The joys of computer upgrades.
One of my machines is an old Fujitsu Lifebook P2110. dating from 2001 It was a gift from the mother of a friend. She loved it, and wanted it to go to a good home, but had upgraded to a newer, faster machine. She commented it was "slow slow slow".
Well, no surprise. It had an 867mhz Crusoe processor, a slow even for the time 30GB HD, a whopping 256MB of RAM, and came from Fujitsu with Win XP Pro SP2 installed. XP Pro wants 512MB
minimum, and according to Fujitsu, the maximum the Lifebook could take was 384MB. You grew old and gray waiting for XP to boot, and older and grayer waiting for programs to load. It was spending more time swapping pages in and out of RAM to make memory available than it was doing useful work.
It looked like a good candidate for Linux. So I swapped the original HD for a 40GB Fujitsu unit with similar specs from a dead laptop of my SO, repartitioned, and set it to triple boot Win2K Pro, Xubuntu, and Puppy Linux. Win2K Pro is slow as a frozen snail, but runs somewhat better than XP on the box, and is there for when I need Windows. Xubuntu runs, but it too is arthritic. Puppy itself and the bundled apps are fairly sprightly, as they were all chosen for small size. Other things, like Firefox 3.5 and Open Office 3 were different stories. FF, for instance, took about 45 seconds to initialize. The CPU is fast enough, and 256MB of RAM is adequate. The problem is a slow hard drive with low transfer rate. The main Firefox program is small, but it must load and link against an assortment of libraries, and gets killed by disk I/O. In contrast, Opera 10 loaded in about 20 seconds. It was built "static", with all the needed library code compiled into one big executable, so Puppy could simply find the start of the file and continuously load till it reached the end, instead of having to seek multiple locations on the drive to find the pieces. (Unfortunately, current Mozilla apps
can't be built static.
)
Puppy got to a state where it would hang on shutdown, requiring a power cycle, and hang on boot, never running X-Windows and loading the GUI. I was still running the 4.12 release, and there was a 4.21 and 4.31 release since, so I downloaded the ISO, burned a CD, and installed. I chose to wipe the existing installation after preserving stuff I wanted and install from scratch, because among other things, Puppy was built with the latest kernel and supported the ext4 file system, which had performance improvements I wanted to investigate, and would require a reformat.
Installing Puppy itself was painless. The fun started when I started adding back the other things I'd installed. I have an SD card where I keep copies of the Puppy packages I run, and I stared installing them.
Most of the applications that run under Puppy use the Gtk graphics framework, and link against a Gtk library. One of the apps I installed broke that. Graphical stuff already up was fine, but anything I tried to run after would die with an undefined symbol error trying to link against the GTK library and not seeing what it needed. The Gtk library itself hadn't been touched. It was the same working version from before. I had no idea what was going on.
After a couple of iterations of wipe, reinstall, and try to find out which third party app was the culprit, I discovered it was a package of the Gimp paint program that was newer than the one in the official Puppy repository. It had worked just fine in the 4.12 release...
So I installed the most recent version in the repository, and all was well.
I'm still rebuilding my former configuration, but it's substantially back to where it was. And the ext4 filesystem seems to be a lot faster than the previous ext3 version. FF 3.5 now loads in about 30 seconds, and Opera 10 comes up in a bit over 10. The new release is also better developed in areas like detecting missing dependencies, and telling you if there are missing pieces needed by what you're installing. But it still has a way to go before matching Ubuntu, which does a much better job of preventing the issues I had.
Maybe it's time to wipe and redo Xubuntu, and use ext4 for it, too...
______
Dennis