Using a 64-bit OS with only 1GB RAM?

[Makoto]

I've been using what was originally a Vista OEM tower for my Puppy setup. It's 64-bit capable, but only shipped with 1GB of RAM, and I haven't added any RAM to the tower since then. It's worked okay with Puppy 4.3.1 and Precise so far, though.

(the tower, more or less: Compaq Presario SR5050NX Desktop PC Product Specifications | HP® Customer Support)
(Edit (1/30): Yes, I'm aware the above link has been removed since I posted this. Thanks so very much, HP.)

At the time we bought it (new), the consensus was not to bother trying to run a 64-bit OS unless you had at least 4GB of RAM. Does that still hold true today? While I have no real problem with sticking with 32-bit, there are some developers that insist on pushing 64-bit programs only, like with Skype and Discord, that I wouldn't mind being able to use.

If I chose to run a newer Puppy, would XenialPup be the best bet on this hardware? I've got both 32 and 64-bit versions downloaded, if I do feel like upgrading.

[peterw]

I have not found any issues using 1 GB of RAM with Puppy (64-bit OS's as opposed to 32-bit OS's). 32-bit OS's are limited by being only able to use 4 GB of RAM unless other features are enabled.

With Puppy 1 GB of RAM is enough. If you want to run a fuller Distro then it may be a little slow and you should have some swap. Also, some Distros have zram switched on which, shall we say, doubles the effective RAM.

[watchdog]

I run both 32bit and 64 bit puppies in very old laptops with only 1 Gb of RAM. Now I have expanded the RAM to 1,5 Gb using the RAM from dismissed asus eeepc. The only derivative which does not work well with 1 Gb of RAM in my experience is Fatdog64. I also run Fatdog64 with my RAM but using the humongous initrd and swap partition. I use swap partition of 1 Gb, Palemoon browser with Tab Mix Plus extension to load one tab at a time.

[Mike Walsh]

@ Makoto:-

This was a favourite trick of HP, back in the early days after they first bought out Compaq.

My own SR1619UK (AMD-based instead of Intel), rescued from a trip to the great scrapheap in the sky after my sister upgraded to Win7 by buying a new machine with it preinstalled, also shipped with only a gig of RAM.

That was the first thing I did, tripled the amount of RAM I had. She's run with 3 GB ever since. I doubt I could find another stick to take me to the 4 GB max for this board; DDR1 is like hen's teeth now.....very rare, almost impossible to find, and unbelievably expensive when you do find it.

I also upgraded the CPU from single-core to dual.....but that's another story in itself.

By shipping with minimal RAM, HP, like most other manufacturers whose customer-base consists largely of 'the great unwashed', guarantees themselves plenty of after market business in the process.

She'll certainly run.....but you'll definitely benefit from a couple of GB-worth of swap. As always, so much depends on how you use it, and what you want to do with it; if all you use is lightweight apps, and don't multitask too much, you'll be fine. If you want to use more CPU/RAM-intensive apps (and multitask as well), then swap, definitely.....and doubling the available RAM won't hurt.

Your choice.


Mike.

[Makoto]

...so in other words, I won't see that much of a performance jump from how Precise already runs.

Well, it did result in us buying another HP OEM tower with 4 (6?) GB installed, about a year or two later. That one's still running downstairs.

I guess I'm going to try seeing how XenialPup 64 works on this hardware, as soon as I can find my blank discs. Thanks, everyone.

[nic007]

I run both 32bit and 64 bit puppies in very old laptops with only 1 Gb of RAM. Now I have expanded the RAM to 1,5 Gb using the RAM from dismissed asus eeepc. The only derivative which does not work well with 1 Gb of RAM in my experience is Fatdog64. I also run Fatdog64 with my RAM but using the humongous initrd and swap partition. I use swap partition of 1 Gb, Palemoon browser with Tab Mix Plus extension to load one tab at a time.

I've never used a 64 bit system because I only have 2GB RAM. I'm interested to know why you are using 64 bit on your limited RAM systems. Are there any benefits whatsoever (apart from software that may only be available in 64 bit issue)?

[bigpup]

You know, people keep asking. Can I use this version of Puppy on this computer and will it work?
Only way to know is to try it.

If you have 1GB of ram.
Have a swap partition.

Do not try to have 10 different programs, running at the same time, a web browser with 15 open tabs, and watching a movie, all at the same time.

Xenialpup64 7.5, booted to the desktop, uses about 200 to 250 MB of ram.

[watchdog]

I run both 32bit and 64 bit puppies in very old laptops with only 1 Gb of RAM. Now I have expanded the RAM to 1,5 Gb using the RAM from dismissed asus eeepc. The only derivative which does not work well with 1 Gb of RAM in my experience is Fatdog64. I also run Fatdog64 with my RAM but using the humongous initrd and swap partition. I use swap partition of 1 Gb, Palemoon browser with Tab Mix Plus extension to load one tab at a time.

I've never used a 64 bit system because I only have 2GB RAM. I'm interested to know why you are using 64 bit on your limited RAM systems. Are there any benefits whatsoever (apart from software that may only be available in 64 bit issue)?

I'm an hobbist: I love to collect many working puppies. No sophisticated needs: only webbrowsing, email and a few of apps. 64 bit puppies can work with 1 GB of RAM as I do keeping quiet performance requests.

[jamesbond]

At the time we bought it (new), the consensus was not to bother trying to run a 64-bit OS unless you had at least 4GB of RAM. Does that still hold true today?

Yes, it is still true; and it is even truer today than before as size of programs and their memory needs keep growing: newer programs require more memory than older ones.

The "threshold", however, is a bit arbitrary. The cutoff is definitely 4GB for Windows, but for Linux it's not so hard and fast.

I would say that you need at least 2GB RAM to make it worthwhile. Not saying that it won't work with 1GB RAM (it will, if you take special precaution - I have Fatdog64 800 running on netbook with Intel N450 and 1GB RAM and I can do stuff like watching youtube videos without problems), but if you have 32-bit OS which is current and works; stick with it for your 1GB machine.

[nic007]

I run both 32bit and 64 bit puppies in very old laptops with only 1 Gb of RAM. Now I have expanded the RAM to 1,5 Gb using the RAM from dismissed asus eeepc. The only derivative which does not work well with 1 Gb of RAM in my experience is Fatdog64. I also run Fatdog64 with my RAM but using the humongous initrd and swap partition. I use swap partition of 1 Gb, Palemoon browser with Tab Mix Plus extension to load one tab at a time.

I've never used a 64 bit system because I only have 2GB RAM. I'm interested to know why you are using 64 bit on your limited RAM systems. Are there any benefits whatsoever (apart from software that may only be available in 64 bit issue)?

I'm an hobbist: I love to collect many working puppies. No sophisticated needs: only webbrowsing, email and a few of apps. 64 bit puppies can work with 1 GB of RAM as I do keeping quiet performance requests.

Okay, I was just curious if there are any real performance advantages using it on "limited" systems.

[Makoto]

Well, I've been spending time setting up and tweaking XenialPup64, and aside from some minor issues (time/date sync, Discord and get_libreoffice not working, some odd graphics glitching), it's working decently.

The "threshold", however, is a bit arbitrary. The cutoff is definitely 4GB for Windows, but for Linux it's not so hard and fast.

I would say that you need at least 2GB RAM to make it worthwhile. Not saying that it won't work with 1GB RAM (it will, if you take special precaution - I have Fatdog64 800 running on netbook with Intel N450 and 1GB RAM and I can do stuff like watching youtube videos without problems), but if you have 32-bit OS which is current and works; stick with it for your 1GB machine.

Ah. At least finding 2GB for this tower might be easier than finding 4GB. Of course, I wouldn't mind adding another hard drive and an actual video card as opposed to the Intel Graphics hardware, but that's a different story.

I've got it set up where I can easily switch between all three Puppies, so if performance becomes a big issue, I can just switch back to Precise. But for now, I'm experimenting with XenialPup.

[bigpup]

Your XenialPup64 problems.
Have you run Quickpet>Info>Xenialpup updates?

The get_libreoffice problem.
Are you getting a low memory install warning message?
If installing to a USB drive.
The way get_libreoffice works, it needs more than 1GB of ram.

[Makoto]

Your XenialPup64 problems.
Have you run Quickpet>Info>Xenialpup updates?

Yes.

The get_libreoffice problem.
Are you getting a low memory install warning message?
If installing to a USB drive.
The way get_libreoffice works, it needs more than 1GB of ram.

I'm not trying to install it to a USB drive. It just... quits after giving me the option to choose between downloading the stable or development versions.

A weird problem with PaleMoon is that right-click menus and child windows (bookmarks, preferences) do NOT graphically update, and I may be stuck with the same right-click menu throughout the session (no highlighting, either). And, of course, that makes bookmark/history searches somewhat useless. Happens with both 32 and 64-bit versions of PM.
Edit: Doesn't seem to happen with Thunderbird, so it's not a constant across Mozilla-based programs...

[bigpup]

Have you updated Pale Moon to the latest version?
The version installed in Xenialpup64 7.5 is not the latest version.
They seem to be constantly fixing bugs in Pale Moon.

Usually multiple problems with a fresh install of a Puppy version is caused by a bad install, bad iso download, messed up file system on the partition installed on, etc....

A fresh new iso download.
clean new partition formatting or e2fsck of the file system on the partition.
Fresh new install of the Puppy version.
Usually can fix a lot of issues.

[Makoto]

Yes, everything is up-to-date.

I doubt it requires that drastic a solution, though. I'm only having a few program-specific issues (not multiple problems, per se), and everything else is working fine. Other than the odd right-click menu/child window redraw/refresh issue, Palemoon's working normally.

I've had (and still have) Precise and Puppy 4.3.1 running without issues on the same tower for quite some time - though admittedly, those aren't 64-bit.

[Makoto]

After a little digging, I found that the version of get_libreoffice which is included in XenialPup 7.5 (version 0.41) is apparently broken, which caused the problem I was seeing (it would quit immediately after offering the choice between stable or development versions of LibreOffice):

When I tried get_libreoffice in xenialpup 7.5, it exited immediately. I found and fixed the problem, yielding the attached version, 0.42. I also prevented an initial nonsense version entry from appearing and added history entries for versions 0.40 and 0.41, making assumptions from the changes I saw.

As for previous versions, this one needs to be uploaded to pet_packages-noarch on ibiblio.

The failure was due to the use of "grep -w" with a directory name as the pattern -- /mnt/devsave. Since that is not a "word", because it contains nonalphanumeric characters, nothing is found. Apparently, that was acceptable in the past, but no longer.


UPDATE 5/20/18:
Because 0.42 fixed only for 64_bit puppies and lost 32_bit support, I replaced it with 0.43 for both architectures and also fixed the splash messages reporting download failures, to include the failing file name.

(source: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 460#988460)

I'll admit I haven't tried the updated version, though, because I've already grabbed a recent LibreOffice SFS from the forum.

[greengeek]

(the tower, more or less: Compaq Presario SR5050NX Desktop PC Product Specifications | HP® Customer Support).

Did you manage to find extra RAM for this tower? Or is it too expensive to get?

[Makoto]

I haven't seen anything locally (I've checked since making the OP), unfortunately.

[tallboy]

A weird problem with PaleMoon is that right-click menus and child windows (bookmarks, preferences) do NOT graphically update, and I may be stuck with the same right-click menu throughout the session (no highlighting, either).

I have had a weird problem with my PM that may be related. The front page of a website was normal, but the graphics in it's forum suddenly went to text only! I don't know if you have the problem constantly, or if it limited to https-sites, as it was for me. It seems PM's default setup is to react even on a non-critical mixed content related to the https security sertificate. A small icon appear in front of the https in the address line (I didn't notice it at all) and some content goes into text mode. See picture of the icon and it's text popup when clicked. Normally, I get a warning that ask if I want to continue if the https sertificate is corrupted, but these small deviations from the setup in the original sertificate is not picked up by other brosers. It was permanently solved by toggling the setup in about:config:

security.mixed_content.block_active_content now set to false

It may help in your situation. You can enter the word block in about:config and see other related setup lines.

BTW, if you run about:memory in PM, choose Show memory reports -> click Measure, and scroll all the way down to the bottom 3 lines, there is some interesting info related to you question on memory. Mouse-over on the text will tell you about the meaning of the values shown. Nice feature!

If you run about:about, it will give an overview of all the settings that can be modified, if you want to get a laugh, run about:robots!

[Makoto]

Under XenialPup 64, PM displays the pages without problems, mostly... it's just when there's things like a dropdown, right-click menu or child window, that things (items on the list, in the case of the dropdown), suddenly aren't being refreshed properly.

I suppose it could possibly be that it's not a fresh profile - I normally store my Mozilla (and PM) profiles outside my save files, and symlink to them. The PM profile works without problems in Precise, but has the odd problems in Xenial. I've only tried linking to my email profile, as well, but Thunderbird doesn't exhibit similar issues in XenialPup.