I happen to have an ancient computer... It's not my main machine, but I like to have it working as a backup, and Puppy is a good fit for it. At this point I've found a halfway sensible workaround for the security issues (running internet-facing apps as a limited user), but updates and software avail...

D'oh! Thanks for correcting me on that.

Thank you, but it looks like the nice command does not work that way?

Also, the niceness of the processes is normal in both cases, it's just the priority that's different. Not sure if/how that makes sense.

This is a screenshot of htop on an EeePC running Zenwalk 7.0: http://i.imgur.com/1HCcF.png And this is one of htop on an Aspire laptop running Lucid Puppy 5.2.8: http://i.imgur.com/EZUEr.png Note the PRI column. On Zenwalk, most tasks have a priority of 1, and it is usually not higher than 7. On Pup...

Hmm... Well there's something I didn't notice, right in front of my nose. Puppy runs Xorg at niceness -1 by default... That could probably make things snappier on an old machine. I think.

I was thinking maybe kernel compile options, since even Lucid Puppy has a custom kernel (I think?). Probably not it... Whatever, there's got to be some reproducible reason that Puppy works on really old computers while other distros flounder. I think. :lol: Anyway I'd better stop before I hijack thi...

Thinkpad 600E runs Wary 5.2.2 reasonably well. Cost: seems to usually go for $50 to $100 on EBay, so not a particularly good value. OTOH it does qualify as cheap. Specs for mine: 400 MHz Pentium II processor 192 MB of PC100 RAM (I think this was upgraded on mine though) 40 GB IDE hard disk (original...

Short answer: no. Long answer: absolutely no way whatsoever. I've tried minimal Linux installations, with Fluxbox or Openbox or whatever, on a Pentium II Thinkpad with 192 MB of RAM. I've even tried NetBSD and FreeBSD... Makes no difference. Everything other than some form of Puppy performs like a g...

Hmm, another thing: I was able to find BK's config for (what I think is) the Wary kernel... It like he has "tickless" mode (CONFIG_NO_HZ) undefined (i.e. same as 'nohz=off'). I've never seen that make any serious performance difference on newer computers, but perhaps CONFIG_NO_HZ introduce...

It's not a big deal from a live CD. Not convinced about live USB though, USB sticks are read/write. For live USB I'd be more inclined to use something like Porteus, I think (it uses a guest account by default). (Computers that can boot properly from a USB stick are generally powerful enough to handl...

Maybe, but I don't think that's it... I had OpenBSD running entirely without dbus, and had tried one Linux distro (a Salix custom install) likewise. Both were still barely usable compared to Wary. I should also note that the Wary install is frugal, which I'm guessing (though I may be wrong) means ad...

First off, I'll admit to being a little unwilling to give Wary (or any kind of Puppy Linux) a try. I do not like the idea of running as root, completely bypassing the UNIX permissions system. However... I have a spare Thinkpad 600E with 192 MB of RAM, and other Linux distros are simply not usable on...