Long-lost Click: 64 MB to 144 MB — will it make a difference?

(This post was originally written on May 22, 2008; since that time, I’ve added the RAM, and it does indeed make a difference. It’s still not easy to live with 144 MB of RAM and 233 MHz of CPU, but it’s easier than having less than half of that M. What I can say is that 500 MHz of CPU and 256 MB of RAM is positively picnic-ish. Also, I finally did the OpenBSD 4.2-to-4.3 upgrade on the VIA box. It wasn’t easy, but I did get it done.)

If the question is “how low can you go” in terms of computer memory, it’s all about applications.

If you stayed in the Linux console and never ran X, just about anybody could be happy with 32 MB of RAM. It might be hard to actually run Linux or a BSD in 16 MB, but I’ve heard of Linux distributions that will do it, Damn Small Linux, Tom’s RtBt (is that the right spelling?) and DeLi Linux among them.

But as much as the hard-core users talk about how they stay at the command line all the time, it’s hard to get much done strictly in a console when you’re a regular person. Sure you can use Lynx for text-only Web browsing, you can set up Mutt (and Postfix/Sendmail/msmtp/esmtp, Procmail and whatever other helper apps are needed) with highly customized configuration files designed to handle and filter multiple mail accounts, use Vi or Emacs for text editing and all that.

But the bottom line for me is that I need a Web browser. A “real” Web browser, something that works with Movable Type and Google Docs, and that pretty much means Firefox or some Iceweaselish derivative.

I don’t tend to use OpenOffice very much (although it runs better in Debian with 64 MB that you’d think), I barely even use AbiWord these days. I’m not saying that I won’t need OpenOffice in the future, but at present I’m most comfortable using various X text editors, including Geany in most Linuxes and BSDs, Gedit when I’m in GNOME, and Google Docs half the time just for the easy portability of my copy.

And while Geany doesn’t load super quickly from a “traditionally” installed distribution (but is quite quick when loaded into memory as it is in Puppy Linux, once it’s loaded it runs very well indeed.

And the Dillo Web browser — which looks better in its OpenBSD incarnation than it does anywhere else — performs quite well in 64 MB of RAM. The only problem is that Dillo can’t do everything I need to do on the Web. At least the Dillo in Puppy and DSL has https support. That’s not turned on in OpenBSD, and the app needs to be recompiled to add it. I can manage to turn on cookies in OpenBSD, which helps me with some sites, but for anything remotely complicated, Firefox is essential.

And while Firefox will run in 64 MB of RAM, it does so very poorly. There just isn’t enough memory to keep the program from swapping to the drive incessantly whenever doing just about anything.

In this very 64 MB, I’ve run just about everything that will load on this Compaq laptop: Puppy, DSL, Debian (the Xfce install, plus a “standard” install with Fluxbox), Slackware (without KDE) and OpenBSD.

Truth be told, Almost all of these OSes run just about the same. Damn Small Linux has a bit of an edge, and if DSL 4.3 ran as well as 4.0, its inclusion of Firefox 2 would put it over the top. As it is, I’ve lost my desktop wallpaper, and I can’t figure out how to display the menu in Fluxbox (even though I prefer to run JWM).

Puppy definitely needs more memory, especially to run the Mozilla-derived Seamonkey Web suite.

Debian Etch was OK. While the Xfce install is odd in many ways, as I say, I was surprised to see OpenOffice run at all — and not too badly at that. Iceweasel was, again, an exercise in frustration. But Debian remains a distinct possibility for this machine.

It’s main OS for awhile has been OpenBSD, with a partition set aside for the Linux files generated by the Puppy and DSL live CDs.

OpenBSD runs pretty well, but as I said, Firefox remains an issue.

The question: Will things improve with the boost of RAM from 64 MB to the Compaq Armada 7770dmt’s maximum 144 MB? From my past experience, I know that Puppy can run in 128 MB if you have swap space, and DSL is certainly comfortable with 128 MB.

To answer the question, I could reduce the memory in my Via test box from 256 MB to 128 MB and see how OpenBSD (now version 4.3) runs in that configuration. But I’d have to pull the cover from my converted thin client and find a 128 MB SIMM. I’ve probably got one … somewhere.

Better to just wait for my Compaq memory to come in the mail (luckily it’s cheap).

I’ve know for awhile that 256 MB is a significant sweet spot for Linux, but I’d love for 144 MB to be just sweet enough to give this laptop a new lease on open-source life.

And while I managed to upgrade my VIA box from OpenBSD 4.2 to 4.3, it takes a lot more work than a simple apt-get, and I’m reluctant to do it

OpenBSD on the $15 Laptop: The application shuffle

I’ve had a bit of a difficult time with my OpenBSD 4.2 installation on the $15 Laptop — a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 144 MB RAM, a 233 MHz Pentium II CPU and 3 GB hard drive. I use PCMCIA cards for networking, an Orinoco WaveLAN Silver for 802.11b wireless and a TRENDnet TE-100PCBUSR 10/100mbps for wired Ethernet.

Since I upgraded the memory from 64 MB to the 144 MB maximum for this machine, things are running much, much better.

But I’m running out of room in the /usr partition. I’m not sure whether or not OpenBSD can be installed in a single partition, but since the install FAQ tells you to set up separate partitions for everything, that’s what I did.

On this drive, I set aside about 600 MB for Linux filesystems to create swap and a place to store files for Puppy Linux, leaving 2.4 GB for OpenBSD.

At the end of the OpenBSD partitioning, I had 1 GB for /usr, which is where applications are stored in the system.

For awhile things were going fine. I had our daughter’s Gcompris, TuxPaint and Childsplay games on here, Firefox, the Geany text editor, plus a few console apps like nano, mc and mutt.

But it’s not console apps that are taking up all the space.

I pulled the games and their libraries in order to fit the Opera Web browser and the Linux compatibility package needed to run it. That was the best thing I’ve done for this install since I did it. On this old hardware, the Linux build of Opera runs much faster than Firefox.

That speed really shows up when blogging with Movable Type. For some reason, even in Linux, scripts keep timing out in Firefox and the Mozilla-based Seamonkey. Now that I have Opera installed in both OpenBSD and Puppy 2.13, I’m a lot happier on this old laptop, which is about as challenged as it gets when it comes to old hardware working with modern operating systems and applications.

Anyhow, I needed to do some more “formatted” writing, and I did have the Ted word processor installed. But Ted isn’t great when it comes to centering type, print previews or generating PDF output.

I needed Abiword. But I didn’t have enough space.

The only thing big enough: Firefox.

Yep, I got rid of Firefox. One thing about the OpenBSD package manager that isn’t helping me out here is that when you install a package, all the dependencies are checked, and the additional packages needed are downloaded and installed. But when you remove a package, the system doesn’t check its dependencies for whether or not they’re still needed by other applications in the system.

I’m sure there’s a reason for this, and there’s probably even a way around it (like the great deborphan app that I use in Debian), but I know nothing about it.

Anyhow, I managed to get Abiword installed, and I have 500 MB left in my /usr partition. Unfortunately, the spell-check in Abiword doesn’t work in the OpenBSD build. Abiword spell-check doesn’t work in Puppy either.
The spell-check installs and works most of the time in Debian (especially when you install it with Aptitude and get all the packages you need, rather than with apt-get, where at least sometimes you don’t).

I found an old OpenBSD mailing-list hack about how to fix Abiword’s spell-checking capability, but it didn’t have enough information, and it didn’t look like it would work anyway.

But the good news is that with this amount of memory, Abiword 2.4.5 runs extremely well in OpenBSD 4.2. Additionally, for some reason the fonts in Abiword look better in OpenBSD than then do in most other Linux/Unix systems.

So now I have Abiword, Geany, Opera and the Dillo browser as my “main” applications on this system. I don’t want to forget the Rox-filer file manager. I put that on the box awhile ago. I still need space to add the Flash plugin for Abiword, and Rox is a prime target for removal so I can get that space … or the space to install Gaim/Pidgin for IM.

But I just can’t do it. I’ve loved the Rox-filer ever since I first used it in Puppy, and I just can’t give it up.

I probably should. I removed mc (Midnight Commander) for space reasons, even though it probably doesn’t take up all that much space, and since I had Rox. If mc didn’t have problems with the function keys in the console (it misreads the keys for some reason), I’d be able to fit one more app in. (Note: mc works perfectly in an xterm window, just not in the console).

What I’m going to have to do eventually is reinstall OpenBSD. I need a bigger drive so I can have a big /usr partition, install everything I want on it, as well as have room for a full Linux install as well, something I could use in addition to Puppy.

So the OpenBSD install is really tight, in terms of space for applications, but it’s working extremely well. I now have the ability to share files between OpenBSD and Linux via an ext2 partition, and that has added tremendous value to this laptop.

I could be using my Gateway laptop a lot more. It’s got way better specs (1 GB RAM, 1.3 GHz CPU) and runs Linux way faster. But it isn’t so hot with OpenBSD due to the noisy, uncontrollable-by-BSD CPU fan. And its PCMCIA slot still isn’t fixed, so I can’t run wireless with it.

The Compaq may be underpowered, but it has a very clear, very bright screen, an excellent keyboard, working wireless, no ACPI issues (since it has no ACPI), and there’s just something about getting it to work and keeping it working that I find compelling.

And there’s also something about OpenBSD that keeps me coming back to it, even on the desktop.

One thing that preload helps run quickly: OpenOffice

OpenOffice Writer starts in about five seconds in Debian Lenny on my Gateway Solo 1450, and I have to think the preload app is responsible.

I’ve written before about how preload doesn’t seem to have any effect on Iceweasel and Epiphany, which I’d sure like to start more quickly, but with OpenOffice, preload seems to be doing its job.

While on the topic of Open Office, I should mention that I’ve been using it quite a bit lately. I like the way the fonts look way better than those in Abiword, and OO just seems to be working well, so I’ve taken to it quite a bit more than in previous months.

Oh, and Google Docs offline under Google Gears has been pretty much a big disappointment.

Since I started using it (with Firefox in Ubuntu), it has lost my database once, and is dog-slow the rest of the time. I hate starting Docs offline in the browser and waiting an age for my files to show up. With this kind of performance — which is in much contrast to Google Docs’ swiftness when connected to the Internet, I’d much rather use a traditional word processor or text editor.

Hence my increasing use of OpenOffice.

Debian Lenny update: so far, much better, and we also have ‘Etch and a half’

Now that Debian’s current testing release, code name Lenny, has been frozen, we’re this much closer to seeing Lenny become a Stable release, a milestone that is projected for September of this year. That would make it a year and four months after the current Stable release, Etch, was so designated in April 2007.

For those using Etch now, keep in mind that once Lenny becomes a Stable release, Etch will receive the designation Old Stable and continue to receive security patches for another year.

While on the subject of Etch, it’s interesting to know that the install images have been updated, and along with that update comes a 2.6.24 kernel as an alternative to the 2.6.18 kernel that shipped with the initial release.

This new Etch, dubbed “Etch and a half” by the Debian team. With the new kernel comes additional hardware support. For details on the new packages and bug fixes, go to the release announcement.

I don’t think that the decision to add hardware support to Etch at this stage has anything to do with Red Hat’s similar move with its Enterprise Linux product, but it’s interesting to see both distros going in this direction.

Back to Lenny: I still have 84 updates to do with Lenny, but I’m holding off for the moment because I’m at home, and when I start a big download, I tend to dominate our home DSL connection. My Netgear router tends to dedicate almost all of the bandwidth to the huge download, and my wife, Ilene, who is using the iBook G4 on this same router, can barely use Firefox.

I don’t know if there’s some kind of setting in the router I can tweak to more equitably share the bandwidth, and if there is, I’d sure like to know about it.

No, really … back to Lenny: One of today’s updates, which I will install later, is a new Abiword, which will go from version 2.4.6 to 2.6.4. I noticed considerable lengthening of the load times for Abiword in Puppy Linux 4, which uses an Abiword from the 2.5 series, over the 2.4.5 version in previous Puppy builds.

The $0 Laptop — a Gateway Solo 1450 with 1.3 GHZ Celeron processor and 1 GB of RAM — loads Abiword almost instantly, and I’ll be anxious to see if that changes with this new version.

Since my last Lenny update, Firefox/Iceweasel 3.01 has been performing well. The “work offline” issue has been fixed, and I don’t have to uncheck the box every time I start the browser.

One thing about Iceweasel 3 that I like is that the fonts have been cleaned up. Debian has been using what appear to be bitmapped fonts, as opposed to smoother varieties, for quite some time. These look better on LCD displays, but I’ve grown so used to them that I just leave them on the lone CRT monitor I still use.

But now that the fonts are looking so much better right out of the box, I’m just happy to see the screen looking better in Firefox.

OpenOffice 2.4 has been running very well, and I’ve been using it quite a bit more in Debian, Ubuntu and Windows, the latter of which needs an update from what I think is version 2.2. Since I don’t get prompted for an upgrade on the Windows box, I get very lazy about doing them at all.

Going to Windows for a moment, my main Windows text editor, Notepad++, just pushed an update to me yesterday, and I did download and install it. I really am not good about checking Web sites for updated applications, and I do appreciate when the program itself tells me about a new version. Filezilla also does this in Windows, and of course Firefox and Thunderbird always notify me about updates.

Back to Lenny, again: When I wanted to test the KDE photo editor Krita and camera-interface digiKam, a ton of KDE apps and libraries came along for the ride. Since then I’ve also added Xfce, and as a result this Debian Lenny installation is quite large. I might want to redo it at some point with just the default GNOME desktop and Xfce added, just to keep it a little more manageable. But to the Debian Project’s credit, things are working quite well, and many issues have been resolved on Lenny’s road to Stable.

I’m still getting the “ghosting” in the upper panel in GNOME, but it does seem to go away at various times in the computing session. The same thing doesn’t happen in Ubuntu, so that makes it a bit of a mystery.

And if I could figure out why and how Ubuntu is able to suspend/resume this Gateway laptop and make Lenny do the same thing, I’d probably use Lenny a whole lot more.

I’m pretty much a “Stable release” kind of person. I would’ve been content to use Etch all the way through up until Lenny goes Stable, but since Lenny ran so much better on this laptop, most importantly supporting the touchpad better, I decided to follow it through on the road to it becoming a stable Debian 5.0.

Since then, I’ve also tried Sidux, which takes the unstable Debian Sid and makes it easier to use as a desktop system. My time with Sidux was brief, but it pretty much flew on this system as a live CD loaded entirely into RAM.

I had planned to write a full Sidux review, and I still might, but since I’m more inclined to run a Stable release over Testing, I can’t see any reason to run Unstable, even with the Sidux team smoothing the way. I just don’t need the latest packages that quickly to get my work done.

Quick Ubuntu note: Being so “Stable,” in my own mind at least, I had planned to continue running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS for at least a year if not two, but the upcoming Ubuntu 8.10 release promises something I really want: encrypted folders. Instead of encrypting whole drives or partitions, which Debian (and Ubuntu with the alternate installer) has done since Etch, the ability to only encrypt what is really “sensitive” is something that I could really use. Such an ability would speed up the system, since there will be much less to unencrypt, and it would also make it easier to choose to use or not use encryption.

So will I upgrade when October arrives? I’m not sure yet. 8.04 runs so well on this laptop that I’m loathe to mess with it.

Related:
Debian mailing list announcement of Lenny freeze
Sidux 2008-2 release notes
“Etch and a half” announcement

In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies

I tested quite a few versions of Puppy Linux in recent days on my 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt. The bad news is that version 3.01 wouldn’t configure X properly. Any attempts to do so and then start X crashed the box.

The other bad news is that while Puppy 4.00 loads fine and runs fine, for some reason the load time for Abiword went from 8 to 10 seconds in previous Puppy builds to 30 seconds. That’s quite a rollback. On a more positive note, start times for Seamonkey were about the same.

I don’t really use Abiword all that much, but that kind of performance hit is disturbing. It could be due to the new way packages are being compiled for Puppy but is more likely something specific to Abiword, since Seamonkey appears to be unaffected.

I tried Puppy 2.17 just to see how encryption worked. It did fine. And I discovered that in the case of multiple pup_save files on a single system, the ones not in use during the current boot can easily be opened in Puppy.

One bone (pun there, intended or not) I have to pick with newer versions of Puppy Linux is the lack of the Dillo browser. I use it quite a bit. I could still add it from packages, I suppose (and I definitely will), and if the slowness of Abiword wasn’t bothering me so much in Puppy 4.00, I’d be using it right now.

As it is, I will continue testing, but for now Puppy 2.13 (hopefully with Firefox added for Google Gears compatibility) remains the front-running distro for the Compaq, especially if I’m able to remove the hard drive and replace it with a Compact Flash module and CF-to-IDE adapter card.

The fact that I can move files from one pup_save to another, providing that the non-mounted one is unencrypted, gives me more flexibility as far as upgrading from one Puppy system to another and creating a new, encrypted pup_save instead of using an old, unencrypted one.

---

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka “Why?”)

In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed

As I say in a previous post on this very topic, there are many reasons to choose Puppy Linux as the primary OS on the nearly 10-year-old Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop.

For one thing, Puppy is ideal — and explicitely designed — to run as a live CD or easily upgraded frugal install, the latter either on a traditional hard-disk drive or a Compact Flash memory card mounted in a CF-to-IDE adapter inside the Compaq’s hard-drive caddy.

With recent versions of Puppy (2.17 onward, I believe) the ability to encrypt the pup_save file that holds all of the user’s files and configurations adds both a needed measure of security to a laptop installation as well as providing an equally easy way to back up the entire system by copying a single large file to just about any storage medium, from USB flash drive to CD-RW to hard disks in formats ranging from old-school FAT to NTFS to Linux’s many types of filesystems.

Also in Puppy’s favor is that recent versions have heightened compatibility with Slackware 12 packages, promising a greater number of sources for additional applications, should I ever want or need to add anything beyond what Puppy and its own repositories already provide.

To recap, in the time I’ve had the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop (again, with a 233MHz Pentium II MMX processor), I’ve taken it’s RAM from 64MB to the maximum of 144MB, kept the original IBM-made 3GB hard drive, and run the following operating systems:

• Debian Etch “standard,” with X and Fluxbox added
• Debian Etch Xfce desktop install
• Slackware 12 without KDE
• Puppy Linux 2.13
• Damn Small Linux 4.0, 4.3 and 4.4
• OpenBSD 4.2
• Wolvix Cub 1.1.0

Truth be told, I liked every one of these installs to one degree or another. While Slackware (installing without KDE but with everything else) took up too much space and offered too few applications I wanted, it still ran great.

Rolling my own X installation into Debian‘s “standard” install was an excellent exercise, but I just didn’t have the expertise to really build it out. The Debian Xfce install was nice, but somewhat curious; all of the Debian desktop installs, even KDE, feature OpenOffice. Surprisingly, OO ran fairly well in 64MB of RAM and 233MHz of CPU. Strange, however, was the lack of GUI package management in the Xfce install. It did get me using Aptitude, so there was nothing lost there, but I got the feeling that Debian’s Xfce just didn’t offer what I wanted.

However, with Aptitude, Abiword actually installs the dictionary that makes spell-check work. At last look, neither Puppy nor OpenBSD do that.

I continue to enjoy Damn Small Linux, but the most recent versions just don’t run as well as they should on this laptop. And little things like having Firefox renamed Bon Echo (why??) made it difficult to use Google Docs with Gears, which is one of the things I want to be doing fairly intensively, made DSL fall behind Puppy in the running.

Puppy has a great selection of apps, is fairly easy to configure, extremely familiar to me and runs great on this hardware. I find myself using this live CD more and more of the time.

Much of my feeling for 2.13 over other versions of Puppy is nostalgic. I first encountered Puppy with this very release, and most likely a simple move of the cute 2.13 desktop wallpaper to a newer version of Puppy would make me extremely happy. The fact that everything in 2.13 continues to work flawlessly, however, is a strong testament to how very well Puppy is put together. I probably will test and subsequently adopt a much newer version of Puppy for use on this laptop, if for no other reason than to use the encrypted-pup_save feature that will greatly add to the security of my data, since laptops — even ones well past their prime — have a way of falling into the wrong hands.

OpenBSD doesn’t install with as anywhere near as many GUI features as … any Linux distribution. Not that any of the BSD projects can’t be configured to be as full-featured as any equivalent Linux distribution. It just takes time and effort. With a faster processor and a bit more memory, I’d really consider running OpenBSD as the primary distro on this laptop. On the other hand, hardware detection in OpenBSD excellent. It remains the only operating system to correctly auto-configure sound on this Compaq.

OpenBSD has well over 4,000 precompiled binary packages for i386 and even more software available through ports. It offers fewer packages than Debian or Ubuntu but way more than Slackware. And with the quality of the packages being so high and the tools used to manage them equally high in quality, OpenBSD remains an attractive alternative.

But again, Linux is just that much easier to use on the desktop. OpenBSD is no speed demon in X, and speed is more important when you’re running ancient hardware than it is when you have, say, a PC from the past five years at your disposal.

And with OpenBSD, things like Adobe Flash are hard to deal with. And I don’t think Google Gears will ever run in OpenBSD. I could be wrong on both counts (since OpenBSD can run Linux apps), but I do know that both are easier to do in Linux.

A bigger drive that could multiboot Debian, Wolvix and OpenBSD, with Puppy running either in a frugal install or as a live CD, is one way to go.

But running only one or two of these systems at a time seems to be more realistic, manageable and … sane. Using multiple hard drives, like I do with my test box, is another way to go. That way the pain of dual-booting is avoided, as is the tedium of continual reinstalls.

Since OpenBSD offers much of the software I want and is an intriguing diversion from Linux, I could ‘ll probably leave it on the drive for the near future. In my 500MB or so Linux partition, I will probably grow my pup_save file and update Puppy. Now that I have Firefox 2 running on one of my other Puppy installs, I’ll probably begin doing the same with this laptop, and that way I’ll be able to use Google Docs with Gears. I can probably even figure out how to make Gears work with Seamonkey, but it’s not imperative.

---

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka “Why?”)

In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong

I didn’t have high hopes for Wolvix on the $15 Laptop — a Compaq Armada 7770dmt built in 1999 — since previous attempts to load the live CD resulted in an X configuration that needed a little work.

Since then, I’ve had quite a bit more experience working in the xorg.conf file, and I was able to get a halfway decent X configuration going so I could test Wolvix Cub (the smaller of the two Wolvix distributions, with fewer packages than the larger Wolvix Hunter).

As I’ve written on many occasions, I consider Wolvix to be one of the best Slackware-based distributions available. Both the graphical configuration utility and the very flexible installation utility — also an X application — add considerable functionality to a solid Slackware 11 base.

And with Wolvix (and the rest of the Slackware-derived distros such as Zenwalk and Vector), all of the helpful Slackware console utilities are still there. Xwmconfig, netconfig, mouseconfig, even pkgtool can be used in any of these Slackware-based systems. You might not need them as much as you would in a standard Slackware installation, but they do come in handy.

Wolvix also includes slapt-get and Gslapt, the Debian-apt-like utilities that changed the way I look at package management in Slackware.

Before Wolvix, when running Slackware I dutifally downloaded updates from the Slackware FTP site, then used updatepkg to install them. One by one. By one.

One time I figured that using pkgtool for updates would enable me to save time and avoid all that typing of long filenames, or the almost-as-long procedure of copy/pasting them in the file manager for each and every package than needed updating.

I ended up with “doubles” of every updated package, since pkgtool didn’t know I was doing an update and just installed the new packages without removing the old ones. So when you’re talking about doing updates of Slackware packages with Slack’s default tools, it’s updatepkg or nothing.

All it means is that slapt-get and Gslapt, which are included in Wolvix and easily added to Slackware itself, are essential for the person whose life doesn’t revolve around using the updatepkg utility.

Just the fact that Wolvix — which can operate as a live CD with a Knoppix-like save file, or in “frugal” or traditional hard-drive installs, can be brought up to date in minutes with Gslapt in much the same way that apt and Synaptic work in Debian continues to be a revelation.

Put it this way: How many longtime Slackware users don’t have and use slapt-get/Gslapt? I bet not many.

Once I had Wolvix Cub running as a live CD with X properly configured on the 144MB/233MHz Compaq Armada 7770dmt, I used xwmconfig at the console to switch between the Xfce and Fluxbox window managers.

Not surprisingly, both WMs ran quite well, even with only 144MB in the live CD environment.

What astounded me were the extremly quick application-load times. In previous tests of Wolvix, it was quick but not so quick as to beat Debian Etch or Slackware 12 under Xfce and Fluxbox.

In Wolvix Cub running on live CD on the Compaq, a number of text editors, the lightweight Abiword and not-so-light Firefox all loaded relatively quickly. I need to do more tests, but Firefox seemed as responsive or more so than the Mozilla-based Seamonkey browser is in the ultra-fast Puppy Linux.

I wouldn’t want to run Wolvix, even the Cub edition, as a live CD in the same way as Puppy or Damn Small Linux — especially in only 144MB of RAM, but when it comes to a traditional install, Wolvix Cub or the more application-rich Hunter would seemingly make an excellent candidate to permanently run on the Compaq.

In contrast to Debian and Slackware, Wolvix installs with just about every application and utility I like, from Abiword to Bluefish, Dillo to MtPaint, and with extremely well-organized menus in both Xfce and Fluxbox. In fact, the Fluxbox menus even include little icons next to each category of applications, something I’ve never seen before.

I’m “sure” I could replicate all of this goodness in standard Slackware of Debian, but the former’s KDE focus and the latter’s devotion to GNOME mean that it would take quite a bit of work on my part to have as good an experience in Xfce and Fluxbox as I already enjoy in Wolvix by simply loading the live CD and doing an easy installation from what I consider to be among the best installers of any Linux distribution.

---

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka “Why?”)

In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux

In the battle for which operating system runs best on the $15 Laptop, Puppy Linux has pulled out front as the fastest system with the most features I need and best functionality on this 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt.

In case you’re wondering, here are the specs of the Compaq:

233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor
144 MB RAM
3 GB hard drive

I recently bumped the RAM from 64MB to the maximum of 144MB. Before this increase, running Linux or OpenBSD (which I have installed on the hard drive) with the X Window System was difficult at best.

Smaller applications like the Dillo Web browser, the Abiword and Ted word processors, the Geany and Beaver text editors ran pretty well in 64MB of RAM.

But the 500-pound gorilla of graphical applications is Firefox.

It would be nice to get by with Dillo, but many — if not most — of the things I need to do with a computer these days require a fairly modern browser.

Whether it’s blogging, working on Dailynews.com, or on the Movable Type back end, it all happens in the browser.

And for that I need, at a minimum, Firefox 1.5.

Now that Damn Small Linux offers Firefox 2 (under the name Bon Echo, but for all intents and purposes an early release in the FF 2 series), that system is more than fair game for use on this laptop.

Unfortunately, while the browser runs great, other things in DSL have not been working so well.

For some reason, the desktop wallpaper doesn’t work. Instead, I have a plain, gray X Window background. And while JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) is the default in Damn Small Linux like in Puppy, switching over to Fluxbox in DSL has been problematic. Some builds have allowed me to use the Fluxbox menu, but others don’t seem to work at all.

I could live without desktop wallpaper (or I could figure out a solution to the problem), but with Puppy Linux (I’m currently using version 2.13 but could easily upgrade to the newer 4.00 at any time) I get a nice-looking desktop, the Mozilla-based Seamonkey Web suite, Abiword (about as fast as DSL’s Ted word processor but with the added ability to read and write .doc files), the Geany text editor, the ROX filer and quite a few other applications I’ve grown to like very much over the year and a half I’ve been using Linux.

And as far as speed goes, Puppy and DSL are quite equal on this hardware.

---

Coming up:

• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka “Why?”)

A second look at Slitaz 1.0: turns out it has a lot of potential

The extremely lightweight Swiss GNU/Linux distribution Slitaz burst upon the scene in March of this year promising to be easy on system resources yet possessing enough power in the form of basic applications to actually get things done.

In my original non-review, I couldn’t really get Slitaz running on any of three PCs, so I ended it this way:

Hopefully they’ll get it right with SliTaz 1.1 (or 2.0), but for now, it’s a distro with a lot of promise but not a whole lot of delivery — at least for me.

But there was also this:

I’ll try it in the $15 Laptop (based on a Pentium II MMX and with the Orinoco WaveLAN wireless card) …

Coincidentally, I’ve been looking for new distros to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I decided to finally give Slitaz a spin in it.

It works.

And so far, it’s quicker than anything I’ve tried on it before. The closest thing I can compare it to is Damn Small Linux.

As of DSL version 4.4, both have the “Bon Echo” version of Firefox, with Slitaz using a more-recent build of what basically is Firefox.

Having Firefox named Bon Echo presents one problem: It’s harder to install Google Gears, which would enable Google Docs to function in offline mode. I’m sure there’s a way to do it, but so far that’s been the big stopper for me with DSL (and now Slitaz).

Another stopper: Slitaz seems to want the user to store data on a USB-connected drive. But this laptop, made somewhere around 1999, doesn’t have USB. Hell, it doesn’t have Ethernet. My connectivity comes via a Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card, and even if I did have a WiFi signal, which I don’t, I’m not sure Slitaz 1.0 supports wireless connectivity. Otherwise, I’d be trying some packages from the Slitaz repository.

But in its “raw” configuration, Slitaz is a 25 MB ISO — smaller than Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, and with fewer apps as well.

The beauty of it is that Slitaz 1.0 is running entirely in RAM — and I’ve only got 144MB on this laptop.

Again: 144MB and running entirely in RAM. I don’t think there’s a system out there with X that’ll do this without tapping into Linux swap (although Damn Small Linux might be coming close).

Like Puppy and DSL, Slitaz is based on the JWM window manager, which has plenty of features and lots of speed to go with it. Right-clicking gets you a small menu, but for the full menu, you need to left-click on the Slitaz spider icon at the top of the screen.

Slitaz is lean but does have enough apps to get by.

Besides Firefox/Bon Echo (version 2.0.0.12 on the live CD), there’s:

• My favorite development editor Geany
• The mhWaveEdit audio editor (at least that’s what I think it is)
• emelFM2 file manager
• Clex File manager
• mtPaint image editor (one of my favorites)
• Grab screenshot
• GPicView Image Viewer
• Gparted partition manager
• Htop processes viewer
• Lighttpd Web server
• gFTP client
• Grsync
• LostIRC
• Retawq Web browser
• Scpbox secure copy app
• Transmission Bittorrent app
• ePDFView PDF viewer
• Listpatron (I can’t figure out what this does, but it appears to “make lists”)
• OSMO personal organizer
• SQlite database
• Wikiss PHP Wiki
• Bc calculator
• Burn ISO
• ISO Master
• Leafpad editor
• Nano editor
• Xpad sticky note editor
• Xterm

I’m not sure yet how extensive the Web-server capabilities of Slitaz are as yet, but it does have the Lighttpd server, SQLite database, along with PHP, so you can seemingly roll out a dynamic Web page on the system as configured.

Once I get to a live Internet connection on the Compaq, I plan to check out the Slitaz repository, which has some applications that aren’t on the live CD, including Abiword and the GIMP.

I’ll have to deal with how to save my settings in Slitaz without USB, but in that quest, I found a great utility called Mountbox that enabled me to easily mount partitions from my hard drive and then look at them with emelFM2. Not that it’s hard to mount partitions from live CDs, but this app is as good as the mount tools in Puppy or DSL, and I’m glad to have it.

However, upon mounting a hard-drive partition, I could see all the files there, but I was unable to write a new file to it. That’s something I’ll have to work on.

(Hint: When you boot Slitaz, the standard user is hacker, with no password. Root’s password is root.)

After a read through the online documentation, I settled on the following boot codes for my laptop:

boot: slitaz vga=788 lang=en kmap=us home=hda3 sound=noconf

I was still asked by the system (in French, no less) what resolution to use for X. But the boot process was a bit quicker, since I wasn’t asked this time to choose a language or keyboard, nor was I asked to configure sound, something that didn’t work automatically (and never does for this laptop in Linux).

I created a file, saved it in the Slitaz filesystem and rebooted without the cheat codes. The file wasn’t there. I tried again with the boot codes, and my file was there. The same thing worked for a Firefox bookmark. As long as I used the home=hda3 boot code (since hda3 was the hard drive partition I chose on which to put my Slitaz save file) when booting, everything works.

So it turns out you don’t need a USB drive to save files in Slitaz.

There’s a “Cooking” release of Slitaz that looks much changed from the 1.0 release, and I will try it soon and hope that perhaps some and hopefully many of my problems will be addressed. It uses Openbox instead of JWM, features desktop icons, uses HAL to automatically mount media and even has Firefox 3.

Another addition, among many, to the latest build of Slitaz is wireless support. Again, I’ll have to burn a disc tonight and give it a try when I’m near a WiFi signal.

Thus far, Slitaz 1.0 is absolutely the fastest operating system I’ve ever used. While it’s still fairly young, it boasts of a lot of functionality, and if it runs on your particular hardware, it’s a live CD that’s well worth having in your laptop bag.

I’d love to have another alternative to Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, both extremely lightweight — and extremely well-formed — distributions designed to be run as live CDs (but also capable of being installed to the hard drive). And again, running entirely in RAM with only 144MB is as lightweight as they come.

Right now, I can’t use Slitaz with the same “expertise” with which I can use Puppy or DSL. But for a quick-booting, quick-working live CD, Slitaz does exceedingly well for such an early stage in its life.

I’ll be watching Slitaz very closely, and I expect big things for it in the future, should development continue — and I really do hope it does.

Point of order: According to the boot screen, Slitaz stands for “Simple, Light, Incredible, Temporary Autonomous Zone.”

So far, Slitaz lives up to that name.

More on Slitaz:
Slitaz on Distrowatch
Distrowatch review of Slitaz
My first Slitaz post from April 2008
K.Mandla’s review of Slitaz
TechieMoe review of Slitaz
TechSource review of Slitaz

A second look at Slitaz 1.0: turns out it has a lot of potential

The extremely lightweight Swiss GNU/Linux distribution Slitaz burst upon the scene in March of this year promising to be easy on system resources yet possessing enough power in the form of basic applications to actually get things done.

In my original non-review, I couldn’t really get Slitaz running on any of three PCs, so I ended it this way:

Hopefully they’ll get it right with SliTaz 1.1 (or 2.0), but for now, it’s a distro with a lot of promise but not a whole lot of delivery — at least for me.

But there was also this:

I’ll try it in the $15 Laptop (based on a Pentium II MMX and with the Orinoco WaveLAN wireless card) …

Coincidentally, I’ve been looking for new distros to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I decided to finally give Slitaz a spin in it.

It works.

And so far, it’s quicker than anything I’ve tried on it before. The closest thing I can compare it to is Damn Small Linux.

As of DSL version 4.4, both have the “Bon Echo” version of Firefox, with Slitaz using a more-recent build of what basically is Firefox.

Having Firefox named Bon Echo presents one problem: It’s harder to install Google Gears, which would enable Google Docs to function in offline mode. I’m sure there’s a way to do it, but so far that’s been the big stopper for me with DSL (and now Slitaz).

Another stopper: Slitaz seems to want the user to store data on a USB-connected drive. But this laptop, made somewhere around 1999, doesn’t have USB. Hell, it doesn’t have Ethernet. My connectivity comes via a Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card, and even if I did have a WiFi signal, which I don’t, I’m not sure Slitaz 1.0 supports wireless connectivity. Otherwise, I’d be trying some packages from the Slitaz repository.

But in its “raw” configuration, Slitaz is a 25 MB ISO — smaller than Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, and with fewer apps as well.

The beauty of it is that Slitaz 1.0 is running entirely in RAM — and I’ve only got 144MB on this laptop.

Again: 144MB and running entirely in RAM. I don’t think there’s a system out there with X that’ll do this without tapping into Linux swap (although Damn Small Linux might be coming close).

Like Puppy and DSL, Slitaz is based on the JWM window manager, which has plenty of features and lots of speed to go with it. Right-clicking gets you a small menu, but for the full menu, you need to left-click on the Slitaz spider icon at the top of the screen.

Slitaz is lean but does have enough apps to get by.

Besides Firefox/Bon Echo (version 2.0.0.12 on the live CD), there’s:

• My favorite development editor Geany
• The mhWaveEdit audio editor (at least that’s what I think it is)
• emelFM2 file manager
• Clex File manager
• mtPaint image editor (one of my favorites)
• Grab screenshot
• GPicView Image Viewer
• Gparted partition manager
• Htop processes viewer
• Lighttpd Web server
• gFTP client
• Grsync
• LostIRC
• Retawq Web browser
• Scpbox secure copy app
• Transmission Bittorrent app
• ePDFView PDF viewer
• Listpatron (I can’t figure out what this does, but it appears to “make lists”)
• OSMO personal organizer
• SQlite database
• Wikiss PHP Wiki
• Bc calculator
• Burn ISO
• ISO Master
• Leafpad editor
• Nano editor
• Xpad sticky note editor
• Xterm

I’m not sure yet how extensive the Web-server capabilities of Slitaz are as yet, but it does have the Lighttpd server, SQLite database, along with PHP, so you can seemingly roll out a dynamic Web page on the system as configured.

Once I get to a live Internet connection on the Compaq, I plan to check out the Slitaz repository, which has some applications that aren’t on the live CD, including Abiword and the GIMP.

I’ll have to deal with how to save my settings in Slitaz without USB, but in that quest, I found a great utility called Mountbox that enabled me to easily mount partitions from my hard drive and then look at them with emelFM2. Not that it’s hard to mount partitions from live CDs, but this app is as good as the mount tools in Puppy or DSL, and I’m glad to have it.

However, upon mounting a hard-drive partition, I could see all the files there, but I was unable to write a new file to it. That’s something I’ll have to work on.

(Hint: When you boot Slitaz, the standard user is hacker, with no password. Root’s password is root.)

After a read through the online documentation, I settled on the following boot codes for my laptop:

boot: slitaz vga=788 lang=en kmap=us home=hda3 sound=noconf

I was still asked by the system (in French, no less) what resolution to use for X. But the boot process was a bit quicker, since I wasn’t asked this time to choose a language or keyboard, nor was I asked to configure sound, something that didn’t work automatically (and never does for this laptop in Linux).

I created a file, saved it in the Slitaz filesystem and rebooted without the cheat codes. The file wasn’t there. I tried again with the boot codes, and my file was there. The same thing worked for a Firefox bookmark. As long as I used the home=hda3 boot code (since hda3 was the hard drive partition I chose on which to put my Slitaz save file) when booting, everything works.

So it turns out you don’t need a USB drive to save files in Slitaz.

There’s a “Cooking” release of Slitaz that looks much changed from the 1.0 release, and I will try it soon and hope that perhaps some and hopefully many of my problems will be addressed. It uses Openbox instead of JWM, features desktop icons, uses HAL to automatically mount media and even has Firefox 3.

Another addition, among many, to the latest build of Slitaz is wireless support. Again, I’ll have to burn a disc tonight and give it a try when I’m near a WiFi signal.

Thus far, Slitaz 1.0 is absolutely the fastest operating system I’ve ever used. While it’s still fairly young, it boasts of a lot of functionality, and if it runs on your particular hardware, it’s a live CD that’s well worth having in your laptop bag.

I’d love to have another alternative to Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, both extremely lightweight — and extremely well-formed — distributions designed to be run as live CDs (but also capable of being installed to the hard drive). And again, running entirely in RAM with only 144MB is as lightweight as they come.

Right now, I can’t use Slitaz with the same “expertise” with which I can use Puppy or DSL. But for a quick-booting, quick-working live CD, Slitaz does exceedingly well for such an early stage in its life.

I’ll be watching Slitaz very closely, and I expect big things for it in the future, should development continue — and I really do hope it does.

Point of order: According to the boot screen, Slitaz stands for “Simple, Light, Incredible, Temporary Autonomous Zone.”

So far, Slitaz lives up to that name.

More on Slitaz:
Slitaz on Distrowatch
Distrowatch review of Slitaz
My first Slitaz post from April 2008
K.Mandla’s review of Slitaz
TechieMoe review of Slitaz
TechSource review of Slitaz