Bear with the windy old Pentium M bearing fart here...starhawk wrote:Hey -- my best spare system (for testing Pups and such) right now is a slightly elderly VAIO. Two questions, but specs first.
VAIO VGN-S360
Pentium M 1.7ghz CPU
1gb RAM
dying HDD but boots from CD just fine
I've run some kind of Puppy on it before (Upup Precise IIRC) and it was fine, but I'm not sure about Carolina because that's a heavyweight... so...
(1) Does Carolina 1.1 have PAE enabled (I hope not...)?
(2) Would it be advisable to run Carolina on a machine with the specs given above? or would it be frustratingly slow?
I have the following systems side by side on a 1.6 GHz Pentium M laptop with 1Gb memory, Intel Pro 2200 wireless, integrated Intel video. Installed frugally to an 8Gb CF card in an IDE adaptor replacing the noisy merry-go-round. All non-PAE, ondemand governor, Opera and SlimBoat browsers installed to boot partition.
Xprecise 2.2, LxPup 13.10c, Carolina 1.0, Lina-lite 005, and alphaOS 12.1, oh, and Boxpup 4.12. It's an interesting horse race. I'll drop boxpup immediately though it's served for years as it can't run even Opera 12.16, drop alphaOS for difficulty of configuration and cumbersome repo though it is the most CPU efficient at idle at 1.5%. and I like the look,feel and snap once it is set up. I'll drop my lina-lite as it's really pretty much Carolina without the Adrive.
Leaving Xprecise, LxPup, and Carolina. LxPup has the smallest memory footprint at 48Mb vs 64Mb for Xprecise and Carolina. Carolina has the lowest CPU use at idle, 3% vs 8% for LxPup and Xprecise. Carolina does the best job at handling the 2200 Pro wireless. Both Xprecise and LxPup need considerable fiddling with the drop time in Frisbee to hang onto a connection. Carolina just works. In terms of 'snappiness, surprisingly little difference across the board. All three are easy to set up and have great repos. My preference in menu layout leans strongly toward Xprecise and Carolina
SO??? Carolina by a neck on this hardware (though it needed a glibc update to run SlimBoat). Xprecise by a neck on a core 2 duo or newer lappie. Both absolutely stellar beasts, (as is LxPup). On slightly different hardware the balance might tip but all three certainly deserve consideration and respect.