I turned off my Windows machine today.

[bobc]

Its taken me 10 years I bet,but I finally moved off it today

It was just SOOOO slow with 40 tabs open in chrome. Nothing else running, either. 4 gb of memory, 2 fast processors, a pair of 7200 rpm drives, and the s.o.b. was slow as mollasses, taking 30 to 45 seconds sometimes to do simple things.

It wasnt virused, it was MS'd and Googled to death!

BTW, my linux box with the same exact 40 tabs plus 41 on facebook chatting and 42 on youtube playing a music video, and 43 here was running 19% of cpu and only 47% on memory, and this laptop has only 3 gb, not 4 gb like the windows one.

Quite a difference...

The real surprise is that I'm running SlackoPup 5.7.0, and I was able to get most of the games I wanted, and get it to play videos, and once my tweaking was done, I was able to back up the partition, and restore it and get it to work without much trouble on 3 other machines, too.

Anyway, thanks to those who wrote the code and those who helped me get it all working.

[Ted Dog]

lol have the same feeling when I run from RAM the entire OS, even regular linux seems like windows..

[bobc]

Well, to be honest, I don't know how to get it to run more from ram, and would appreciate learning how, if you or someone else can point me to a thread telling how...

But I can tell you its just nice to get it to run reasonably. Windows always seemed to run ok for a month or so after a fresh reload, but eventually just slows to a crawl, and I got just too tired of yelling at it to no avail, LOL.

THIS puppy is Fast, LOL, especially considering its an 8 yr old laptop that ran like crap with its original MS code.

[Ted Dog]

Needs lots of RAM, two different ISOs allow it one 32bit other 64bit. I use them both but prefer the 64bit since it prompts you to save changes where the 32bit version does not.
Fatdog64-700b2.iso with base2ram=expand kernel flag option


unicorn-6.2.1.91.iso does it without prompts or save

[nic007]

I would agree with all Windows operating systems after Windows XP being memory hogs. I hate the newer Windows OS with all the popups and crap. XP, however is very light on resources and for most runs better than the newer Puppies on little RAM. I have only 384MB RAM on my old machine and only the version 4 Puppies (and older I suppose) runs as well as XP. The thing about Windows is that it needs maintenance as you go along. The registry needs to be cleaned and re-packaged regularly (I do it every three months or so) and you need to defragment your drives after prolonged usage. My XP runs as well today as the day I installed it 10 years ago.

[ardvark]

BTW, my linux box with the same exact 40 tabs plus 41 on facebook chatting and 42 on youtube playing a music video, and 43 here was running 19% of cpu and only 47% on memory, and this laptop has only 3 gb, not 4 gb like the windows one.

Quite a difference...

Hi...

To be fair, I highly doubt you would get the same performance with the latest distribution or Ubuntu or Red Hat.

Please see the graph under "Conclusion" here to get more of an idea of what window managers use.

Regards...

[mikeb]

Antivirus is a major hog.... one laptop I played with went from running like molasses to being snappy and pleasant just by removing that alone...to me these conware programs ARE viruses.

Anyway windows 7 and such don't need it as long as you don't use IE/outlook and messenger (their removal of such is not complete but quite effective regardlesss..at least they are no longer available to the user...wow progress)....and disabling updates helps too.
Only XP/2000/me/98 needed the removal of IE et al .

I assume a firewall somewere...without that there is a little fixing needed.

As for vista... well

In other words i get the same performance from windows as from linux... as it should be. Nice to have a choice and after all you did pay for it.

mike

[nic007]

Antivirus is a major hog.... one laptop I played with went from running like molasses to being snappy and pleasant just by removing that alone...to me these conware programs ARE viruses.

Anyway windows 7 and such don't need it as long as you don't use IE/outlook and messenger (their removal of such is not complete but quite effective regardlesss..at least they are no longer available to the user...wow progress)....and disabling updates helps too.
Only XP/2000/me/98 needed the removal of IE et al .

I assume a firewall somewere...without that there is a little fixing needed.

As for vista... well

In other words i get the same performance from windows as from linux... as it should be. Nice to have a choice and after all you did pay for it.

mike

I'm glad someone paid for it. True about anti-virus, bloated rubbish that takes over the machine.

[bobc]

I have a Toshiba Laptop in the basement that still loads XP, was reloaded from scratch recently, and doesn't run any antivirus, and its definitely runs slower when booted to XP than antiX linux, which it has on a dual boot.

Unfortunately, its built-in screen is usually half gone, sometimes all gone, and its only a single processor, and doesn't have a big drive or built-in wifi or a lot of memory, so it doesn't get a lot of use, and isn't worth $100 to fix.

LOL, day #2 on linux and I have so many partitions of Slacko for testing and testing backups and restores that I forgot which was the primary one.

None of them boot to Slacko automatically because I haven't found out how to chroot to it, yet. For the time being, since antiX 14 is still in testing, and Manjaro is reliable for booting (but pretty big, so not quick to boot from cd, especially on the old machines), I am using it to control the boots. Its a pain because it requires all my machines to run Manjaro, but luckily that is one that I have loaded on all of them that works with grub2 from the cd, so its the best choice.

[mikeb]

antix does look puppy like in its basic form.

Well the full sheebang for a fast XP is also to remove IE/outlook/msn and auto updates at install time... no antivirus and then its sweet.

I have 2000 run this way for 11 years same install.

Comparing with puppy circa 4.12.....

mike

[bobc]

antix does look puppy like in its basic form.

Well the full sheebang for a fast XP is also to remove IE/outlook/msn and auto updates at install time... no antivirus and then its sweet.

I have 2000 run this way for 11 years same install.

Comparing with puppy circa 4.12.....

mike

Yeah,I NEVER use autoupdates or IE or Oulook or MSN (ex IT guy here, due to security risks, not performance) and don't run a resident antivirus. I have checked it with boot scans now and then after anytime I've had to use it online, but otherwise, not. But then again, I don't think I'd want to use it online all the time without an antivirus running. Not all websites are that safe, and I suspect eventually a bad one would get clicked into.

PS: I may have found a thread showing how to chroot into Slacko, but the gy wasn't using it for that purpose, so not really sure.... I guess I keep looking, maybe try it on my oldest guinea pup.

[mikeb]

Yep....well deintegrating IE and msn and wmp for that matter does mean less items are preloaded at boot...not the hit that it used to be in 98 but makes a bit of difference. It vastly improved explorer stability in 98 but again less so in NT based systems.

chroot slacko...loop mount the main sfs and the chroot into it...that sort of thing ?

mike

[bobc]

The thing I need to be able to do is to

1. boot from my Slacko 5.7.0 cd, then
2. mount the hd partition with slacko,
3. chroot to it, and
4. run ppm to install the grub2 package, then
5. tweak the grub config files, then do an
6. install-grub to get it onto the mbr of the drive, then do an
7. update-grub to generate the grub.cfg, then
8. exit the chroot, and then
9. reboot into slacko from the hard drive.

The only part of it I don't know is the correct mountings to do before the chroot.

Until I can do that, Slacko can't be the primary OS

I have 16 partitions on the 1st drive and 4 on the 2nd. 5 of those are windows drives, and the rest are different linux versions, most that work. I had bad bad troubles with other boot managers in the past causing me great pains, so I don't trust anything but grub2 because I know for sure that is going to work, and I know for sure I can resurrect it from the dead with Manjaro from a cd. I need that same level of confidence with Slacko or whatever will replace Manjaro managing the boot, because I have a bunch of other machines (also with multiple drives and windows/linux mixed on them) I want to setup similarily,and I need to be sure I can manage them and not lose the ability to boot them.

The primary OS is kind of important because that's the one it boots to by default,and with 2 copies of Slacko 5.7.0 on this one, for example,it gets difficult to remember which is live and which is test if it doesn't boot to either by default.

I did ask the question in the pbackup thread when trying to restore but got no replies. So I created a new thread to ask the chroot question separately but got no replies there, either. Not many people even looked at it, so maybe its just that nobody looks in the filesystem subforum? Most "normal" users aren't going to know the answer. The problem is that if I do it wrong,I might really mess things up badly, and wouldn't even know how to tell unless I got an error message, and I'm certainly no linux guru.

[mikeb]

So in essence you are adding slacko to grub2... there are threads on the subject to give the right stanza..I believe/assume it would be done from your default system to point at the slacko install... a full or frugal one?

I suppose its all sounded more complicated that most here are used to doing to multiboot thats all.

mike

[bobc]

Well, not quite...

I've installed Slacko 5.7.0 as a full install

and I can't let grub4dos or lilo touch my boot or i lose everything

so i install grub2 via puppy package manager

but can't make it boot.

the only way i have found to do it is to then boot manjaro (or install and boot manjaro if not there), rerun the update-grub in manjaro to get slacko on the boot list, then reboot and hand key the pmedia=atahd on the boot line, then boot to slacko

then do the grub-install and update-grub from grub2 on slacko.

I found 4 or 5 posts with the chroot stuff, but non are for a full install type setupand all of them are doing what i'd call weird mappings and such, nothing straight forward, unfortunately. It seems there might be a dozen active posters here that probably "just know",but otherwise I bet most people would have no clue.

I may just try guessing it on my old clunker...

[mikeb]

From what i have seen an approach like this is all thats needed

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 25&t=83666

in your case drop the initrd line and pmedia is meaningless with a full install

Mike

[bobc]

Mike,

Yes, that works, and is essentialy what I'm doing now, but that leaves me needing to install and keep Manjaro there in order to control the boot that runs Slacko. If Manjaro gets deleted, Slacko is no longer accessible. I did it by mistake the other day, and had to reinstall Manjaro. That's how I know its important.

Thanks for the reply, though

[rufwoof]

Needs lots of RAM, two different ISOs allow it one 32bit other 64bit

I've tried loading both uncompressed sfs's into/from ram and fast low-compressed sfs's and found little between them. Typically the compressed sfs's are half the size of the non compressed which seems to offset the decompression time. Overall I ended up going with LZO level 1 compression as the default - modest data compression with fast decompression speeds.

I did start with a range of sfs's, one each for Libre, Skype, Openshot ...etc, but found that combining them all into one big sfs suited me better. Once you figure out the best order for those to be loaded (combined) then thereafter tends to be very stable.

I did have a go at looking at whether adding a massive swap file and loading tons of stuff so some of it becomes swapped out - as swaps are single instruction processes, and compared that to conventional disk bound sfs's - but came to no firm conclusions.

Approaching a year of using Puppy now after moving across prior to XP support being dropped, still have my XP partition, but just gathering dust. Once I transitioned from Excel to Libre Calc I have no desire to switch back. Puppy serves all my PC needs. Single small initial partition that I use exclusively for grub4dos, second XP (NTFS) partition. Third is a ext3 partition where I keep all of the initrd's and vmlinuz's in sub directories that grub4dos's menu.lst point to. 2nd HDD for backup purposes. External USB HDD for whatever is taking my fancy at the time.

Generally when I try out another pup I download the ISO, left click to open that and then select all and drag to a new sub directory under my /mnt/sda3, and then edit grub4dos menu.lst to point to the initrd and vmlinuz files in that sub directory, something like

title some-other-pup
root (hd0,2)
kernel /some-other-pup/vmlinuz
initrd /some-other-pup/initrd.gz

and try that. Often it works, sometimes you have to hunt around to find what other parameters to add to that to get it to boot (maybe psubdir and/or nouveau.modeset=0 etc type parmeters).

I don't generally use savefiles - and instead just boot, make all of the changes I desire and then remaster, dropping the new initrd in to replace the original copy of the ISO version in the respective sub directory for that pup.

Of all the pups I have one favourite that I've worked on/refined the most that has become my main daily usage pup. Very stable and runs on all household PC's (includes a PXE server so all other PC's can netboot from it). 32 bit and a older version of slacko based, but does its job well enough for me.

[mikeb]

Ok sorry to recap but if manjaro was no longer needed does anything else require grub2 ...if not the grub4dos setup in pup is pretty decent....and thats only if grub2 was removed for some reason.

mike

[bobc]

I appreciate you trying to help.

Ruwoof is telling me I have to think from a blank sheet, but that means doing it experimentally first.

I lost a machine to grub4dos once. It was years ago, but once I lose a machine to a program, it takes eons for me to stick my neck out again.

I guess I'll either guess a way to chroot, or setup a test machine that I can afford to lose with grub4dos or figure something else out.

Anyway,thanks for trying to help...