Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[sindi]

350MHz HP 4530 (AMD K6-2 cpu), upgraded from 32MB to 192MB (4MB are used by video). Puppy 4.31 loads itself into memory, leaving 4MB free ram to work in. On a Thinkpad 770E with 228MB memory it does not load itself into ram, and I have 145MB free to work in and puppy runs quite quickly. I tried on the HP pfix=noram and pfix=nocopy (booting with loadlin). Also when I select 'save to hda2' it saves but on boot ignores the saved info so I had to save to a file. I now also have a 200MB swap file.

On a slow computer with slow hard drive will puppy run faster from memory or from hard drive?

[PANZERKOPF]

[sindi]

When I saved to /dev/hda2 various partitions with files appeared in my puppy partition, but on reboot I was again asked to
choose keyboard and resolution, and I had only 4MB free RAM. When I saved to a pup_save file in the same partition (and
deleted /etc /initrd etc.), on the next boot my settings were still there AND I had much more free memory (the main sfs
file was probably not loaded into memory). Frugal install. I had thought saving to /dev/hda2 would reduce memory usage,
but it was the opposite. In my experience, on a computer with 350MHz cpu it takes a few seconds from clicking on the icon
to when a program starts to load with frugal install. Would it load faster from full install with slow cpu? (Problem is
when the user turns it off without shutting down, from full install, it crashes unfixably, even e2fsck run manually from
the live cd could not fix it - I experimented repeatedly with this). I upped it from 188 to 252MB memory because Firefox
3.6 was using 113% of physical RAM, and will try booting with pfix=nocopy if 252MB is not sufficiently low to stop puppy
from automatically loading into RAM.