(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Bruce B has replied quite precisely on the question.

obxjerry wrote:

I posted here because yesterday I installed two Puppys, I thought were designed to run on old machines, on a 800mhz, 160 ram computer and neither ran acceptably, not nearly as fast as 421 on the lesser machine.

Can you tell us which two?

Can you tell us which two?

Wary 104, Wary 5.0s smaller brother and Classic Pup 2.14x.

I'm doing some things and am more puzzled than ever.

related comment i hope??

I downloaded libflashplayer to temp file...
clicked the install icon
got box with package listed in it...
only options under action and archive are extract or add???
Why not an "install" choice??

I mean... what do I do now???
Thnx

Stocky wrote:related comment i hope??

Tangentially ......

I downloaded libflashplayer to temp file...

What is the full name of the file?

If it's something like .tgz then it's not a puppy package, so it is not automatically placed where puppy will need it. With a .tgz file, you first expand it to its uncompressed form, then move it yourself to the directory where the browser expects to find it.

adobe falsh player..?

.tar.gz

lots o fun here..

Thnx

got no clue

Stocky wrote:adobe falsh player..?

.tar.gz

lots o fun here..

Thnx

got no clue

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/FlashPlayer

Thnx for the linkkk


It gives 2 choices(vs)...?

I'm using classic... but... guess i'll just downld the newest version.

CU

Says it installed ok...

so i'll reboo and give it a wak.

thnx much agin

Stocky

Thanks again...
An hour at youtube started with serious lag on video and audio...
But for some reason smoothed out on audio completely after not too long... but with the video still goin fits and stops...
Before i got a recent gum up I caused with firefox fixed... It ran pretty smoothe...
but realistically... i'm short on ram... 256... older vaio...
no complaint here.. just an observ...
Bless us all....
and what the heck is Russia doing moving the magnetic north line???

Shoot... 5:33 Boston USA time... Gotta go eat some captain crunch!
cuStocky
ps... i don't say it enough.. appreciate the patience.

Stocky wrote:but with the video still goin fits and stops...

Close all other tabs in the browser, and have as few other processes going, to give your computer the best chance at playing smoothly. There might be a cache setting that would help performance.

There's a thread on installing in a PC with only 16 MB of RAM, though it's earlier than Wary & Lucid, so does not directly help the OP. Nevertheless, is deserving of some sort of award.

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=48214

Re the original question as to Puppy's minimum requirements, I find it useful for MS refugees to place Linux distros on a MS continuum. So on my hardware Ubuntu is a bit heavy compared to Win98 but Puppy is somewhere between 98 and 3.1. In fact, the slowest machine I run Puppy on (2.x) has a Pentium 200 clone and 64Mb of RAM. Win98 won't install and I don't think I would be very happy with it if it did. With this machine we are getting back to a different family of requirements. It has no USB support and will not boot from a CD. So I did a frugal install and there is a swap file in there somewhere. The HDDs are 1.6 and 2.1Gb. I boot from a floppy. Puppy runs fine for what I use it for on that machine.

Which brings me to my second point. When we go that far back in time we hit a mind boggling point where the OS takes up a small fraction of the resources that applications do. Puppy is like that. So the right question may be, "What are the requirements of the software you want to run?" For my old machine burning CDs or browsing the web isn't possible in Win3.1 and doing it in 98 would be slower than Puppy (assuming I could get 98 to install). Puppy lets me install a CD burner and use it to back-up the Win3.1 partitions.

So figure out if your HARDWARE can do what you want to do. If it can, then for old computers, Puppy is less likely to drag it down than any Windows since 3.1. A swap file helps a lot. I seem to recall some Puppies automatically use one if present while others require you to turn it on. Antique memory can be pricey but old IDE hard drives are cheap.

hayden wrote:Re the original question as to Puppy's minimum requirements, I find it useful for MS refugees to place Linux distros on a MS continuum. So on my hardware Ubuntu is a bit heavy compared to Win98 but Puppy is somewhere between 98 and 3.1. In fact, the slowest machine I run Puppy on (2.x) has a Pentium 200 clone and 64Mb of RAM. Win98 won't install and I don't think I would be very happy with it if it did. With this machine we are getting back to a different family of requirements. It has no USB support and will not boot from a CD. So I did a frugal install and there is a swap file in there somewhere. The HDDs are 1.6 and 2.1Gb. I boot from a floppy. Puppy runs fine for what I use it for on that machine.

Which brings me to my second point. When we go that far back in time we hit a mind boggling point where the OS takes up a small fraction of the resources that applications do. Puppy is like that. So the right question may be, "What are the requirements of the software you want to run?" For my old machine burning CDs or browsing the web isn't possible in Win3.1 and doing it in 98 would be slower than Puppy (assuming I could get 98 to install). Puppy lets me install a CD burner and use it to back-up the Win3.1 partitions.

So figure out if your HARDWARE can do what you want to do. If it can, then for old computers, Puppy is less likely to drag it down than any Windows since 3.1. A swap file helps a lot. I seem to recall some Puppies automatically use one if present while others require you to turn it on. Antique memory can be pricey but old IDE hard drives are cheap.

tnx for all the contributions,

i think hayden hit the point, sometimes the applications use more resources than the OS itself, so can you plese tell me the best applications for a "normal" use of the computer (playing video, music, youtube, etc).


i pretend to use a p3 1.2ghz and 256 mb of ram, b




PS: sorry for my bad english

Stocky wrote: but with the video still goin fits and stops...

I never use the flashplayer. It is hopeless, needing too much resources. (PIII 560 MHZ)

After clicking on a video, and checking that it starts okay in the flashplayer, I pause the flashplayer. The video continues to download in the background.

Using the filemanager, I go to the /tmp directory and click on the Flashxxxxx file (which is the temporary file where the browser is buffering the video for its flashplayer).

Your multimedia player (it's Mplayer here) then plays the flashvideo much less resource-intensively, and much smoother, than the flashplayer.

You don't have to wait until the whole video has downloaded before you click to start the media player, either.

OK, just putting this here for a date code more or less. I will be trying Puppy out on a PC with 1300Mhz CPU, 1,281 HD (of which only 400-500 available; it has Win 2000 Pro on the other 550-600MB). I will also use a 4GB flash drive for storing files? I don't think I can set it up to run from USB because I don't think it will boot from it. I know there is a proggy I can get that can boot older PCs to flash drive, but for now I don't want to mess with too much. Just going to run the live CD, install something to the HD (the minimum what ever that is). I used Puppy four years back. Went to Knoppix from there, then Ubuntu, then finally Fedora. Just playing with Puppy again, see if he fetches a bone.

Will report back in a few days.

Last post here was January of 2011.

chinamike, what made you think it would be better to post in a thread that has long been consigned to antiquity, than to post a new thread? I'm not really trying to be rude (although it may come across that way) -- I'm genuinely curious.

EDIT: to be on topic... Puppy does not per se have minimum requirements to run. That is, it will try to run on just about anything new enough to boot the kernel in question. How far it gets is another question -- as is whether or not it is usable at the other end.

I have what I call the "infernal Dell" -- a Latitude CPi from 1999. It has (once) booted Slacko 533, although it took a very long time (well in excess of five minutes) to boot to a desktop and was appallingly slow to the point of being barely useful. That said, such is to be expected from a system with a 300MHz Pentium II and 128mb RAM!

To run Puppy comfortably, the general rule is 512mb RAM. If you've less than that, and you've got a hard drive around, stick it in there and make up what's missing in swap. If not... it's gonna be slow going until you can upgrade RAM or add swap.

Your 1.3GHz system will run Puppy just fine as long as you've got the RAM. Much higher on your list of things to worry about should be resizing your Win2k partition so that Puppy can fit on the drive! (Windows does not like its partitions shrunk!)

chinamike wrote:OK, just putting this here for a date code more or less. I will be trying Puppy out on a PC with 1300Mhz CPU, 1,281 HD (of which only 400-500 available; it has Win 2000 Pro on the other 550-600MB). I will also use a 4GB flash drive for storing files? I don't think I can set it up to run from USB because I don't think it will boot from it. I know there is a proggy I can get that can boot older PCs to flash drive, but for now I don't want to mess with too much. Just going to run the live CD, install something to the HD (the minimum what ever that is). I used Puppy four years back. Went to Knoppix from there, then Ubuntu, then finally Fedora. Just playing with Puppy again, see if he fetches a bone.

Will report back in a few days.

I run Lupu 5.2x on a Asus 900 eee Netbook, using a 4GB SD card instead of the internal HDD (SSD). It works fine (though I have 1GB RAM on that).

I have 5.25 running on a 333 MHz laptop, with 256MB RAM, and a 512MB swap partition. It's a little heavy for that machine -- I may roll back to something lighter (I once ran 4.11/12 on it which worked pretty well -- planning to try Wary on it next).

If you run a flash drive on an old machine, it will likely be slow to shutdown, as the USB 1.1 is pretty doggie... But otherwise, it should work fine.

I run 5.28 on my 1600 MHz laptop (I also have 1GB installed in that).

If you've got 500+ MB RAM, you'll probably be fine -- though you may want some swap space depending on browser selection.

I use the rule that you want at least 512 MB in RAM+swap. But typically, more is better.

5.25 does exhibit a lighter hardware load (and lower memory load).

RetroTechGuy wrote:

I have 5.25 running on a 333 MHz laptop, with 256MB RAM, and a 512MB swap partition. It's a little heavy for that machine

Are you referring to 525 Retro?

planning to try Wary on it next

Try Wary 5.1.4.1.
The last of the 5.1.x generation, it includes the older, lighter SeaMonkey 1.1.18.

starhawk wrote:Last post here was January of 2011.

chinamike, what made you think it would be better to post in a thread that has long been consigned to antiquity, than to post a new thread? I'm not really trying to be rude (although it may come across that way) -- I'm genuinely curious.

EDIT: to be on topic... Puppy does not per se have minimum requirements to run. That is, it will try to run on just about anything new enough to boot the kernel in question. How far it gets is another question -- as is whether or not it is usable at the other end.

I have what I call the "infernal Dell" -- a Latitude CPi from 1999. It has (once) booted Slacko 533, although it took a very long time (well in excess of five minutes) to boot to a desktop and was appallingly slow to the point of being barely useful. That said, such is to be expected from a system with a 300MHz Pentium II and 128mb RAM!

To run Puppy comfortably, the general rule is 512mb RAM. If you've less than that, and you've got a hard drive around, stick it in there and make up what's missing in swap. If not... it's gonna be slow going until you can upgrade RAM or add swap.

Your 1.3GHz system will run Puppy just fine as long as you've got the RAM. Much higher on your list of things to worry about should be resizing your Win2k partition so that Puppy can fit on the drive! (Windows does not like its partitions shrunk!)

Maybe because it's better to not post something that has been already posted. That's what the search button is for, i think. It's all in the same place..