[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

I sacrificed a command-line virgin.

As you can probably guess I didn't stopwatch the event and was only paying attention to cold-boot because I didn't want anything happening which would make the machines unsaleable (they weren't mine in the first place; I was asked to "just throw Windows on them so I can get rid of them"). Neither one took more than a minute from BIOS to desktop. The first run of Firefox couldn't have been more than 15 seconds and the first run of IE (in order to get Firefox) was about the same; I consider that a long time on any other machine. I didn't install Office or anything else; obviously if I got ambitious I could make either one of them choke but I've locked up a Win7 box with 2GB also. On the other end, I've gotten XP to boot and run in as little as 64MB RAM, on a 2GB hard drive no less, but it was similar to the results you describe. I saved that hard drive for posterity and still have it here someplace. In the middle, my aforementioned Gateway Celeron box from several years ago required a fair amount of multitasking before redraw from the onboard video became noticeable. Anything's possible if you try hard enough.

<shrug> I've been dealing with PCs since the original IBM PC with a green mono monitor, dual 360K 5.25" floppy drives, and a 4.77mhz 8088 CPU and 256KB of RAM running MS-DOS 2.X was first beginning to invade corporate desktops and Lotus 1,2,3 was single-handedly forcing everyone to upgrade to a full 640KB of RAM to accommodate large worksheets.

Along the way I've learned various tricks to optimize performance. I'll take your word on the results you describe, but I'm still unclear how you managed it.

My first Linux install was on a P4 with 128 and swap set up as you describe because I didn't know any better and that's what Anaconda told me to do. I didn't have to lower my expectations because I didn't have any in the first place. It was even running Gnome. Performed well.

I'll take your word on that, too.

Now, before you get the impression that we have different levels of acceptable performance, my main rig is a 4-core Xeon OCed to 4.09GHz watercooled (that's 24/7, not a one-off suicide run...I've actually benched it at 4.5), with 8 GB DDR2-800 OCed to 1140-something MHz, and an Nvidia 9600GT OCed to 700/1100 (which I consider woefully behind the times) pushing twin 20" Acer widescreens. I'm looking into a method for running Quadro drivers for the vid card but all things considered I rank this setup as out-of-date.

We have different levels of acceptable performance. My desktop lags way behind the current performance curve, with a 2ghz CPU, 3GB of RAM, and onboard video, multi-booting Win XP Pro SP3, Win2K Pro SP4, and Ubuntu 9.10. I have other things to spend the money on, and what it does is adequate for my purposes.

The challenge has been wringing performance out of the old Fujitsu Lifebook, and I think I've hit a hardware imposed wall. PArt of the challenge with the Lifebook was what performance I could achieve without spending money. I might be able to help things with more RAM and a faster HD, but I'm not inclined to pay for them.

I was told, without any detail, that Puppy would run on 16MB. It requires 128 for the ramdisk even though it doesn't necessarily need that much to run, however, leading to the build-and-transfer thing you describe. I won't say that's too much like work because something deliberately made that small would most likely be used on an embedded device anyway. At my site I reviewed Puppy alongside Damn Small Linux, which actually will run on the build target with 16MB if given the appropriate boot parameters.

The guy who did it took it as a challenge to see if he could. There are a few folks in Puppy land running Puppy in 64MB, and even 48MB, but the installations are the equivalent of embedded - built to perform a specific function, rather than be a general purpose desktop.

Other Puppy folks have been promoting it as a good base for an embedded device, and dreaming of things like a Puppy powered smartphone. I think that's a case of "If what you have is Puppy, you see everything as a dog run", and they'd do better to look at other things for the purpose.

I looked at DSL back when, when I was looking for a distro that would run on low end kit. The last I knew, DSL had run into a wall because the developer had reached a limit on what he could successfully include and keep the distro size under 50MB. A spin off with a different approach is TinyCore Linux, with a distro that I believe is around 10MB, where it's just enough to get you a running Linux system and the assumption is you will add what you want once you have.

You've got the Puppy user base characterized pretty well in your review. "Rabid" is a fairly apt description. And "Woof" ought to add considerably to Puppy. The ability to use programs sourced from other distros will be a considerable boon. PetGet isn't a bad tool, and the PET format works well. But dependency management effectively doesn't exist, and the repositories are out of date and poorly maintained. You essentially have to search the Puppy forums to see if someone has done a PET of what you want, and if they have, hope you either have the dependencies installed or can find them if you don't.

Still can't find who said that. Doesn't make it any less true, just saying.

I have no idea who first said it either, but it's dead on.

I like XFCE as well; it's one of several DE/WMs I have installed. As of version 4.6, however, it's still GTK-based. Therefore in some distributions installing XFCE will pull in some Gnome deps, especially if said distros are Gnome-based in the first place.

Sure. Bottom line here is starting from the Ubuntu Minimal CD to get a working CLI installation, then manually adding XFCE4 through apt-get (which brought along the required parts of X as a dependency) produced a usable system. Starting with Xubuntu did not.
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Dennis