Puppy likes memory

I finally got around to stuffing the Thin Puppy (Maxspeed Maxterm thin client) with 256 MB of PC133 RAM, and now I can even load dailynews.com, with all its various Flash animation components, WITHOUT killing the Thin Puppy. With the new memory, there's about 48 MB of RAM left over for Puppy Linux 2.14 to play with. I'd love to see how Damn Small Linux works with this setup, but it -- and all other Debian-based Linuxes I have on CD -- won't even boot. Something about a disk error. Well, whatever's in error there is not with Puppy, which is running fine right now.

I suspect that if I loaded those other Debians on a hard drive (or even Compact Flash), I'd be able to boot them on the Thin Puppy, but now with Puppy Linux itself booting and actually working, I couldn't be happier (for the minute, at least).

Hardware note: Now that the CD-R drive is hooked up, the fan runs continuously on the Thin Puppy, whereas it never ran at all before. Therefore it must be responding to the increased load on the power supply (this is a pretty small DC supply to run actual physical drives, as opposed to a measly CF card).

So I can say now, with some certainty, that Puppy Linux is a bit uncomfortable with 128 MB RAM, but comfortable enough with 256 MB (the maximum the Thin Puppy can address, by the way). Since boosting an old PC to 156 MB is a fairly cheap proposition (you ARE buying your memory on the used market, aren't you?), then Puppy is a very viable system with which to rescue said PCs for productive use.

Memory addendum: In Puppy Linux, downloading to the "My Documents" file stores your data in memory until you exit Puppy, but downloading to an extermal drive -- in this case a USB flash drive -- does NOT ding your RAM, so it is possible to work with big files in Puppy and not bring your system to its knees. Goooood dog.