Thin Puppy Torture Test, Day 24 -- time to turn off the box

It's been 24 days since I booted the Thin Puppy (a Maxspeed Maxterm 1 GHz thin client) with Puppy Linux 2.14 by plugging a CD drive into the motherboard's IDE interface, then removing the drive and letting Puppy run free in 256 MB of RAM.

Early on in the test, I lost the ability to mount drives, so instead of using the attached USB flash drive, I stored all my files in RAM, keeping an eye on free RAM for such files with the freememaplet. But Puppy kept chugging along, allowing me to write and post to this blog, download photos and prepare them for the Web. Along the way, I listened to some podcasts (Gxine gave up when a 35 MB download ate into free RAM, but the madplay program is the default for mp3 files, and that offers skip-free audio to be played on this thin client, which pretty much chokes on any kind of audio and video (which, for the record, is the box's problem, not Puppy Linux's).

But it's been 24 days of silent, mostly trouble-free computing with the Thin Puppy (whose fan doesn't run unless the box is held at an 75-degree angle in either direction, but which also has not overheated) and Puppy Linux 2.14.

I'm turning off the box because I want to crack it open, try to get a CD drive and a hard drive connected, and install some other operating systems. I've had trouble getting anything Debian-based to even boot, but I will try for alternate installs of the Ubuntu family, as well as Zen Walk (which I have booted successfully on this box) and Fedora, maybe Sabayon and Mepis.

Next up: I'll try to do an install over the Internet of openSUSE.

And now, after 24 days, It's shutdown time.