Install basic Puppy on a computer with 16 Mb RAM

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Moose On The Loose
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#21 Post by Moose On The Loose »

saintless wrote:Puppyt, thank you for the information about puppy running on low ram computer like that.
I have an old computer with 40 Mhz processor, 3 Mb RAM (three MB RAM) and 40 MB HDD. It has a network card.
It has only floppy drive but I can connect CD-Rom and I can put about 500 Mb HDD as well.
At the moment it works with MSDos 6.2 and Windows 3.1 and it takes about 30 MB from 40 MB hard drive.
Does anybody have any idea if there is a chance to make some puppy work on that computer? :roll:
Yes, you will be able to get Puppy to work on it at least "sort of". I had a machine with only 8 Mb of RAM and managed to get a Linux to run on it even with most of the RAM made into a ram disk. I would first try to get just the command line version to go. You will need to make a swap space on the hard drive. To do that, you will need to get fdisk to be able to work with the drive. Either do it on a bigger computer or get just enough Linux to go to change the drive.

It will be a lot of work to do. Are you sure you don't just want to leave that as a DOS machine and buy something a little bigger like $200 laptop.

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saintless
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#22 Post by saintless »

Moose On The Loose wrote:Yes, you will be able to get Puppy to work on it at least "sort of". I had a machine with only 8 Mb of RAM and managed to get a Linux to run on it even with most of the RAM made into a ram disk. I would first try to get just the command line version to go. You will need to make a swap space on the hard drive. To do that, you will need to get fdisk to be able to work with the drive. Either do it on a bigger computer or get just enough Linux to go to change the drive.

It will be a lot of work to do. Are you sure you don't just want to leave that as a DOS machine and buy something a little bigger like $200 laptop.
Thanks for the answer, Moose On The Loose,
I have several more much better computers, but I like to see if there is a limit for old hardware and RAM for puppy linux.
I will save the 40 Mb hard drive as it is and I'll change it with 500 Mb HDD with 128 Mb SWAP file. I can make it on another computer. I will connect a CD Rom drive also together with the Floppy drive if i can (when I open the box I will see if I can connect booth devices).
I will do some experiments and post the result in a few days. :)


Edit: Wow, for $200 in my country I can by the first 15-16 second hand laptops from that link :D :
http://crash-bg.com/laptopi.html

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Moose On The Loose
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#23 Post by Moose On The Loose »

saintless wrote:[
Thanks for the answer, Moose On The Loose,
I have several more much better computers, but I like to see if there is a limit for old hardware and RAM for puppy linux.
I will save the 40 Mb hard drive as it is and I'll change it with 500 Mb HDD with 128 Mb SWAP file. I can make it on another computer. I will connect a CD Rom drive also together with the Floppy drive if i can (when I open the box I will see if I can connect booth devices).
I will do some experiments and post the result in a few days. :)
Also, some of the old hard disks used a board that plugged in because the motherboards didn't have hard disk controllers. Some of those boards can be jumpered to be the aux hard drive controller.

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Lobster
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#24 Post by Lobster »

You guys are mad :shock:
It is an acquired taste. :lol:
Congratulations on your efforts 8)
Puppy Raspup 8.2Final 8)
Puppy Links Page http://www.smokey01.com/bruceb/puppy.html :D

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saintless
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#25 Post by saintless »

Puppyt wrote: I could be wrong, but I don't think that any of the Puppy kernels work with x386 -vintage motherboards. So it breaks my heart to point you over to FreeDOS for that machine.HTH
You were right, Puppyt,
my first try wasn't successful. Puppy kernel doesn't support x386.
I had an installation of puppy 410 on another PC and I changed the HDD to the x386 PC. I attach some pictures to show the machine and the message. It does not have CD boot option as well.
In that box I have two motherboards. One is x386, and the other one has Pentium II.
I would like to continue with this experiment, but I need to find Puppy linux with x386 kernel support.
Does anybody know such Puppy version?
Moose On The Loose , what puppy version did you install on your low ram PC?

And I hope you were a little bit wrong, Puppyt, because I found this site:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/
I will do some testing on this Basiclinux too. it is also compatible with slackware 4 packages.
looks like my old PC will start booting linux anyway :D
ImageImageImage
ImageImageImage
ImageImage

Edit: Some interesting information for the video card. It does not work at all with that old CRT Compaq monitor:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/Te ... =c00327243
But it works fine with that LCD TV. The pictures of the screen are from the TV:
http://www.elite.bg/en/products/415-16- ... c1601.html

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Colonel Panic
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#26 Post by Colonel Panic »

saintless wrote:
Puppyt wrote: I could be wrong, but I don't think that any of the Puppy kernels work with x386 -vintage motherboards. So it breaks my heart to point you over to FreeDOS for that machine.HTH
You were right, Puppyt,
my first try wasn't successful. Puppy kernel doesn't support x386.
I had an installation of puppy 410 on another PC and I changed the HDD to the x386 PC. I attach some pictures to show the machine and the message. It does not have CD boot option as well.
In that box I have two motherboards. One is x386, and the other one has Pentium II.
I would like to continue with this experiment, but I need to find Puppy linux with x386 kernel support.
Does anybody know such Puppy version?
Moose On The Loose , what puppy version did you install on your low ram PC?

And I hope you were a little bit wrong, Puppyt, because I found this site:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/
I will do some testing on this Basiclinux too. it is also compatible with slackware 4 packages.
looks like my old PC will start booting linux anyway :D
ImageImageImage
ImageImageImage
ImageImage

Edit: Some interesting information for the video card. It does not work at all with that old CRT Compaq monitor:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/Te ... =c00327243
But it works fine with that LCD TV. The pictures of the screen are from the TV:
http://www.elite.bg/en/products/415-16- ... c1601.html
Basic Linux, now that's a blast from the past - it was my first ever Linux distribution@ I have fond memories of surfing the Net on a Pentium 100, using Opera 5 in Basic - but I did have 32 MB of RAM, not 16. It should work with less than 32 MB, but I can't guarantee it.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

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saintless
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#27 Post by saintless »

Colonel Panic wrote:Basic Linux, now that's a blast from the past - it was my first ever Linux distribution@ I have fond memories of surfing the Net on a Pentium 100, using Opera 5 in Basic - but I did have 32 MB of RAM, not 16. It should work with less than 32 MB, but I can't guarantee it.
I'm trying to install basic linux on a computer with only 3 Mb RAM. It is a special basic linux version for such low ram computer. It looks like a frugal install to me. You can see the files on the picture.

Image

There is 6 Mb swap file also. It needs DOS to boot and my real problem is I can't have dos and basic linux on 40 MB hard drive. The space is a little bit short. I have one more 40 MB HDD and I'm trying to connect them both with no luck for the moment. I have 500 Mb HDD, but I use it with Puppy 410 on another computer and I don't want to replace it for now.

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