(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I installed puppy (very easilly) on my old laptop.

I wondered how I can make it faster, are there any cool performance tweaks that I just dont know about. Its just that people are saying that they have resurected old machines and can run it on 16MB from cd and all this.

I just expected it to be faster for a...
133mhz
144MB RAM
3GB HDD

Any ideas?

Not sure how you'd do it using Puppy, but you'd get yourself a major speed/performance boost by creating a swap partition.

On my backup PC (which comes with an earth-scorchin' 64* MB of RAM and a 4G hard drive), I put in the swap partition when I installed DamnSmall Linux. I later removed DSL and installed Puppy, but kept the swap partition. Makes a huge difference. Running Puppy with swap, this machine thinks it's showroom-floor new.

Don't need a lot of space for swap. A partition about the same size as your RAM (in your case 144MB) should be plenty; in fact it might border on overkill.

Maybe some of the other folks here may know a way to create the swap using Puppy tools without having to reinstall everything. Suggestions?




Clarification, added 7/7/05:
*Forgot -- this backup PC carries 48MB, not 64. But it STILL kicks tail with Puppy.

Not too fussed about having to reinstall the whole OS as its so quick and easy to do.

Any idea how to create a swap partition then?
Any possible way to make it any amount faster would be much appreiciated.

Its not incredibly slow, its just that its the spare machine and without making propper use of it it will go back to the big wardrobe in the sky.

Also I know its pretty offencive to ask on here.

Is DSL any quicker?

it's easier to make a swap file than a swap partition

find somewhere to put the swap file ... type:
df -h
to see how much free space you have on each partition

create an empty swap file:
for example, to make a 512 meg swap file on /mnt/home called pup.swp, type:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/home/pup.swp bs=1M count=512

if /mnt/home is an NTFS drive, do not use dd (writing to your NTFS drive can corrupt the file system) ... boot to Windows and create the file by typing something like:
fsutil file createnew C:\pup.swp 512000000
then boot Puppy again

make the empty file a swap file:
mkswap /mnt/home/pup.swp

mount the swap file:
swapon /mnt/home/pup.swp

you can see if it's working by typing:
free

to automatically mount the swap file when Puppy boots, put a line like this in an init file, like /etc/rc.d/rc.local:
swapon /mnt/home/pup.swp

there could be a wizard to setup a swap file ... Puppy could automatically mount a swap file if it found it in the same place as pup001

I presume this is all done from rxvt???

Also is /mnt/home/ the same as /dev/hda1

Forget the 2 previous posts. Ive got it working.

Any other tweaks

First, tell us what you did to "get it working."

Exactly what he told me to do.
Opened rxvt
Typed: dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/home/pup.swp bs=1M count=512
Pressed enter
Typed: mkswap /mnt/home/pup.swp
Pressed enter
Typed: swapon /mnt/home/pup.swp
Pressed enter
Typed: free
Closted rxvt
Then put a line in /etc/rc.d/rc.local:
swapon /mnt/home/pup.swp

It created the swap file for definate. Whether it actually uses it is another matter. Every time I look at it it says 0 used. The other figures are all correct though.

________total________used______free______shared___buffers
Mem:___483676______30716____ 452960_____0______900
Swap:___524280_______0______524280
Total:___1007956_____30716_____977240


Just thought I would let you see this bit. Ive not had it come with any used at all yet.
The figures are higher than normal because I am now on my other laptop but ive done exactly the same swap file procedure.

(my dad turns his computer off at night so I can only get on the internet via ethernet and not wifi. My old computer only has a wifi pcmcia card. Doesnt have ethernet at all )

with 480 megs of ram, the swap file is probably not going to be used a lot. You have over 1 gig of total virtual memory

Oh right, so it uses ram until there is no more then it dips into the swap file?

The point was though that it also gave 0 swap used on my other machine and it only has 144mb ram and at the time it had approx 3mb of that free

Completely off topic though,
Can I change the cursors?
How do I create desktop icons?
How can I delete beaver? (A new version is now out)
How do I delete mozilla (no I dont want gaim or any other email/chat software) so that I can replace it with firefox?

For the final 2 I looked around the forum and found a few things but nothing definate that told me specifically how to do it.

I haven't seen anything on cursors, but there are several new posts on desktop icons. Look here, under "Tips and Tricks."

Several people have discussed deleting Mozilla and replacing it with Firefox. I think those threads are also in the Beginners index, but maybe they're in the Additional Software index instead. I don't think I've seen anything definitive on deleting Mozilla.

A swap file will always be slower than a swap partition due to the overhead of accessing a loop filesystem....


But since puppy (ususally) runs from ram I beleive any speed increases would be academic. Tho the use of the XFree X server did appear to make my machine run quicker, well GFX anyways.

A custom kernel tuned to the machine would also give a slight increase but would the effort be worth it.
I used to run Win98 on my lappy but got sick of the boot times and the final straw was not being able to get a reliable connection with my new wireless card........
Now I'm being lead down the road that Linux has better hardware support and is a damn sight easier to install a new driver, no more rebooting 50 million times

GuestToo wrote:it's easier to make a swap file than a swap partition

find somewhere to put the swap file ... type:
df -h
to see how much free space you have on each partition

The info has been added here
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/wikka/SwapFile

people are welcome to add improve the page
(double click on page to edit)
on some pages editing requires login use CamelCase for your login name (lettering with a capital letter on the beginning and middle/end)

Added note to replace dd with fsutil at:
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/wikka/SwapFile

Would configuring all of puppy with the right device drivers speed it up?

Graphics surely would, is the any way of telling what graphics drivers are loaded up at the moment and if I do need other drivers then where can I get them and how do I install them.

-------------------------------------------------------
Compaq Armda 7730MT Laptop

Thanks