Toshiba Lifebook 520t 24Mb of ram - Can it run puppy?

[BenyBen]

Specs: Pentium 120mhz, 24mb of ram, 800mb hd
Internal cd rom (which doesn't seem to support boot from cd, even though the bios option is there)
External floppy drive

This laptop runs windows 98 surprisingly well, but I'd love to turn it over to puppy...

I've attempted to use the puppy boot floppy method, but there's not enough ram to load all it needs in ramdrive, so I tried using this method

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/InstallingPuppyInMsdos

When I try to use grub, it gives me the following message:
Error 28: Selected item cannot fit into memory
And grub also says that only 8k of lower memory is available.

So, I'm thinking grub won't run because dos loaded into lower memory, but I can't use XMS to load dos into it, can I? Because when I load XMS, Grub says it only wants to run in real mode.

Bassically, can my laptop run puppy? What would be the best method for installing puppy, based on the fact that I have 24mb of ram? Is there some kind of command line only install script that could be run from a boot disk?
Thanks

[raffy]

Try making a swap partition first to augment your small RAM, say 96 MB or larger. You can use Partition Magic in Windows or bootitng.

[BenyBen]

How do I tell puppy to use that partition? I've never managed to actually get puppy running...

[slvrldy17]

Ben -

If you use something like Partition Magic to create a swap partition you will find that Puppy will automatically find it and make use of it. I had to do this recently and did so in Windows with the above program. The only effect on the Windows install should be that it will see an "unknown partition". As for size, I would recomend that you go as large as you can get away with - if you have the space 256MB or larger will give good results. With less working memory some programs like Firefox 1.5 and/or Seamonkey will freeze or not open on occasion. Let us know how you come out.

[Sage]

I'd like to get more definitive advice about swap files and swap partitions in Linux, raffy & SL, because what you are saying runs directly counter to all the advice I've received previously and certainly my experiences with Puppy. Many moons ago, I was taught that the 'maximum allocated swap space should never exceed twice the value of main memory' . I think that it may even say something like that in 'doze somewhere, although they are hardly an authority on memory handling?!!
The problem of large swap space is that the OS can get confused and use it constantly in preference, so much so that it can destroy the HD. This is known in the business as 'thrash'. This used to be a problem on older machines with cache memory, too. Now, to what extent this remains true for Puppy, which has a very different structure, I do not fully understand. Except that, from my own investigations with RAM-challenged systems, I find that ~48Mb+ of swap space will turn a non-booting or non-operating Puppy installation into a fully viable system. Adding more swap space doesn't significantly improve matters, although I tend to adopt the 2xmain memory formula in most cases. Indeed, too much swap space could slow down access. I know that there will be IT HW specialists out there with more Linux specific experience, so it would be very helpful to hear their views. In the meantime, it might be best to stick to conventional wisdom and avoid very large swap space.
24Mb has to be on the very margin? Even if it boots, it could take hours to load some apps? And cause damage to the HD? See what happens with DSL and Austumi? They operate entirely differently, esp wrt to memory. It may be possible to come to some kind of operational conclusions by such comparitive studies?

[Nathan F]

I'd have to say I'm with Sage on this one, for his reasons and some others. Almost anyone who has ever had a Toshiba and tried to run Linux on it will tell you some stories about it anyway, they are really finicky. But that's actually of topic a bit.

With the way Puppy runs by loading into RAM 24 MB just isn't going to be enough, actually even OneBone might balk at it a bit. What you need for that beast is a simple barebones Linux that can run off the hard disk. I love Puppy but really I think a couple other distros might give you better results on this one.

Now if Puppy could be installed to your HD without having to boot from the cd first then you would be set, but that route invariably involves some kind of hardware swapping at this point (remove drive, put into another box, install puppy on it, and put it back). What you want is a good old fashioned boot floppy or network installable distro.

Nathan

[Lobster]

It may be a little early but as 98 runs this might be of interest . . .
http://www.reactos.org/xhtml/en/index.html

I wonder if menuet would run on your system?
http://www.menuetos.net/

[muggins]

as 98 works alright, why not leave it there, as 98 & pup can co-exist in harmony, as a search of the forum will show. (to remove some bloat from 98 & give some more room, you could try 98lite to exorcize those explorer demons from it!).

with regards to booting puppy from cdrom, have you tried the smart boot manager bootfloppy, which can sometimes have success booting stubborn cd's? if this works as a floppy, then there's a workaround where you can use it on your hard-disk, with grub, to cdrom boot. see here & give it a try:

http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=4038

[muggins]

Oh, i forgot to add, a good site for anything involving linux & toshiba is here:

http://newsletter.toshiba-tro.de/main/index.html

where you can search for working machines. unfortunately, there's no mention of any lifebooks!

[BenyBen]

Ben -

If you use something like Partition Magic to create a swap partition you will find that Puppy will automatically find it and make use of it. I had to do this recently and did so in Windows with the above program. The only effect on the Windows install should be that it will see an "unknown partition". As for size, I would recomend that you go as large as you can get away with - if you have the space 256MB or larger will give good results. With less working memory some programs like Firefox 1.5 and/or Seamonkey will freeze or not open on occasion. Let us know how you come out.

Hmm, I actually managed to get DSL running, though I've been having some issue getting my pcmcia cards to run. That's so sad, because DSL was actually very fast on this old machine

So I still want to give puppy a try as it seemed to have been better with hardware recognition in the past.

Anyways, I created a 128mb swap partition with it (DSL linux), along with the rest of my hd as a linux ext2 partition. Yet when I attempted booting into Puppy from the cd, it still went ahead and created a ramdisk and tried to "install" itself there... which fails of course, with only 24 mb of ram.

I think what's missing here, is a way to boot puppy into command line from the diskette/cdrom, and some kind of hardrive install script...

[BenyBen]

as 98 works alright, why not leave it there, as 98 & pup can co-exist in harmony, as a search of the forum will show. (to remove some bloat from 98 & give some more room, you could try 98lite to exorcize those explorer demons from it!).

with regards to booting puppy from cdrom, have you tried the smart boot manager bootfloppy, which can sometimes have success booting stubborn cd's? if this works as a floppy, then there's a workaround where you can use it on your hard-disk, with grub, to cdrom boot. see here & give it a try:

http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=4038

WOW! This worked.. Puppy even recognized my swap and used it.. but the thing is that it only used 64mb or so of it... And it's SLOW!!!! I haven't been able to get to the install script. So as soon as puppy booted, I did ctrl+alt+backspace, and now I'm in the prompt.

Can the universal install script run from the command line?

[Flash]

Here's a very technical Wikipedia article on Linux swap memory.

[muggins]

sounds like you're very close to getting it working. don't know if the universal install script can be made to work command-line...simplest solution would be, from command-line, to mount cdrom, mount hda1, then copy over 3 integral files to boot puppy, make grub boot floppy, (or perhaps the smart boot manager floppy will find vmlinuz? can't remember) and boot. sort of like this:

mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom
mount -t ext2 /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
mkdir /mnt/hda1/boot
cp /mnt/cdrom/vmlinuz /mnt/hda1/boot
cp /mnt/cdrom/initrd.gz /mnt/hda1/boot
cp /mnt/cdrom/pup_201.sfs /mnt/hda1



then you've got to make a grub floppy, (try smart boot manager first as it may work), or install grub to hda1. the critical thing with grub is the file menu.lst which sets up the parameters so that grub boots the kernel properly.

alternatively, given your minimal ram, it might be more sensible to install the commandline one-bone puppy, then beef it up, as nathanf says, elsewhere on forum, that he got graphics working with, i think, 5 or 6 additioanl files added.