Thin Puppy torture test -- Day 3

It's Day 3 of the Thin Puppy torture test, in which the Thin Puppy -- a Maxspeed Maxterm thin client repurposed to run Puppy Linux 2.14 -- will run continuously to test the hardware and OS ... and also because since the Compact Flash memory died, I booted the machine with a CD drive, then disconnected said drive. So the Thin Puppy is running totally in RAM (I have a 256 MB USB flash drive connected in case I want to save anything big, but there's no OS or apps on it), and it can't be rebooted without me cracking the case open and re-plugging the CD drive, or inserting a pre-programmed CF module in the back (the only "disk" this thin client is wired for is the CF, via an IDE adapter that plugs into the motherboard and a floppy power connector.

Again, the Maxspeed Maxterm, which I bought on eBay, is running a Via C3 1 GHz processor with special heatsink that pipes to two auxiliary heatsinks bolted to the metal case; a VT133 chipset, 256 MB of PC133 RAM, all on a Mini-ITX motherboard of undetermined origin (I don't think Via made it, and it could be PC Chips, but I can't confirm that either), plus a small, fanless power supply, also in the case, fed by an external 12 V laptop-style adapter, and the previously mentioned CF-to-IDE adapter with access through the back of the case.

One thing that Puppy Linux offers is a running tally of how much free memory you have for data. I'm currently at 45.2 MB. The computing session began on March 26, with 49.5 MB and has fluctuated all the while. Much of that is taken up in cache for the SeaMonkey browser; emptying the cache restores some of the memory. But as long as things stay at an acceptable level and nothing else crashes the system, the Thin Puppy should keep going.

The system only achieved its current stability when I swapped in the 256 MB RAM stick -- it would buckle on Flash animation elements of Web pages with 128 MB of RAM because Puppy only had about 5 MB of free RAM for data (it's not ALL the free RAM, just that set aside for data -- caches, added programs, downloads NOT made to the USB flash drive and such).

I used the Dillo browser for most of the day. It's much lighter and faster than SeaMonkey, which itself isn't that slow. But Dillo loads instantly and displays pages almost as fast. The way it achieves that speed is, in some part, because it doesn't use CSS style sheets, Java, or any of that other stuff that makes most browsers work hard. For general Web browsing in which you don't have to fill out forms and do other complex things (or need Flash), it's a great app to have on hand. And while SeaMonkey is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS, Dillo is a Linux-only application, as far as I can tell.