Thin Puppy Torture Test -- Day 8

I know what you're saying: Big freakin' deal. I leave my PC running all the time, all week, all month, all year, yadda, yadda -- what's so special about you leaving the Thin Puppy running for a full week?

A good question.

The difference is that the Thin Puppy is a thin client (a Maxspeed Maxterm) -- 13 1/8 inches tall, 2 1/8 inches wide and 10 1/2 inches deep, and weighs maybe 5 pounds (I can't disconnect it to drop on the scale, so that's an estimate) -- an as a thin client consists of a features-challenged motherboard, small fanless power supply AND little else. I stuffed it with 256 MB of RAM (there's only one PC133 RAM slot, and the maximum the VIA-powered motherboard will address is 256 MB), and there's only one IDE input. As a thin client, the OS (which in this case might've been Windows CD) is on a Compact Flash card plugged into a CF-to-IDE adapter.

The client came with no memory or CF card, both of which I added. I originally put Puppy Linux 2.14 on the CF card (via the Puppy Universal Installer, which allows for installation of the OS on a CF card via a USB card reader, with the CF to later function as an IDE hard drive via the adapter. But either I killed the CF chip, or it died a premature death on its own.

To get the Thin Puppy running again, I connected a CD-R drive to the IDE header (the CF-to-IDE adapter is powered by a floppy power plug, and there's an extra hard-drive power plug that I used for the CD drive). I loaded Puppy from the CD -- the entire program goes into RAM -- and disconnected the drive. So now Puppy is running entirely in RAM. I've since even disconnected the USB flash drive I was using for downloaded files.

The Thin Puppy does have a fan, but it only works when the box is held at a 75-or-so degree angle (why, I don't know). The Via C3 Samuel 1 GHz processor has a unique heat sink, with pipes going from it to additional heat-sink material that's connected to the metal case for additional heat dissipation. So far the CPU and chipset seems to be running OK. If I could figure out what the actual CPU temp was, I would.

AND ... Puppy Linux isn't generally considered an OS that you boot and leave running for weeks at a time. First of all, it works great as a live CD, and since it runs in RAM, lots of things could be lost if it crashes before a proper shutdown. But since I've upped the RAM from 128 MB to 256, there have been no crashes ... and all has worked perfectly through this -- day 8.