the taskbar you see this:
The value displayed with white text, blue background, is the amount of memory that you have available for storing files.
The very first time that you boot Puppy from live-CD, Puppy will
normally be running totally in RAM and not using the hard drive at all.
The value you will see in the taskbar is the amount of RAM that Puppy
has determined you can use for your own files. This means all files
created, such as cache and history files created by the web browser,
email, anything that you download, application configuration settings,
etc.
So, if running Puppy in a RAM-challenged PC, you may need to keep an eye on that display value!
So, the displayed value is not how much free RAM is in the PC! It is how much Puppy has determined can be set aside for your personal files.
Note, the background of the display will turn red, then will start to flash, when Puppy thinks it is getting critical.
The first time that you shutdown, you will be asked to create a
"home"
file, in which to save all your personal files/settings, so next time
you boot Puppy the situation will be much improved. You will then see a
much higher value in the display. If for example you chose to create a
512M persistent-storage "home" file (which is actually named
'pup_save.3fs') on your hard drive,
then you would see about 460M available in the taskbar display.
With over 460M free space, there's plenty of room for downloading and
installing packages (see the PupGet package manager), saving email, and
so on, but even so it's not unlimited. The good thing is, there is a
utility to increase the size of the pup_save.3fs file -- see "Utilities
--> Resize personal storage file" in the menu.
Note, one of the great things about Puppy is that all your personal
files/settings are in just one file, pup_save.3fs -- great for backup!
Now for some more detail... skip this for now, if the above has answered your question.
With Puppy, the persistent-storage can be a partition rather than a
file. For example, if you install Puppy to a USB Flash drive with a
Linux filesystem (ext2, ext3, reiserfs) then you have the option of
saving personal files direct to the partition, rather than in a
pup_save.3fs file. In that situation, the value that you see in the
taskbar will not be the free
space in the partition, as Puppy runs in RAM to avoid writes to the
Flash memory. Take another example, the multisession-CD: personal data
is stored in folders on the CD/DVD and loaded into RAM at bootup --
therefore, space available for your personal files is derived from the
free space in RAM, not how
much space is left on the CD/DVD. On the otherhand, if the persistent
storage is a fast internal hard drive partition, it is mounted directly
and the value displayed in the taskbar will be the free space in the partition.
Technical:
'M' means megabytes, and 1M equals 1,048,576 bytes (not exactly a million bytes!)
'G' means gigabytes, and 1G equals 1024 M (approximately 1000 megabytes)