Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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?

[John Doe]

pentium.

First machine the family really started using together.

Brings a tear to my eye

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]

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]

Might try 2.02. http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=131451#131451

[HairyWill]

[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).

[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

[E2001]

[hanzf]

[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]

maybe try DeLi linux on that really old one?