Puppy system requirements summary

Helping keep Puppy well documented
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pa_mcclamrock
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Joined: Fri 03 Jun 2005, 23:13
Location: Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA

Puppy system requirements summary

#1 Post by pa_mcclamrock »

Hmm, almost four months since there's been any activity on this "Documentation Project" . . . that will never do. How about some comments on this (probably incomplete) summary of the system requirements for Puppy?

* If you're going to boot Puppy from a live-CD, it's highly recommended to have at least 256 MB RAM or at least two CD or DVD drives. Why? Because, if you load Puppy from a live-CD and you have less than 256 MB RAM, Puppy won't let go of your CD drive until you shut down or reboot. That's because Puppy won't load your entire main file into RAM, and will need to read parts of the main file from the CD instead. If you have at least 256 MB RAM, the entire main file will go into RAM and your CD drive will be available for other things.

* On your hard drive, it's best to have at least 700 MB available for your main file and your personal save file--or more, if you create a bigger main file or have a lot of stuff to store in your personal save file. You can put these files on a flash drive instead, but then Puppy will periodically interrupt you to save things to the flash drive. (It does this to prolong the life of the flash drive; if you save to a hard drive instead, you don't get interrupted.) If you have less than 128 MB RAM, you'll also need a Linux swap partition (use the System --> Gparted partition manager menu item to create one).

* Aside from that, just about any PC with an Intel or AMD "x86" processor, either 32-bit or 64-bit, should do. Puppy will run even on computers with pretty old, slow processors, like under 200 MHz. I don't know exactly what's the oldest, slowest computer Puppy has ever run on, but it was probably one so old and slow that you'd never want to use it if you could help it!

David McClamrock
It's stupid to use inferior software for ideological reasons.
--Linus Torvalds

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