johnywhy wrote:if your older disk-based machine supports SD cards, run puppy off an SD. SD gives performance that's pretty close to an SSD-- much faster than a hard drive or flash drive.
Actually, it was myself who added SD card support to Porteus boot for the DebianDogs (so for changes=Exit: methods used by BionicDog, StretchDog, BusterDog...). That was years ago and involved modifying several of the other Dog system scripts to make it all work. So you are preaching to the believer - there are four of us in my family, and the two children both use 2008 HP 2530 Elitebooks that came with harddrives missing. So for these several years now they are booted and run from (cost < $10) SD cards (which is why I originally did that particular development work for saintless/fredx181's DebianDogs).
Originally, I had XenialDog64 installed on their SD cards, then I upgraded them to BionicDog64, and now they have my (what you say is rather large) WeeDog Arch64 running from the SD. They are just 16GB SD cards, but WeeDog Arch64 (biggest version) only needs 2.4GB of that.
WeeDog, by the way, can build systems as small as the plugin developer wants - right down to a tiny system that uses busybox alone (except plus a package manager of some sort) - Void Linux package manager is particularly useful because it has been designed as a standalone program (that doesn't require a surrounding Void Linux system), so 'really' tiny systems can be built using WeeDog/FirstRib build system, particularly when using Void Linux package manager. And WeeDog initrd provides (consistently for any and all WeeDog builds) all the frugal install facilities users might want such as copy2ram and persistence either permanent or in RAM and so on. Whilst official Arch can be downloaded as a live CD, using that does not provide save persistence (though there are attempts) or the Puppy-like (aufs or overlayfs) frugal install experience us Puppy users have come to love. WeeDog does.
But you seem to have not understood how WeeDog/FirstRib works. It is a build script system, and not an iso. The plugin used during the build determines what packages are installed so user can decide what they want everytime they build. I provide a pretty full-featured plugin, so that users can just use that if they wish, but generally I expect they will remove whatever they don't want from the packages pacman list and substitute in what they do want. Hence it took me ten minutes to start with full plugin, trim it down by removing LibreOffice and so on, and then undertake new auto-build such that that first attempt came out at around 890MB. Easy to make it what you like - depending on how small Arch base can go. Arch is proving to be a great underlying system (I hadn't used it before) but Void Linux is my absolute favourite because of its standalone package manager design.
I have learned, however, to appreciate (unlike several on this forum) the elegance/convenience/use-simplicity of systemd through setting up my WeeDog Arch system, but runit from Void gives it a good run for the money too (SysVinit, which I have used for decades, is awful comparatively in terms of being a jungle shell-scripting mess of an init system). If you don't want systemd, I'd advise using runit (NOT old SysVinit!). But core WeeDog FirstRib builds can use either SysVinit, runit, or systemd, or whatever...; what is used in practice tends to be whatever the upstream system is primarily designed for. But the most basic FIrstRib build starts with option to use busybox mini-SysVinit init applet, though once main rootfs is mounted, whatever init is used in that is used by default (but the FirstRib build plugin developer can change that).
However, you don't need to be a developer to use WeeDog. It is designed, for newbies or people who just want a system that works, with 'larger' plugin (currently for Arch, but similar coming for Void, Debian, Ubuntu and Devuan options) to come pre-configured to work out-of-the-box (including wifi connection capability, auto-login as root, and with seamless ability to switch login to normal user when desired). You don't need to understand any WeeDog scripts or its plugins to use it at all. And it comes as a simple short shell script, which 'auto-builds' the whole system in usually less than 30 minutes (so easier to install than from a static iso - WeeDog always builds the rolling release latest!) - ready to boot and connect via ethernet or wifi for productive work (without countless hours hacking to minimise it or install most larger apps - it has a gui package manager that is as good as the upstream repo/package-manager system provides...).
wiak