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#1 2007-12-30 02:40:31

ypnos
Member
Registered: 2007-12-30
Posts: 59

Arch owns Puppy Linux

Hi,


I just wanted to tell you about my experience on installing Linux on a rather old SIEMENS laptop. It comes with a PII 233 Mhz CPU and 64 Megs of RAM and a 4 GB hard drive.

This limited hardware setup in mind I decided to skip Arch and install Puppy Linux on it. Using Puppy from the live CD was a PITA, as Puppy is thought to have at least 128 MB of RAM and had to reload every bit from CD all the time. I chose to install it on the harddrive. After that, Puppy was smooth. But the software available is very limited and also inconsistent, it looks rather ugly. There is no localisation available, even vi is missing(!!) and using man opens a webbrowser pointing to Wikipedia big_smile.
That's because Puppy is designed to fit into 128 MB. But I thought using a "full blown" distro like Arch -- meaning the applications are full blown -- would kill a system with 64 MB of RAM!

Still I couldn't refuse to try Arch -- for the user of the laptop, software without German or Georgian localisation wouldn't be a good fit.

First, the Arch setup worked flawlessly using the lowmem bootoption. I didn't recognize any drawbacks apart that the machine is slow per se, with a very slow hard drive.

Next, running Arch works damn great on that machine! What I did:
- skip daemons like SSH
- don't use a session manager but instead automatically do startx on first login
- use Fluxbox as window manager, aterm as terminal, fbdesk for desktop icons. fbdesk sucks!
- install epiphany (+adblock extension) and every gnome part needed for it, but nothing more from gnome
- install some fonts, tango icons
- use thunar & thunar's volume manager for file browsing
- install gqview, xpdf and abiword for images and documents, mplayer for audio/video media
- even install jre and flashplugin ... SCNR

Unbelievable but still true: Having X and everything up and running, one or two open aterms and epiphany running, still after browsing some website with flash content, still there were 0 Bytes of swap used!

Let's reconsider this: We are talking about fscking 64 MB of memory here! We are talking about a bleeding edge distro. The linux kernel with the "newest & greatest" software running fits into 64 MB of RAM, try this with Windows XP or even Vista big_smile
After running Abiword & Thunar besides Epiphany, the system started to swap out about 5 to 10 MB. This didn't affect the performance or switching between applications. You had to do some heavier stuff to really get applications swapped you were currently running in background. Although the disk is very slow (~ 15 MB/s) the system still was quite usable.


I'm really astonished about Arch Linux on that machine, it made an old and forgotten machine usable again for browsing the web, reading mails and writing simple documents. And this without passing on a modern look, state-of-the-art usability, secure webbrowsing with adblocking etc smile


Btw. if you're interested, the system has an old GFX card which can only accelerate 16 bpp. Still, while in 16bpp mode, the graphics look quite good, even the antialiased font rendering is great (although I decided to prefer Xorg's bitmaps fonts where applicable on that system). The system came without Ethernet, so I bought a random PCMCIA card on ebay for € 10, which works flawlessly. Boot time is a bout 2 minutes. Here puppy is faster, booting in less then a minute.


Ypnos

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#2 2007-12-30 02:49:38

theringmaster
Member
From: Air Force
Registered: 2007-07-16
Posts: 581
Website

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

ypnos wrote:

Hi,


I just wanted to tell you about my experience on installing Linux on a rather old SIEMENS laptop. It comes with a PII 233 Mhz CPU and 64 Megs of RAM and a 4 GB hard drive.

This limited hardware setup in mind I decided to skip Arch and install Puppy Linux on it. Using Puppy from the live CD was a PITA, as Puppy is thought to have at least 128 MB of RAM and had to reload every bit from CD all the time. I chose to install it on the harddrive. After that, Puppy was smooth. But the software available is very limited and also inconsistent, it looks rather ugly. There is no localisation available, even vi is missing(!!) and using man opens a webbrowser pointing to Wikipedia big_smile.
That's because Puppy is designed to fit into 128 MB. But I thought using a "full blown" distro like Arch -- meaning the applications are full blown -- would kill a system with 64 MB of RAM!

Still I couldn't refuse to try Arch -- for the user of the laptop, software without German or Georgian localisation wouldn't be a good fit.

First, the Arch setup worked flawlessly using the lowmem bootoption. I didn't recognize any drawbacks apart that the machine is slow per se, with a very slow hard drive.

Next, running Arch works damn great on that machine! What I did:
- skip daemons like SSH
- don't use a session manager but instead automatically do startx on first login
- use Fluxbox as window manager, aterm as terminal, fbdesk for desktop icons. fbdesk sucks!
- install epiphany (+adblock extension) and every gnome part needed for it, but nothing more from gnome
- install some fonts, tango icons
- use thunar & thunar's volume manager for file browsing
- install gqview, xpdf and abiword for images and documents, mplayer for audio/video media
- even install jre and flashplugin ... SCNR

Unbelievable but still true: Having X and everything up and running, one or two open aterms and epiphany running, still after browsing some website with flash content, still there were 0 Bytes of swap used!

Let's reconsider this: We are talking about fscking 64 MB of memory here! We are talking about a bleeding edge distro. The linux kernel with the "newest & greatest" software running fits into 64 MB of RAM, try this with Windows XP or even Vista big_smile
After running Abiword & Thunar besides Epiphany, the system started to swap out about 5 to 10 MB. This didn't affect the performance or switching between applications. You had to do some heavier stuff to really get applications swapped you were currently running in background. Although the disk is very slow (~ 15 MB/s) the system still was quite usable.


I'm really astonished about Arch Linux on that machine, it made an old and forgotten machine usable again for browsing the web, reading mails and writing simple documents. And this without passing on a modern look, state-of-the-art usability, secure webbrowsing with adblocking etc smile


Btw. if you're interested, the system has an old GFX card which can only accelerate 16 bpp. Still, while in 16bpp mode, the graphics look quite good, even the antialiased font rendering is great (although I decided to prefer Xorg's bitmaps fonts where applicable on that system). The system came without Ethernet, so I bought a random PCMCIA card on ebay for € 10, which works flawlessly. Boot time is a bout 2 minutes. Here puppy is faster, booting in less then a minute.


Ypnos

yes arch is quite awesome indeed. eh, could you tell me how you got it to do startx "automatically"? or did I misinterpret you.


Check me out on twitter!!! twitter.com/The_Ringmaster

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#3 2007-12-30 04:37:04

thayer
Fellow
From: Vancouver, BC
Registered: 2007-05-20
Posts: 1,560
Website

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

theringmaster wrote:

...could you tell me how you got it to do startx "automatically"? or did I misinterpret you.

[thayer@dublin:~] $ cat .bash_profile 

# Source the .bashrc
if [ -f .bashrc ]; then source .bashrc; fi

# Start X if logging in at VC/1 and save debug info to ~/.myXLog
if [[ -z "$DISPLAY" ]] && [[ $(tty) = /dev/vc/1 ]]; then
  startx >& .myXLog
  logout
fi

thayer williams ~ cinderwick.ca

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#4 2007-12-30 06:12:33

stonecrest
Member
From: Boulder
Registered: 2005-01-22
Posts: 1,190

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux


I am a gated community.

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#5 2007-12-30 12:31:28

lucke
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2004-11-30
Posts: 4,018

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

Great to hear about your experiences, Ypnos.

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#6 2007-12-30 19:51:04

dunc
Member
From: Glasgow, UK
Registered: 2007-06-18
Posts: 559

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

Puppy's great as a live CD (provided you have enough memory to load it all into) or from a USB stick, but I wouldn't use it from a hard disk as an everyday OS. Obviously plenty of people do, but it's just never seemed suited to that role to me. There are no user accounts, for one thing. (Incidentally, yes, Vi is missing, but Puppy's based on busybox, and I think its editor can emulate vi. It's been a while since I booted it up.)

Great story about Arch. How about ROX-Filer? I haven't actually worked it out, but it might end up lighter than Thunar when you take dependencies into account, and it manages desktop icons, letting you remove the sucky fbdesk. wink


0 Ok, 0:1

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#7 2007-12-30 21:34:57

finferflu
Forum Fellow
From: Manchester, UK
Registered: 2007-06-21
Posts: 1,899
Website

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

Not to forget PcManFM, which is an ultra-light file manager, and also manages the icons on the desktop.


Have you Syued today?
Free music for free people! | Earthlings

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- A. de Saint-Exupery

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#8 2007-12-30 23:21:51

ypnos
Member
Registered: 2007-12-30
Posts: 59

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

Vi was not available as busybox' vi was broken, that's what Puppy told me smile


Thunar didn't have as much dependencys as I expected. As I had evince already installed, it was about 2 or 3 extra packages. I don't really like ROX as it doesn't fit into the paradigm. So I forgot about it. It could be that it would be a good fit. I wanted to try PcManFM but it didn't start as no fam daemon was running or so? So I skipped it..  A benefit of thunar is thunar-volume-manager which basically works out of the box and automounts CDs etc. for my friend who doesn't even know the difference between Windows & Linux.

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#9 2007-12-30 23:59:41

finferflu
Forum Fellow
From: Manchester, UK
Registered: 2007-06-21
Posts: 1,899
Website

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

FAM is useful anyway. I don't know how much memory it uses, but it's useful for refreshing folders in real time. I think it's necessary for a GUI user. I'm not sure whether Thunar also needs it (unlike PcManFM, leaving to the user the choice of whether using it or not).


Have you Syued today?
Free music for free people! | Earthlings

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- A. de Saint-Exupery

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#10 2007-12-31 01:05:11

ypnos
Member
Registered: 2007-12-30
Posts: 59

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

On that system I think every MB of RAM counts. I even didn't use a pixmap for the desktop background. FAM et al are really usefull, but on that system, there aren't many applications running side by side, so the effect is neglectable. But I will try out FAM+PcManFM on my regular system smile

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#11 2007-12-31 18:37:20

ikaruga
Member
Registered: 2007-12-31
Posts: 10

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

Thanks for the info... What about power usage (battery life)? How does Puppy compare with arch linux? As far as I can tell, Puppy 3.X is a beast in terms of power usage... But before I switch over to arch linux, I'd like to know if arch linux is any better.

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#12 2007-12-31 19:47:34

nexus7
Member
From: brain dump
Registered: 2006-12-06
Posts: 285

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

@ypnos

Haven't read your thread in detail, but you might have a look at http://lowarch.org/ wink

Happy new year!


we are Arch.
you will be assimilated!
resistance is futile!

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#13 2008-01-01 03:41:19

crouse
Arch Linux f@h Team Member
From: Iowa - USA
Registered: 2006-08-19
Posts: 907
Website

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

I hadn't tried Arch on anything with that little of memory, good to know it works wink

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#14 2008-01-01 05:53:09

sm4tik
Member
From: Finland, Jyväskylä
Registered: 2006-11-05
Posts: 248
Website

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

crouse wrote:

I hadn't tried Arch on anything with that little of memory, good to know it works wink

Just got to say:.
That 64MB beats the hell out of my 128MB setup which I thought was ( IS! ) quite nice! This is actually one of the things I've been concentrating on. Brand new software on ..well.. freakin' OLD hardware.. As soon as I get me a working hdd, I'll post my whole thinkPad x23 with 128MB ram story (and most likely my 390X with 256MB ram) from the ground up.
This hdd I'm running right now is actually from the other (..my wife's..) thinkpad.. So.. anyone wanna donate a fast, large and silent hdd for a good (..or even a better..) purpose ? wink

Thanks to everyone of you for this year passed by and especially for the next year and them years to come!

I and I send them blessings to ya'll!

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#15 2008-01-04 02:03:44

Bralkein
Member
Registered: 2004-10-26
Posts: 354

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

Good story to read! About a year back I was using a similar spec system to yours to implement a video playback system for the university "student TV station". I used Arch, Ruby, MPlayer, X, mjpegtools and a bunch of other stuff, and it worked great. My predecessor tried a similar thing on the same machine, only he used Ubuntu and could barely manage to get real-time video playback!

It's in situations like these that Arch really shines.

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#16 2008-01-05 19:52:29

ikaruga
Member
Registered: 2007-12-31
Posts: 10

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

@ypnos@ - I'm confirming what you wrote... I have an old dell latitidue cpi 266mhz with 64mb. I tried both PuppyLinux 3 as a hard drive install and archlinux (for the first time) on the same machine. Performance-wise, they run about the same. However, although no swap is used, epiphany runs a bit sluggish although better than seamonkey on Puppy. I got better (usable) performance with kazehake. My only compliant is the long archlinux boot time -- that darn udev that no one can seem to shake.

Complaints aside, archlinux is wonderful! It's a bleeding edge system that runs on my old computer *and* just as fast as a distro supposedly designed for old systems. I'm definitely sticking with archlinux.

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#17 2008-01-06 03:21:43

kraluz
Member
From: Aveiro, Portugal
Registered: 2008-01-01
Posts: 30

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

ikaruga wrote:

My only compliant is the long archlinux boot time -- that darn udev that no one can seem to shake.

Ditto. I have a similar spec machine and the next thing I'm going to try is to ditch udev, load all modules with the kernel and use a static /dev.

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#18 2008-01-06 08:51:16

sm4tik
Member
From: Finland, Jyväskylä
Registered: 2006-11-05
Posts: 248
Website

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

kraluz wrote:
ikaruga wrote:

My only compliant is the long archlinux boot time -- that darn udev that no one can seem to shake.

Ditto. I have a similar spec machine and the next thing I'm going to try is to ditch udev, load all modules with the kernel and use a static /dev.

If one doesn't _need_ acpi, I found out booting with apm dropped my thinkpad's boot time into half. Just for a "quick fix", which has it's on drawbacks, of course..

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#19 2008-01-06 15:21:09

kraluz
Member
From: Aveiro, Portugal
Registered: 2008-01-01
Posts: 30

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

sm4tik wrote:
kraluz wrote:
ikaruga wrote:

My only compliant is the long archlinux boot time -- that darn udev that no one can seem to shake.

Ditto. I have a similar spec machine and the next thing I'm going to try is to ditch udev, load all modules with the kernel and use a static /dev.

If one doesn't _need_ acpi, I found out booting with apm dropped my thinkpad's boot time into half. Just for a "quick fix", which has it's on drawbacks, of course..

For the record, I was talking about a machine whose network interfaces are nonexistent. The only deamons running are syslogd, crond and alsa. It wont get much lighter than that... tongue in my case the real problem is udev itself. Takes eternity to load...

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#20 2008-01-10 19:02:32

sm4tik
Member
From: Finland, Jyväskylä
Registered: 2006-11-05
Posts: 248
Website

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

kraluz wrote:

For the record, I was talking about a machine whose network interfaces are nonexistent. The only deamons running are syslogd, crond and alsa. It wont get much lighter than that... tongue in my case the real problem is udev itself. Takes eternity to load...

I don't know why, but just try it and you'll see what I mean. Udev load time drops in half. Can someone else explain what it is with acpi that takes so much udev loading time? I have added an entry in my grub menu.lst which is a copy of the default, only I added

acpi=off apm=on

to the kernel line.

Sakari

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#21 2008-01-10 23:39:39

kraluz
Member
From: Aveiro, Portugal
Registered: 2008-01-01
Posts: 30

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

sm4tik wrote:

I don't know why, but just try it and you'll see what I mean

I love you big_smile. udev loading drops from 7 sec to 3 sec on my main machine (Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.86GHz, 1GB RAM).

On the "little one" the improvement was even better. Modules on the kernel image, apm instead of acpi, no module auto-loading, and what formerly would take more than 5 minutes, now takes not much more than one minute and half, 2 min tops!! Not to mention that most of it is udev's loading time.

I still have to see how a static /dev would improve this even further... :twisted:

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#22 2008-01-11 02:29:31

exiguous
Member
Registered: 2007-11-11
Posts: 44

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

I think acpi does not get along with some (old) hardware. Some people cannot even boot unless they use 'acpi=off'.

When you use 'acpi=off', the standard acpi modules are not loaded and that saves some time. As for its effect on the time it takes to complete "udev uevents", it seems to make little, if any, difference for me.

There are some more options that are not as severe as 'acpi=off'. See:

http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/acpi/debug.php

Last edited by exiguous (2008-01-11 02:30:29)

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#23 2008-01-11 14:52:19

rocktorrentz
Member
From: Southampton, England
Registered: 2007-08-05
Posts: 141

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

nexus7 wrote:

@ypnos
Haven't read your thread in detail, but you might have a look at http://lowarch.org/ wink

Lowarch is actually likely to be slower on this system and it is no longer maintained afaik. This is because it is the same as arch except it is optimised for i486 instead of i686 to allow it to work on hardware that doesn't support i686 instructions; as this laptop has a Pentium II it supports the i686 instructions and so normal arch is better suited.

Last edited by rocktorrentz (2008-01-11 14:52:39)

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#24 2008-01-11 15:20:03

schivmeister
Developer/TU
From: Singapore
Registered: 2007-05-17
Posts: 971
Website

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

It's the inherent design of Linux and GNU software; low footprint smile I put eLive on a 400MHz K6 w/ 64MB RAM some time ago, and it was quite usable for web browsing, simple multimedia, and document processing.


I need real, proper pen and paper for this.

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#25 2008-01-12 00:13:23

sm4tik
Member
From: Finland, Jyväskylä
Registered: 2006-11-05
Posts: 248
Website

Re: Arch owns Puppy Linux

@ kraluz: ..Aren't we getting a bit too sentimental here wink ..But just remember the drawbacks I was talking you might encounter. Like with my thinkpad 390X the machine won't power itself off automatically and I have to press the power button. Kind of reminds me of the "It's now safe to turn off the computer" promt smile (This is a known issue and I think there are patches available, but I haven't dug any deeper)

@ exiguous: Thank's for the link. Nice info indeed if only "some acpi" is wanted!

I have 2 old laptops and 2 old desktops, all running arch, and maybe that speaks for itself and for arch. One "even older" (not i686) machine is for dos (impulse tracker, fast tracker, deluxe paint.. can you really live without them?) and some testing purposes when I get that feeling. Btw, I had apache running with it [a 200mhz/32mb.. or is it 64?] on debian for a while and it was working just fine! So, to repeat myself once again, your computer is as new as the software your running on it!

Sakari

Last edited by sm4tik (2008-01-12 00:15:21)

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