Thin Puppy behaving today

The Thin Puppy (Maxspeed MaxTerm 1 GHz thin client converted to stand-alone Compact Flash-driven Puppy Linux box with 128 MB RAM) is behaving today.

I've done a bunch of Yahoo! e-mail, posted blog entries, edited photos -- and there have been no problems. Oh, and I haven't gone to Dailynews.com, which has a bunch of embedded videos that brought the Thin Puppy to its knees yesterday. Nor did I try to install any new, giant applications, another deal-breaker with 128 MB RAM Puppy (I hear you need 192 MB to successfully download and install bigger packages).

I think part of my problem is that I am running Puppy installed on a hard drive -- even if it's a CF chip acting like a hard drive. If I was running from CD, I think the whole thing would work that much better. It's something I plan to try out, since I do have a spare CD-ROM drive; if only I could pry it out of This Old PC (a screw head broke off, leaving it in there for the duration).

Soon the 512 MB experiment will begin. I feel that I have to write more -- and more -- about Linux, Windows AND Mac OS in regard to memory. I think 512 MB is the minimum for Windows XP. We're running something like 384 MB with OS X 10.3.9, and I know it would run better with more RAM. Windows Vista needs 1 GB minimum. Going back to Windows 2000, it runs pretty good with 256 MB, and I suspect it could handle 128 MB, though I haven't done a real-world test. Windows 98 can run in 32 MB, but it crashes all the time; 128 MB gives 98 the room it needs to run, but I wouldn't recommend anybody actually use it -- 2000 is that much better, as is XP.

For Linux, you have a choice of window managers, everything from Fluxbox to JWM, to IceWm, GNOME, KDE ... so there is a flexibility that you don't have with Windows or Mac OS (although there's noise out there that KDE will be available soon for the Unix-based Mac OS X). There are distros out there that work with low-RAM machines -- Damn Small Linux and DeLi Linux among them. At the DeLi site, they say the test box is a 486 laptop with 16 MB RAM, but they recommend 32 MB. With more RAM, you can run more stuff, like Firefox and Gnumeric. Mannn ... I have a DeLi CD, but it's not a live disc, so you need to do an install. (For those who want to know, DeLi uses the Fluxbox or IceWM window managers, with Abiword for word processing, Dillo for Web browsing, See, that's the difference between a "lite" system with less functionality and a "lite" system that works on hardware that will choke on most of the Linux distros out there. DSL can also run with 16 MB ... but runs entirely in RAM with 128 MB. I believe it. But it's too hard to make a bootable CF. I'll try again, but the Puppy Universal Installer is a gift from the Linux gods that I .

Xubuntu is said to run with 64 MB RAM, but I can't believe it can do well even with 128 MB. Something to test. I couldn't even get the live CD to boot on This Old PC with 262 MB ... so that one will have to wait for a new hard drive and the "alternate install" disc. Zen Walk, which is also for lower-power machines, recommends 128 MB RAM as a minimum.

MepisLite (the small version of SimplyMepis) which hasn't reached release 1.0 yet but is pretty stable in my testing of it, is one of the most intriguing "lite" distributions, since it includes the KDE desktop and KOffice. That one's going to get a major workout vs. Xubuntu and Zen Walk in my experimental future.

So depending on what day it is, Puppy is performing well with 128 MB RAM. When the going gets tough, the system starts swapping, and as I've learned, swapping to Compact Flash is a recipe for disaster. Yesterday I had a couple of loops running and hogging the CPU. I could've just killed X and restarted it, but I instead ran KP and slowly waited for the mouse to work its way through all the processes that were causing the trouble. And that means 24 hours of uptime for the Thin Puppy at this point. As I've also said, I think these problems are minimized or eliminated when running Puppy from CD -- the system isn't really using your hard drive -- in fact, it doesn't even need one -- so there's no swapping. What I have to do is get This Old PC hooked up to the Internet so I can replicate these conditions and see how a 333 MHz box deals with it.

I guess the bottom line is that when you get to low RAM, you have three choices: add more RAM, run an older Windows OS, or run a slighter Linux than the main distros. I think the answer, for me at this point, is dual booting.

In reference to today's work with the Thin Puppy, I'm happy to report that mtPaint, the included image editor in the Puppy Linux distribution, works quickly and easily -- and I even was able to put a border around a photo. Who needs the GIMP? By the way, mtPaint uses the GTK+ toolkit and runs in both Linux and Windows.