The Thin Puppy ate a CF card

While trying to prepare the Thin Puppy to dual-boot from Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, the whole thing crashed, with the aftermath being a dead CF card. It has soured me on the use of flash RAM as a boot medium ... and now the Thin Puppy has a heart, but not a brain.

Next for the Thin Puppy: Pulling the spare CD-ROM drive from This Old PC, running MANY Linux distros that way ... or stuffing a 3.5-inch hard drive in there -- there's space for it.

One thing this experiment has done is dampen my enthusiasm for Puppy Linux. Performance with 128 MB of RAM is less than satisfactory. I had a lot of crashes. Downloading large files wreaked havoc with available RAM and made the system unstable. Working entirely in RAM, nothing saves to physical drives until the computing session is finished, meaning data loss in the event of a crash.

Streaming audio and video was choppy -- I expected that from an older VIA-powered board, but -- on the plus side -- Puppy used a very light program that played MP3s downloaded to the system without trouble (something Gxine couldn't do).

Still, configuration of the system has been easier in Puppy than in any other Linux I've tried. Networking, sound, printing, mounting drives, installing a bootable OS -- all goes smoothly in Puppy. And as a live CD, working entirely in RAM is more palatable -- everything saves to your pup_save file when you power down. And it makes the live CD environment work quickly. But with 128 MB of memory, when stress on the system climbs, Puppy starts accessing the drive like mad -- swapping, perhaps? -- and with a CF, that can't be good, especially for a system that is billed as being easy on flash memory. That's true when you work from CD and write to pup_save on flash, but not so true in a HD installation. I don't think Puppy is really meant for that. Like Knoppix, Puppy Linux is designed as a live CD and while it can be installed to HD, I'm not recommending it at this point.

The crashes with 128 MB of RAM are troubling. The Thin Puppy's motherboard maxes out at 256 MB, and once you get to 512 MB of RAM, you can pretty much run any Linux distro. Generally "light" means light on RAM and CPU speed, not just one or the other. Still, I'll have to try Puppy on This Old PC, a traditional box which I can run with 128 MB or 256 MB to compare performance.

Again, to sum up, Puppy is designed to run from a live CD and be shut down and restarted daily. It isn't designed to be installed to a hard drive or flash medium, although it's easy to do so. I really love the working environment of Puppy, but doing everything in RAM memory presents its problems, and I've experienced them.

Question: Is it the Thin Puppy itself, or its RAM (the amount) that's causing the trouble?