Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Bruce B

I've been wondering for sometime how well Puppy will run on a computer with only 32 MB RAM using an option 2 (Hard Drive) install.

In order to find out, I removed my RAM chips and installed a 32 MB chip. I'm pleased to report that Puppy runs respectably well with only 32 MB ram and a swap partition.

* booting to the prompt takes about 8 mb ram
* running icewm takes about 28 mb ram
* firefox loads a little slow, but once it is running it does pretty good

mike · Joined: 13 Aug 2005 Posts: 75 Location: Bowser

that's great Very Happy

do you think that you could post how much ram fluxbox, jwm and fvwm95 take up?

just curious how well fluxbox fares....

Bruce B · Posted: Sun 14 Aug 2005, 19:43 Post subject:

Mike I deleted fvwm95. I have not deleted jwm yet.

I just tested jwm with a solid color background, by this procedure:

Boot X with jwm
run command
free>jwm.txt
read jwm.txt and it shows 24 MB RAM usage on initial boot.

The idea I have is making a well organized and feature rich Puppy. Then make a partition magic image of the partition. Copy the image to CD.

After that I can set up Puppy to hard drive in MS-DOS mode using the DOS version of Partition Magic and Drive Image.

With these procedures and the right software, I should be able to set up and old computer with Puppy in DOS mode in hour or less, if I don't have snags.

I do anticipate finding computers with 64 MB RAM and such which will be much nicer.

A person could have a respectable command line Puppy running programs like elinks, midnight commander and minimum profit editor with only 12 MB RAM

raffy · Joined: 25 May 2005 Posts: 4636 Location: Manila

That's a good project. Hope you can have one with barebones + firefox.

Bruce B · Posted: Sun 14 Aug 2005, 20:33 Post subject:

raffy, I don't see any reason why a compressed type 2 insall image couldn't or shouldn't be hosted.

the format I have in mind for my use, is power quest drive image. the problem is it would take pqdi to install the image.

as i'm sure you know, i don't have license to distribute pqdi for free.

using an image and pqdi doesn't take much ram and it can be done in dos. (any dos).

i wonder if you or someone else has suggestions about any other image formats one could use, hopefully in dos which has 'free software' to install the image?

btw - i'm posting this with links browser and links really does run well with only 32 mb ram

GuestToo · Puppy Master Joined: 04 May 2005 Posts: 4078

you could try savepart
http://damien.guibouret.free.fr/en/
http://damien.guibouret.free.fr/en/telechargement.html

Bruce B · Posted: Sun 14 Aug 2005, 22:12 Post subject:

I just gave savepart a test run. My opinion is: I wasted close to 100 dollars on Powerquest (Symantec) Drive Image. Not 100% lost, because PQDI can create, resize and format ext3 partitions, which are my preferred partitions. Nevertheless, savepart looks very good, also quite intuitive and easy to understand. I didn't even need to read the docs.

The compressed image came out at 79 mb.

I'll do some more R&D - but this looks very doable.

For some time I've wanted to come up with an easy procedure to install Puppy for users' machines that don't meet the minimum RAM requirements.

The next obstacle is managing, creating and resizing partitions. For users with a cdrom drive, I think System Rescue CD would be fine substitute for pqmagic.

As for hosting a 79 mb image??

Again, I'm very impressed with savepart. Thanks G2

GuestToo · Puppy Master Joined: 04 May 2005 Posts: 4078

of course, there's also a Linux solution:
http://www.partimage.org/

you can use bit torrent to "host" files using peer2peer rather than on a server

Bruce B · Posted: Sun 14 Aug 2005, 22:55 Post subject:

My thinking (which is subject to change) has been more or less along the lines that people wanting to install Puppy on machines with not much RAM would probably be running DOS based Windows 9x. Possibly ME, but if they are - not much I can do in DOS for them without some effort.

If someone reports they are running Windows and have 64 mb ram, I'm inclined to suspect they are not running XP, NT or W2K.

I'll do more thinking and see what seems best to start with.

---------------

Change of subject, before reinstalling the full RAM on my machine, I decided to boot Puppy Option 1 install. To my surprise, it worked rather well at 32 MB, although it used more RAM.

Apparently, Puppy checked the available RAM and didn't attempt to copy usr_cram.fs to RAM, rather it left it on hard disk and mounted it from there.

Prior to today, all my experience with Puppy has been with more than adequate RAM space. After today's experiments, I'm more impressed than ever with Puppy's design, as I see it running so well on such a relatively small amount of RAM.

raffy · Joined: 25 May 2005 Posts: 4636 Location: Manila

OK, I really _love_ your initiative, as that is exactly what I wanted to do, but my skills limit me to only writing tutorials Embarassed

For a floppy-based solution to partitions, this works (just avoid/cancel its setting up in your hard disk) - it is shareware

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

and this is the download link

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/downloads/bootitng.zip

Cheers!
---------------------
Edit: Thanks, Lobster (for the post below), but am sure Bruce will do it after he perfects his project. Will be concentrating in XAMPP for now.

Lobster · Posted: Mon 15 Aug 2005, 01:09 Post subject:

Very interesting and exciting and I believe Barry was contemplating a console based Puppy . . . in fact we had a code name for it - or suggested names - one of which was Bonsai Puppy

Do we have a link for that?

Raffy if you are interested a Projects page on the Wiki would be a good idea (linked from the front page)

this is the original developers page . . .
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/wikka/DeveloperDiscussionAndLinks

mouldy · Joined: 04 May 2005 Posts: 479

I vaguely remember running into other linux imaging software on some Czech site. I remember thinking I'd go back and download it, but never did.

However what I use and have mentioned before is the emergency self booting cd of Acronis True Image. The regular True Image is a bloated windows program, but the emergency cd that you can make with regular True image uses a linux kernel. Anyway I found my copy in pile of old software (not latest version by any means). Boot from the cd and make or restore an image. As an option, you can resize partition when you restore an image. Bout simplest imaging software I've run across.

And right now I just happen to be using my old AST 100mhz laptop with 40mb ram with Puppy. Working great. I was surprised. I dont use old laptop much and did have win95 and a very old version of DSL on it. Win was indicating it needed to be reinstalled and DSL was taking forever to boot. Installed barebones Puppy 1.04 as type2 install replacing win. Had to physically move hardrive to desktop to install since no cdrom, no usb, nor even working floppy drive. Its running great. Did upgrade to the patched Dillo. By way Puppy's GRUB installer works ok. Hadnt tried it before.

I do have to mention that the speed of the hardrive makes such a difference on old low end machines. Some ancient hardrives are downright sluggish.

Hernan · Joined: 09 Aug 2005 Posts: 8

I used to run Ventura Publisher 2.0 Profesional, twelve years ago.
It was running in 640 KB RAm so a litle slowly. But with 2 MB RAM it went flying.

Those were MS-DOS monopoly times, And Ventura had its own graph environment I don' remember the name. All this in that small room.
Ventura could manage a whole publisher project, Chapters, columns, WYSIWIG, pitch, fonts, photos, images, colors, color separations, Post Script, all you need in a pub.

Why can't us do anything so now?

Hernan · Joined: 09 Aug 2005 Posts: 8

I used to run Ventura Publisher 2.0 Profesional, twelve years ago.
It was running in 640 KB RAm so a litle slowly. But with 2 MB RAM it went flying.

Those were MS-DOS monopoly times, And Ventura had its own graph environment I don' remember the name. All this in that small room.
Ventura could manage a whole publisher project, Chapters, columns, WYSIWIG, pitch, fonts, photos, images, colors, color separations, Post Script, all you need in a pub.

Why can't us do anything so now?

Bruce B · Posted: Wed 17 Aug 2005, 01:24 Post subject:

In those days if an ISV wanted to be successful they had to write efficent code. And quite frankly they did.

In DOS days bloatware was not an option for the ISV. Today bloatware is an option and well there is a lot of bloatware.

Changing subject:

Netscape 4.x was a pretty big piece of software even in 1995. Nevertheless, it ran pretty well.

Netsape 4.x is still available for Linux - I've tried it on Puppy and it is fast and a fairly respectable browser, newsreader, html editor, addressbook, etc.

Here is where I get in trouble with people: I assert that Netscape Communicator 4.8 is faster than Mozilla, faster than Firefox and people argue with me that it is not, or that it couldn't be. or that it is based on the same geko engine, or whatever.

Nevertheless, I assert that it is faster than Firefox because it actually is.

I mention this because Netscape Communicator is a viable option as a web browser on low end computers low ram computers.

As I recall the Netscape 4.x series was written circa 1994. That was in a day when mainly power users were running as much as 32 MB RAM. The rest of us guys were proud to have 16 MB, because a lot of people only had 8.