Is there a Puppy for an old notebook with 64 MB of RAM?

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rogerlewis1957 · #1 Post by **rogerlewis1957** » Wed 05 May 2010, 18:18

hi I have a old notebook which I use to run windows98se on it. Now for some reason it won't recognize the hdd. it has a pentium mmx processor only 64mb of ram 2 usb1.1 ports and a dual cd/dvd drive. The bios does not allow booting from usb. I have tried using the puppy 4.30 live cd and got as far as getting the menu bar but no desktop display. I was wondering if there is a smaller Puppy os that would run on this old machine.

roger

RetroTechGuy · #2 Post by **RetroTechGuy** » Wed 05 May 2010, 19:19

rogerlewis1957 wrote:hi i have a old notebook which use to run windows98se on it, now for some reason it won't recognize the hdd. it has a pentium mmx processor only 64mb of ram 2 usb ports and a dual cd/dvd drive the bios does not allow booting from usb. i have tried using the puppy 4.30 live cd and got as far as getting the menu bar but no desktop display. i was wondering if there is a smaller puppy os that would run on this old machine roger

Have you tried any of the "retro" versions?

I would try working backwards (using the most recent version you can). I believe these are the 4.3.1 "retro" versions:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... l-puppies/

Then look at 4.21retro, 4.12retro, etc...

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... uppylinux/

64MB is a bit skimpy (and may be slow), but it should be able to boot.

I have an old laptop (333MHz, now with 128MB ram) that ran 4.21retro, 4.12retro, etc. I haven't tried 4.3.1 on it yet.

#3 Post by **Flash** » Thu 06 May 2010, 03:38

I think the only way Puppy (or any operating system) can run in so little RAM and without swap memory somewhere is if only the kernel of the OS is loaded into RAM plus just one or two other (small, by today's standards

) programs. That configuration will sometimes run very slowly because it has to load programs from the CD when they are needed. And it may crash a lot. I think Puppy can run that way though, but I've never tried it.

looseSCREWorTWO · #4 Post by **looseSCREWorTWO** » Thu 06 May 2010, 03:57

G'day rogerlewis1957,
This beast
<---------
had only 64mb RAM when I first got it and Puppy 421 ran (very slowly) but it was only good for wordprocessing. With no Hard Drive I put a 256mb Swap Partition (acts as extra "virtual RAM") on a throw-away $10 USB Stick and then I could surf the Web.

When Seamonkey web-browser comes up you will have to immediately turn off Automatic Updates by going into
Edit / Preferences / Advanced / Sofware Installation

and untick everything. With that amount of RAM, if Seamonkey updates itself to the latest version, it will crash your system. If anything is going to work it's most likely to be Puppy 421 or 421 Retro downloadable below, Both of these Puppies are crammed full of Widgets and Trays and if you de-activate all of that the PC will run better.

http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/pupp ... monkey.iso
http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/pupp ... ey.md5.txt

http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/pupp ... monkey.iso
http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/pupp ... ey.md5.txt

WhoDo · #5 Post by **WhoDo** » Thu 06 May 2010, 08:14

rogerlewis1957 wrote:hi I have a old notebook which I use to run windows98se on it. Now for some reason it won't recognize the hdd. it has a pentium mmx processor only 64mb of ram 2 usb1.1 ports and a dual cd/dvd drive. The bios does not allow booting from usb. I have tried using the puppy 4.30 live cd and got as far as getting the menu bar but no desktop display. I was wondering if there is a smaller Puppy os that would run on this old machine.

Try ttuuxxx's 2.14x Classic Puppy. It's built on an earlier base but has all the latest software versions.

If not, go back to vanilla 2.14r (retro). That was pretty solid.

Either way, 64Mb is going to be challenged without a swap file or partition. It will work, but it won't be fast to boot.

With older hardware, be sure to burn the CD at a very, very slow rate =< 4X which gives the older drives a better chance of picking up the software.

Worst case, drop back to 1.08 - we have one devotee who has only just upgraded from that and it runs very well on old hardware, although it may be challenged by laptop device drivers.

Hope that helps.

looseSCREWorTWO · #6 Post by **looseSCREWorTWO** » Thu 06 May 2010, 09:12

When I tried 2.14X a few weeks ago it wouldn't run a USB Wireless Modem and the PetGet Package Manager wasn't working, so I had no way to install what USB Wireless needs to function. In fact, with PetGet not working, I wouldn't be able to install any other programs at all.

If rogerlewis1957 gets his Internet connection through the phone line then 2.14X might be OK, as long as he doesn't want to install any other programs.

I posted all these problems on the 2.14X development Thread in this Forum, so perhaps by now it's been fixed.

rogerlewis1957 · #7 Post by **rogerlewis1957** » Thu 06 May 2010, 10:02

Hi guys, thanks for the quick relpies, i have down loaded puppy-2.16.1-seamonkey-fulldrivers it's running or should i say crawling very slowly. I think i might try and get another 64mb of ram.But before i do that is it possible to get this thing to boot from the USB like you can with Ubuntu even though the bios does not give you that option? thanks for all your help. Roger.

looseSCREWorTWO · #8 Post by **looseSCREWorTWO** » Thu 06 May 2010, 10:19

Welcome to Puppy !!!

Don't forget to turn off the Auto-Update feature in Seamonkey. It's a persistent bugger and it WILL update itself (very soon) and the larger/slower that SeaMonkey gets, the worse it will be for your PC.

To boot from USB Stick
Boot from CD, use the Puppy Universal Installer to install Puppy to the USB Stick. At the next CD bootup, during the first pause in the sequence, hit F2 and then type in

puppy pfix=usbflash

and it should switch from CD bootup to boot from the USB Stick.

I have a spare block of 64mb laptop RAM. It works OK in my ancient Toshiba laptop. You can have it if you cover the cost of postage from Sydney, Australia. However you might be better off to buy 2 X 128mb RAM blocks off eBay, which is the maximum your PC can take according to the link below. You would have to check very carefully what type of RAM it needs (CL.1 or CL.2) as the wrong type may not work in your PC. This is the link for specs on your Pc:
http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/hp-omni ... 02387.html

RetroTechGuy · #9 Post by **RetroTechGuy** » Thu 06 May 2010, 12:29

rogerlewis1957 wrote:Hi guys, thanks for the quick relpies, i have down loaded puppy-2.16.1-seamonkey-fulldrivers it's running or should i say crawling very slowly. I think i might try and get another 64mb of ram.But before i do that is it possible to get this thing to boot from the USB like you can with Ubuntu even though the bios does not give you that option? thanks for all your help. Roger.

That's a good place to start. "Crawling" is OK, as it tells you that you do have functional hardware (and thus it might be worth do some minor upgrades). Nothing worse than doing the upgrade, only to learn that it won't work...

Hint: when you get things working like you want, make a backup copy of your pupsave (i.e. boot to ram, so the current pupsave is not mounted, and copy it to a new name). Then if you have an "accident", you can restore by copying that file back over the original (wiping out all new work and files, but restoring to that working point from the past).

rcrsn51 · #10 Post by **rcrsn51** » Thu 06 May 2010, 12:58

rogerlewis1957 wrote:Hi guys, thanks for the quick relpies, i have down loaded puppy-2.16.1-seamonkey-fulldrivers it's running or should i say crawling very slowly. I think i might try and get another 64mb of ram.But before i do that is it possible to get this thing to boot from the USB like you can with Ubuntu even though the bios does not give you that option? thanks for all your help. Roger.

You may find that launching Puppy through a USB1 port will also be slow.

RetroTechGuy · #11 Post by **RetroTechGuy** » Thu 06 May 2010, 14:01

rcrsn51 wrote:
rogerlewis1957 wrote:Hi guys, thanks for the quick relpies, i have down loaded puppy-2.16.1-seamonkey-fulldrivers it's running or should i say crawling very slowly. I think i might try and get another 64mb of ram.But before i do that is it possible to get this thing to boot from the USB like you can with Ubuntu even though the bios does not give you that option? thanks for all your help. Roger.
You may find that launching Puppy through a USB1 port will also be slow.

With only 64 MB ram, he's probably continuously swapping...

As he tinkers, he may want to try to reduce the total memory load (under 4.3.1 my older desktop persisted in loading the .sfs into memory, rather than reading it from the HDD -- which left me with almost no memory to function, and brought the machine to a crawl). Works fine since I forced the file back out of memory (it was also ignoring "pfix=noram").

It would be nice if a version of Puppy functioned on a machine with 64 to 128 MB of ram (Win98 works fairly well in 128MB, and Puppy should be able to do the same

)

rcrsn51 · #12 Post by **rcrsn51** » Thu 06 May 2010, 14:43

Sorry. I just meant that a USB1 port is not going to be much faster than a CD drive to get Puppy loaded. And copying a reasonable sized pupsave file back through the USB1 port will be equally slow.

RetroTechGuy · #13 Post by **RetroTechGuy** » Thu 06 May 2010, 18:23

rcrsn51 wrote:Sorry. I just meant that a USB1 port is not going to be much faster than a CD drive to get Puppy loaded. And copying a reasonable sized pupsave file back through the USB1 port will be equally slow.

True enough. In an earlier version of Puppy, I thought the machine had locked up during the 1st shutdown -- possibly as a result of pushing the pupsave and .sfs though a USB1.1 pipe... (interestingly, once it was created, the pupsave was fine for speed)

In reference to slow, I thought he was referring to the speed of operation, once running - with low memory, it can be very slow...

RetroTechGuy · #14 Post by **RetroTechGuy** » Thu 06 May 2010, 18:27

looseSCREWorTWO wrote:G'day rogerlewis1957,
This beast
<---------
had only 64mb RAM when I first got it and Puppy 421 ran (very slowly) but it was only good for wordprocessing. With no Hard Drive I put a 256mb Swap Partition (acts as extra "virtual RAM") on a throw-away $10 USB Stick and then I could surf the Web.

When Seamonkey web-browser comes up you will have to immediately turn off Automatic Updates by going into
Edit / Preferences / Advanced / Sofware Installation

and untick everything. With that amount of RAM, if Seamonkey updates itself to the latest version, it will crash your system. If anything is going to work it's most likely to be Puppy 421 or 421 Retro downloadable below, Both of these Puppies are crammed full of Widgets and Trays and if you de-activate all of that the PC will run better.

http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/pupp ... monkey.iso
http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/pupp ... ey.md5.txt

http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/pupp ... monkey.iso
http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/pupp ... ey.md5.txt

I had success on an old laptop (sounding quite similar to above) with 4.11 or 4.12 retro, also.

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... uppylinux/

cebobbitt · #15 Post by **cebobbitt** » Thu 06 May 2010, 19:17

ditto on the 4.12....got it to work on an old toshiba with 64mb of ram. Seamonkey is slow to start, but once up and running, does fine. Dillo zips!!

looseSCREWorTWO · #16 Post by **looseSCREWorTWO** » Fri 07 May 2010, 04:35

@rogerlewis1957,
With my ancient laptop, the first thing I did was spend $10 on one 256 mb block of RAM (to see if it would work in my PC) and I've since lashed-out another $10 for a second 256mb block of RAM from eBay. According to the specs for your PC, 2 X 128mb RAM blocks is the max it will take and that, plus a 512mb Swap Partition, would make a huge difference to the PCs performance. If you buy one RAM block even that will make a noticeable difference, but you'll need to research whether you need CL.1 or CL.2 RAM.

What rcrsn51 says about the USB 1.0 ports is right, but your laptop has Expansion Slots and $15 will buy you a PCMCIA Card with two high-speed USB 2.0 ports on it which goes into the Expansion Slot. I've done this and for me, it was $15 well spent. USB 2.0 ports are 40 times quicker than USB 1.0, something you'll notice as you're saving to USB all the time. Again you'll need to research whether your PC takes PCMCIA, PC Card or CardBus cards. They all look the same but are different. The only type you can be sure WILL NOT work in your PC is the later-model Express Cards. See here for details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Card

rogerlewis1957 · #17 Post by **rogerlewis1957** » Sat 08 May 2010, 00:28

Hi all, looseSCREWorTWO thanks for the offer for the RAM but i will say no for the moment. The HP notebook you refered too is not mine it's to new + all the dimensions are different, i don't what make this notebook is as there are no makers mark on it, it's just called a notebook and when i looked into getting more memory before i was told it was this type 144-Pin 60ns 3.3v EDO SODIMM and that the limit was 64mb any way putting that aside i've now got puppy 2.16.1 seamonkey full drivers, 4.12 retro, 4.21 retro, and 4.30 all on disk. the two retro's will not run they get stuck in exactly the same place 7done's and then stays there, 4.30 goes all the way but i don't get a desk top, how ever puppy 2.16.1 runs but slowly i've put this one onto a usb flash but it will not boot up from it i followed your instuctions but after typing puppy pfix=usbflash it keeps on using the cd,i've tried the wakepuppy floppy but without success should this work even though my bios does not support booting from usb? I don't know if this has any thing to do with this but i do get an error message just before it boots up which is Invalid Hibernation partition/file...Run HDPREP. looking forward to your answer thanks Roger.

rcrsn51 · #18 Post by **rcrsn51** » Sat 08 May 2010, 00:37

puppy pfix=usbflash

It should be

Code: Select all

puppy pmedia=usbflash

looseSCREWorTWO · #19 Post by **looseSCREWorTWO** » Sat 08 May 2010, 05:26

@rogerlewis1957,
Sorry for the bad info I gave you. Notebooks usually have a manufacturer's label somewhere on the base-plate.

If you could ID the make/model you might be able to run a BIOS update which would allow you to put in more RAM. There is always a risk with BIOS updates, but you'd have to weigh that up against the fact that with 64mb RAM maximum, the PC will struggle to do anything more than word-processing and surfing the Web.

Steve

treeplanter · #20 Post by **treeplanter** » Sat 08 May 2010, 10:16

I have run puppy 2.17 on an old sager 82 with 40mb of ram. It is slow but quite usable ,it has a wireless card ,great for email and some web browsing. .You really need that swap space. I've never done it on a usb ,always on a hd,. and use Opera as your browser ,if you don't want to use dillo. Opera will run on minimal memory. I'm now running 4.31 on a blazing 192mb of ram, firefox 3.5.2, skype, twinkle,.I going to give my son my laptop with Vista.

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