[sarcasm]sickgut wrote:having had experience with creating other linux distros, there seems to be a some mythology surrounding the disk size of an OS and its speed.
And predators in the wild are not affected by other predators competing over limited resources.
[/sarcasm]
if you are going try to bust myths, please provide data and not FUD
full install - ever heard of seek/read/write times? it takes longer for programs to start up
frugal install - if SFS in RAM is large it can force swap when RAM usage gets high ... and if no swap file or partition exists it will fail
live cd - do I even have to say it?
Puppy runs in many forms - you have to consider them all
try to prove that compression in RAM actually makes it slower than reading from a hard disk - better get yourself a really old cpu and a really fast hard disk
Being a small distro doesn't directly make puppy use less RAM, carefully selecting packages that are both small _and_ based on minimal dependencies that use less resources does.
The number of programs running is not directly related to RAM usage
I can load 1000 programs into RAM and use less resources than 10 other programs - dependencies matter. Loading a 10kb fltk program, a 10kb Fox toolkit program a 10kb QT3 program a 10kb SDL game and a 10kb kde4 program can use more resources than 1000 instances of a 10kb gtk+ program
Using 128MB as some arbitrary line is ridiculous though, start with a base system and carefully select, add and tweak the programs that provide your desired user experience. If you need 140Mb of RAM for your main app + 32Mb for system processes and want it to run in pfix=ram on a box with 256Mb, then your limit would be 84Mb. Don't just pick a number and pray that it works, based on some random thumb rule with no basis. Which reminds me, pet packages need an extra field(s) for resource usage in the pet.specs file.