How to run Puppy at 75MHz with 40 megs of EDO RAM

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John Doe
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How to run Puppy at 75MHz with 40 megs of EDO RAM

#1 Post by John Doe »

Intro
My purpose in posting this is to demonstrate the extreme lower limits that are possible and communicate the steps I took in order for users, with limited hardware available, to take advantage of what I learned and optimize their performance as much and as quickly as possible.

*disclaimer: All testing and comments were made using my test system:
75MHz
40megs EDO Ram
2gig IDE HD
400 KBS CDROM
1.5 MB Floppy
Rematered CD that has a 215meg iso.

Booting from Floppy
If you BIOS doesn't support CD Boot, do this (otherwise, goto 2 under "Booting"):

1-Find a computer that boots from CD or currently has Puppy Running and make a "WakePup Boot Floppy" (Menu->Setup->WakePup create boot floppy).

Get WakePup2 for puppy2.16 or greater here.

Booting

2-Put in your CD (and boot floppy if needed) and boot.

note: If booting from CD you may need to use 'puppy pfix=ram' or 'puppy pfix=rdsh' at this point depending on mistakes, problems or method chosen to proceed.

3-Do keyboard wizard and video wizard (you probably want to pick XVESA if you have limited HW). Then when X starts to load (the text will go away and you'll see a big X on the screen), give it the three finger salute (ctr+alt+backspace) and get back to the command line.

Setting up Swap Space and copying squash files

4-You might now want to familiarize yourself with cfdisk and How to Create a Swap Space.

5-Make your save partition and maybe one for swap space or let puppy handle a swapfile. Although I found little notable difference in boot up or general performance in my tests, this may be due to non-extended use. I've read a partition is faster that a swapfile.

I made my partition the inner most partition in hopes of increasing seek time. I don't know how much this helped.

cfdisk /dev/hda
make save partition (vfat or ext3)
make swap partition (type 82)
write changes
run mkfs.vfat /dev/hda2
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=1024 count=1024
mkswap /dev/hda1 1024

*note: I did run another test with a second 2gig drive and hooked it up as a slave on the CD IDE cable. I set it up as a 2gig swap partition and removed the swap partition on the first drive. The performance increase seemed negligible. Perhaps there was a stability increase.

6-If you understand how puppy saves session then consider copying your pup_2xx.sfs file and zdrv_2xx.sfs file to that partition now, otherwise do so on the next boot (you may need to ctrl+alt+backspace again). Optionally, in a low RAM situation, you may want to consider leaving those two files on the CD depending on the speed of the CD drive. My tests used a CD drive that boasts of "600 KBS" transfer speeds so I opted to use the IDE HD for reading those files.

7-Type "shutdown" or "reboot" and select your save partition.

Optimize ROX and JWM

First thing, remove as many desktop/pinboard icons as you can. This made a noticeable difference in performance at the level I was working. Set the background to a single solid color (no picture) to speed things up a bit also. After you've done these, select your resolution (doing this last saves the time of rendering all the icons and picture again).

Make sure Thumbnails are shut off for JWM. They are by default now, but my remastered CD had them on and I thought it was worth mentioning.

Consider Changing Default Applications

Change Mozilla to Dillo (/usr/local/bin/defaultbrowser)
Change Geany to Leafpad (/usr/local/bin/defaulttexteditor)

Mozilla was impossible to run. Geany ran ok, but leafpad runs better. Most other applications seemed to function fine at this level with a bit of patience.

Kudos to the T2 implementation and team for building everything with x86. This seems to work much better than when I tried it prior to this.
Last edited by John Doe on Mon 18 Jun 2007, 03:30, edited 1 time in total.

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Lobster
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Which version of Puppy did you start with?

#2 Post by Lobster »

Very impressive.
Which version of Puppy did you start with?
OneBone Pup, PicoPup ... console based Puppy or a recent 'full version'?

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/VersionsPuppy
Last edited by Lobster on Wed 05 Nov 2008, 02:13, edited 1 time in total.
Puppy Raspup 8.2Final 8)
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amish
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#3 Post by amish »

this is very cool, especially if you managed it in 2.14. i have 2.11 and dos grub running on a 32mb machine. xwin is as slow as you'd expect it to be, but it works. puppy 1.07 does not boot on the machine at all- the kernel has a fit about ram.
sadly, it is not possible to separate politics from free software. free software - politics = unfree software.

John Doe
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#4 Post by John Doe »

It was a remastered version of 2.13b1/2 I think. Maybe 2.12.

(I actually wrote that in the first week of Jan., so a few things like the menu locations might be off now.)

Check out the 'pfix=nox' idea also. I've never actually tried Pico or OneBone but I get the idea. I was thinking it would be possible to merge the two into one using that concept. So Puppy would be puppy, but with a quick arg it becomes as powerful a cli as onebone for use in the above situation to then become a sort of fat-pico/lite puppy afterwards.

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mbutts
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#5 Post by mbutts »

i think the last time i owned anything that high performance was back in 1995. impressive to say the least. was that dx4 or pentium microprocessor?
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John Doe
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#6 Post by John Doe »

pentium.

First machine the family really started using together.

Brings a tear to my eye :cry:

I learned html on it and how to type really well; by entering the entire Chamber of Commerce into a database so I could print labels to mail them about my lawn service.

Before that it was all Franklin 3800's/Basic/Fortran, BBS's and some goofy apple boxes.

JPsDad
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My Pentium 100 with 64MB RAM. hangs during boot, copying sfs

#7 Post by JPsDad »

My Pentium 100 with 64MB RAM. hangs during boot from LiveCD 2.14 & 2.17.1 The last thing to appear on the screen is: "copying pup_2.14.sfs to tmpfs... " it NEVER ENDS
I've tried several Puppy vers. including 2.14 & 2.17.1
I have created a swap partition, hdc3 which 2.17.1 says is loaded.
I tried pfix=nox, but it doesn't get that far.

(It boots and runs DSL v.1.0 to v3.4.3 with no problems, except I have trouble with the multimedia apps.)

I want this machine for surfing and audio (CD to MP3). at a vacation home.

Any suggestions for making the Puppy behave. Are there cheat codes for lowRAM? Should I go back to v1.0 or some other version that may be happier with 64M??

John

jonyo

#8 Post by jonyo »


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HairyWill
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Re: My Pentium 100 with 64MB RAM. hangs during boot, copying

#9 Post by HairyWill »

JPsDad wrote:I want this machine for surfing and audio (CD to MP3). at a vacation home.
If you want to rip CD to mp3 I'm not sure that your processor is up to it. If any one knows differently I'm very interested, I have a p133 laptop that I would like to be able to do this with if it is possible.
Will
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jgui
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#10 Post by jgui »

Thanks for the post, very helpful.

I installed almost the same puppy version (2.14) on the same configuration (P75MHz, 40MB EDO RAM, 1GB HD, CD Rom not bootable). I configured a 128MB partition for swap but it looks like it doesn't use it by default. Each time I boot I have to click on the Devices icon and then click "use swap" link next to the swap partition.

I'm not sure if I missed something from your explanation. Can I set the swap partition to be used on boot?

I also wanted to point out that KonquerorEmbedded is working quite well with my configuration (javascript enabled, as opposed to Dillo).

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technosaurus
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#11 Post by technosaurus »

manual full install would go something like what is in the puppy universal installer and would be better on older systems (follow the same steps as above also for swap etc.. also turn off unneeded services like cups as well trayed apps - see /root/.jwmrc.tray)

/usr/sbin/puppyinstaller

it basically does the following (all $ are variables created in the script - use what is applicable to you instead)

wipe the destination drive

Code: Select all

rm -rf $DESTMNTPT/*
mount the sfs

Code: Select all

   losetup-FULL /dev/loop2 $SRCPATH/$xSFSNAME
   mkdir $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt
   mount -r -t squashfs /dev/loop2 $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt
copy files

Code: Select all

   cp -a -u --remove-destination $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt/bin $DESTMNTPT/
   cp -a -u --remove-destination $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt/dev $DESTMNTPT/
   cp -a -u --remove-destination $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt/etc $DESTMNTPT/
   cp -a -u --remove-destination $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt/lib $DESTMNTPT/
   cp -a -u --remove-destination $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt/mnt $DESTMNTPT/
   cp -a -u --remove-destination $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt/proc $DESTMNTPT/
   cp -a -u --remove-destination $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt/root $DESTMNTPT/
   cp -a -u --remove-destination $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt/sbin $DESTMNTPT/
   cp -a -u --remove-destination $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt/tmp $DESTMNTPT/
   cp -a -u --remove-destination $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt/usr $DESTMNTPT/
   cp -a -u --remove-destination $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt/var $DESTMNTPT/
   [ -d $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt/opt ] && cp -a -u --remove-destination $DESTMNTPT/srcmntpt/opt $DESTMNTPT/
update PUPSTATE

Code: Select all

    echo "ATADRIVES='$ATADRIVES'" >> $DESTMNTPT/etc/rc.d/PUPSTATE
update fstab

Code: Select all

    mv -f $DESTMNTPT/etc/fstab $DESTMNTPT/etc/fstab.bak
    echo "/dev/$DESTPART     /            $DESTFS     defaults               0 1" > $DESTMNTPT/etc/fstab
    echo "none          /proc        proc     defaults               0 0" >> $DESTMNTPT/etc/fstab
    echo "none          /sys         sysfs    defaults               0 0" >> $DESTMNTPT/etc/fstab
    echo "none          /dev/pts     devpts   gid=2,mode=620         0 0" >> $DESTMNTPT/etc/fstab
    echo "/dev/fd0      /mnt/floppy  auto     noauto,rw              0 0" >> $DESTMNTPT/etc/fstab
it also shows basically how to create a boot floppy

I only took the key points for those who would actually need to do it this way (no sata checks etc..) if you need more info look at the puppyinstaller script

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E2001
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Re: My Pentium 100 with 64MB RAM. hangs during boot, copying

#12 Post by E2001 »

HairyWill wrote:f you want to rip CD to mp3 I'm not sure that your processor is up to it. If any one knows differently I'm very interested, I have a p133 laptop that I would like to be able to do this with if it is possible.
It's not necessarily the processors fault. If you can force the CD drive to do digital audio extraction, it should work at any cpu speed. Just don't ask me how to do that in Linux. :lol:

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hanzf
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Re: How to run Puppy at 75MHz with 40 megs of EDO RAM

#13 Post by hanzf »

John Doe wrote: Set the background to a single solid color (no picture) to speed things up a bit also.
How is this done? The only method I know is to make a .jpg file (eg with mtPaint ) that shows only one solid color, but this will not really save resources (will it?) I once tried to change .jwmrc to make a solid desktop background but either I had a wrong syntax or it was overridden from somewhere else.

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#14 Post by Puppyt »

Crikey!
Just goes to show that while you may not have room to swing a cat, there's always room for Puppy...

I think I will leave my 75MHz dustbunny machine in the "too hard" basket though - I only have 16Mb EDO RAM for that one, and life is always getting shorter.

bubbles99
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#15 Post by bubbles99 »

maybe try DeLi linux on that really old one? :wink:

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Flash
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Re: My Pentium 100 with 64MB RAM. hangs during boot, copying

#16 Post by Flash »

HairyWill wrote:...If you want to rip CD to mp3 I'm not sure that your processor is up to it. If any one knows differently I'm very interested, I have a p133 laptop that I would like to be able to do this with if it is possible.
I'm certainly no expert but here's my opinion:

Ripping a CD to mp3 is a two-step process (at least in Puppy). First the track(s) on the CD are ripped to the HDD as a .wav (I think) file, then the .wav file(s) are converted to mp3 by some algorithm or other. If the computer can play the CD then it ought to be able to rip the .wav files to HDD. After that, converting the .wav files to .mp3 can be done at any speed.

So if Puppy can play the CD in your computer, and there's enough room in the Puppy save file to hold the contents of the CD, then it *ought* to be possible for Puppy to convert the CD to mp3 even with a slow processor.

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tallboy
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#17 Post by tallboy »

I have an old post with signature petur.eu in my archives, the process described may be useful for ripping a CD to mp3 as well. The /dev/shm/ dirctory is present in my LupuPlus, I guess it will be in other puppies as well. I have used it, so I know it works perfectly. I have not edited the contents, so you'll have to pick out he good parts yourself! :D

[quote="petur.eu"]Howto download ISO files directly to a CD/DVD/BLU-RAY

It is possible to download .iso files directly onto a cd\dvd\blu-ray disk.

/dev/shm is a directory found on Debian & RedHat based distributions. (Please let me know if you find it on dists as well)
/dev/shm is a dynamic RAM disk, meaning it’s size will grow and shrink with the size of the files placed there.

The following process is especially ideal for users running Linux from RAM or small USB sticks. No drive space will be used during the process & only a very small amount of RAM is used.

First create a FIFO (first in first out) on /dev/shm

Next we command the burner to write any data written to the FIFO onto the preferred medium (dvd, cd, blu-ray, etc.)

Then we download the file ‘directly’ onto the preferred medium through the FIFO.

And finally we remove the FIFO.

I’ll demonstrate this by downloading the “Fedora Core 13 LIVECD
True freedom is a live Puppy on a multisession CD/DVD.

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tallboy
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#18 Post by tallboy »

I just realized that this is a very old thread, I don't know why it popped up, but I may have found a suitable answer anyway! A few years late, pfuhh! :lol:

I may have pressed a wrong button somewhere... :roll:

tallboy
True freedom is a live Puppy on a multisession CD/DVD.

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Mike Walsh
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#19 Post by Mike Walsh »

Hi, tallboy.

No, it's nothing to do with you pressing wrong buttons, mate.

It's summat to do with this entity..... xushengda0415

I noticed it this morning when I logged on; 'it' joined today, creating 138 posts within around 3 mins.....every one of them dredged up from the murky depths of history, and in every single sub-forum, too. But if you click to see the post created, the Forum throws a wobbly, saying the post doesn't exist.....

I've got a feeling somebody's playing 'silly buggers' with the Forum software.....perhaps as a prelude to a DDOS attack, or something like that? :roll:


Mike. :wink:

sheldonisaac
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the xushengda0415 posts

#20 Post by sheldonisaac »

Mike Walsh wrote: I've got a feeling somebody's playing 'silly buggers' with the Forum software.....perhaps as a prelude to a DDOS attack, or something like that?
Ii certainly has been a nuisance, Mike.
Maybe Flash or someone can be of help.

Thanks,
Sheldon
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