Puppy beats Bloat

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NeroVance
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Puppy beats Bloat

#1 Post by NeroVance »

I've had a decent amount of experience with Linux, and I find myself intrigued with how many other distros tend to get heavier and can end up requiring the same amount of power Vista did, yet Puppy either has this at a slower rate, or manages to completely avoid that path, but still be up to date, and usable.

I have an old Acer netbook, I'm thinking of loading Puppy on it, and getting it to do stuff, since I lent it to my brother, and he loaded elementary OS, which is quite slow on it.

I kinda wonder what Puppies are best for what systems. As in:
Pentium - Early Pentium II:
Late Pentium II - Early Pentium III:
Late Pentium III and Early IV:
Modern x86 and perhaps x86_64:

My best guess for the first would be Puppy 1.x

rokytnji
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#2 Post by rokytnji »

First thing I try on old p2 and p3 gear is

http://macpup.org/macpup412.php

and then

http://lhpup.org/download500.htm#mar-iso

but that is just me. Others may have other suggestions. I got this to run on a 128MB SD card. A poster there said good things about using it on his old gear.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=72576
Wow, GuyDog runs much better on my old Thinkpad X24 (256M RAM) than the Lupu 5.1 I had been using, even with GuyDog's better features (Openbox, tint2, wbar). I used to have to scale videos down and use smaller formats to get them to play smoothly, and my processor was frequently maxed out by other programs. But that's rarely the case with GuyDog and I can even play videos full screen no problem. A big thank you to Iguleder.

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NeroVance
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#3 Post by NeroVance »

rokytnji wrote:First thing I try on old p2 and p3 gear is

http://macpup.org/macpup412.php

and then

http://lhpup.org/download500.htm#mar-iso

but that is just me. Others may have other suggestions. I got this to run on a 128MB SD card. A poster there said good things about using it on his old gear.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=72576
Wow, GuyDog runs much better on my old Thinkpad X24 (256M RAM) than the Lupu 5.1 I had been using, even with GuyDog's better features (Openbox, tint2, wbar). I used to have to scale videos down and use smaller formats to get them to play smoothly, and my processor was frequently maxed out by other programs. But that's rarely the case with GuyDog and I can even play videos full screen no problem. A big thank you to Iguleder.
Nice. GuyDog sounds rather interesting. and to have it fit on a 128MB card is pretty nice.

I do wonder what he used in terms of videos? With many videos being on youtube, a watcher for low-powered systems could be nice.

Perhaps an ISO could be made of different pups for different hardware, like a Puppy Multi-Tool

starhawk
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#4 Post by starhawk »

Specs of the netbook in question...?

I'm running XSlacko 1.0 on mine...

ASUS 1000HEB (Best Buy "exclusive" aka 1000HE with an extra letter on the end)
Atom N270 CPU
i945Gsomething chipset and graphics
2gb RAM (I upgraded it from 1gb)
64gb SSD (replacing the original 160gb SATA HDD)

XSlacko is very nice and works perfectly EXCEPT that it is a total RAM hog. Expect to be able to do very little if all you have is 1gb RAM -- by booting XSlacko you have used a bit more than half of it! But it's pretty and it's actually very familiar territory if you're a Windows Refugee :P I converted from Win7.

Note that I haven't tested how it feels about suspend/hibernate yet -- the last Puppy I put on this netbook I used suspend heavily and I wound up with a Very Bad Dog for my troubles ;)

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dejan555
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#5 Post by dejan555 »

puppy 2.15CE is one of good pups to try on low PIII and older (have it running on PIII laptop996Mhz and 335MB RAM) or maybe tuxxx's updated 2.x series for support of newer apps.
puppies 3.x and up to 4.2 which are pre-woof (not based on other distros binaries) are also very low demanding, I think 4.3.1 too is also puppy-only and latest of old puppy branch?

For modern PCs I guess latest slacko/dpup/upup/whatever

There are so many versions though and you can't know which works best until you try several.

I personally use dpup 486 for my machine because I think it works optimal with my graphics (AMD Sempron 1.8Ghz / Radeon 9250)
puppy.b0x.me stuff mirrored [url=https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_Mb589v0iCXNnhSZWRwd3R2UWs]HERE[/url] or [url=http://archive.org/details/Puppy_Linux_puppy.b0x.me_mirror]HERE[/url]

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cimarron
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#6 Post by cimarron »

I wrote the above-mentioned comment about GuyDog. I have been able to watch video on YouTube with Firefox 16.0.2, though it can bog down with heavy swapping. Newer versions seem heavier on memory and CPU usage (I think GuyDog comes with an even older version). And I run Firefox with NoScript to lighten the load while browsing.

For most video I download it first, then play with Mplayer (built into GuyDog). Using a GUI like SMPlayer or Gnome-MPlayer is significantly heavier on the CPU. But MPlayer can be run without a GUI, using built-in hotkey commands to control playback (here's a list; a few of these don't work on older versions of MPlayer). It's very light.

There are also several MPlayer command-line options that can reduce CPU load (extensive documentation here). These can be added to the mplayer command in the "defaultmediaplayer" script in /usr/local/bin, so simply clicking any video file will automatically launch MPlayer with whatever options you want. But I haven't needed these options with GuyDog, which plays videos very well for me with 256M RAM and running at 733MHz.

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mikeb
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#7 Post by mikeb »

The oft forgot gmplayer is a nice compromise of size to user friendliness and there are some nice skins around.
vlc 0.8.6i.... oldie but lightwieght goodie... plays most formats anyway....like gmplayer you stay under the 10MB mark.

xmms... sorry its light and cute for music and thousands of skins...It sticks around.

firefox 3.6.... still me regular browser... happy on sites but not over the top with system usage... theres always opera and qtweb if you want to try others. flash 10.0.15...my stable and downloads to /tmp....still fine for many sites.

pentium3 ... 4.12/lenny/slax 6 the sweet spot to me...Lucid ok though you start to notice slowdown unless to trim the fat/scripts. 2.14x gets good praise on this forum too.

pentium 2... gets cramped with any distro with newer software...driver support tails off with recent too... Nlited XP is often a better idea.

Newer ...well if the older lighter work then why not enjoy the speed.... new drivers can be built on older kernels.
Lucid has good long term support and some nice touches....

Toast and tea on a frosty morning... ok in small doses. A bit of spice in there makes it refreshing.

mike

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NeroVance
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#8 Post by NeroVance »

mikeb wrote:The oft forgot gmplayer is a nice compromise of size to user friendliness and there are some nice skins around.
vlc 0.8.6i.... oldie but lightwieght goodie... plays most formats anyway....like gmplayer you stay under the 10MB mark.

xmms... sorry its light and cute for music and thousands of skins...It sticks around.

firefox 3.6.... still me regular browser... happy on sites but not over the top with system usage... theres always opera and qtweb if you want to try others. flash 10.0.15...my stable and downloads to /tmp....still fine for many sites.

pentium3 ... 4.12/lenny/slax 6 the sweet spot to me...Lucid ok though you start to notice slowdown unless to trim the fat/scripts. 2.14x gets good praise on this forum too.

pentium 2... gets cramped with any distro with newer software...driver support tails off with recent too... Nlited XP is often a better idea.

Newer ...well if the older lighter work then why not enjoy the speed.... new drivers can be built on older kernels.
Lucid has good long term support and some nice touches....

Toast and tea on a frosty morning... ok in small doses. A bit of spice in there makes it refreshing.

mike
That's okay mate, I quite like XMMS for I can use a skin that I fetched one time online. Though I would be careful about keeping a non updated browser just in case of bugs and security vuln. I heard about something called QupZilla which could be good for a lightweight browser.

darry1966

#9 Post by darry1966 »

don't apologize about preferring xmms it is my default now these days too and there isn't much it can't handle. It is a pity it isn't still developed.

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mikeb
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#10 Post by mikeb »

we should develop xmms :)..... but it just gets on with it and even better after realising there was a alsa plugin lol.
Now streaming aac would be nice....

My security policy is not to go near Internet Explorer...been fine ever since....that has real holes rather than hyperthetical. ;)

A retro speed freak me is....

mike

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NeroVance
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#11 Post by NeroVance »

mikeb wrote:we should develop xmms :)..... but it just gets on with it and even better after realising there was a alsa plugin lol.
Now streaming aac would be nice....

My security policy is not to go near Internet Explorer...been fine ever since....that has real holes rather than hyperthetical. ;)

A retro speed freak me is....

mike
True. Though isn't Audacious a fork of XMMS? Though it uses GTK 2 rather than 1, but if most software needs GTK2, a GTK2 fork of XMMS might be good to use, aka Audacious.

Perhaps there are just mainly hypothetical security holes.

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mikeb
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#12 Post by mikeb »

IE has the big hairy ones...plenty to keep the dodgy internet polluters well happy.

Hmm I found all the xmms gtk2 forks to be less than ...erm xmms.

mike whos name rhymes with bike.

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NeroVance
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#13 Post by NeroVance »

mikeb wrote:IE has the big hairy ones...plenty to keep the dodgy internet polluters well happy.

Hmm I found all the xmms gtk2 forks to be less than ...erm xmms.

mike whos name rhymes with bike.
Makes pretty good sense :D

Well in that case, original (and if they are more limited than xmms, superior) xmms ought to be the way to go.

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mikeb
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#14 Post by mikeb »

Please don't be swayed by my or anyone else's bias.

Whatever floats yer bloat.... or should that be sink.

Mplayer has a cute xmms skin... its actually quite light run that way.

lets do a rhumba....

mike

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Fossil
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#15 Post by Fossil »

Don't forget Beep Media player (BMP) which can also use xmms skins and read them as compressed .wsz and .tar.gz's. Very small and light for the 4x series Puppies.

darry1966

#16 Post by darry1966 »

mikeb wrote:Please don't be swayed by my or anyone else's bias.

Whatever floats yer bloat.... or should that be sink.

Mplayer has a cute xmms skin... its actually quite light run that way.

lets do a rhumba....

mike
Mplayer uses beggar all when run without gui thats my preference but love Patriot's 2x efforts with inbuilt ffmpeg they are brilliant even on old puppy 2 tried on Cupuppy an old 2.17 pupplet ran well.

Found here http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=292855

My reasons for loving Xmms so much is that I have run it since Redhat 8 days and loved it's skins and sound and yes Beep player but sorry Xmms is my favourite.

So may be if anyone interested (Yes I know wishful thinking) might look at developing it for Puppy?????

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mikeb
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#17 Post by mikeb »

Hmm yes...did a rebuild of 2009 and the lucid one (rc4) a while ago... minimised dependencies/esoteric features and made them player only...no encoding...the latter nearly halved mem usage.

The 2009 works fine on puppy 2.02 yet handles anything but the most annoying formats.

Look closely at the screenshot and both players have buffered about 5mb of the stream in those figures.

mike

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