The Futility of Stripping -- BusterPup Stripped

[mikeslr]

Although this resulted in an ISO you can download and use, the purpose of this project was to examine the ramification of stripping a Puppy of applications, primarily to answer the question of whether the gain in available Random Access Memory on boot-up is worth the effort required to remove the applications you consider unnecessary.
I’ll be candid. I’m not an impartial evaluator. Neither computers nor the computing environment which existed when Puppies first appeared exist today. At that time most websites were text with an occasional graphic but you were lucky if your computer had more than 256 Mbs RAM. You still had to carefully ration the use of every byte.

Of the two computers I regularly use the one with the least amount of RAM has 4 Gbs. From prior experience I know that carefully removing builtin applications and remastering would take several hours. I also know that however little RAM is being used when you first boot into a Puppy, as soon you open any web-browser over a hundred Mbs of RAM will be used, and accessing each graphic-rich web-site will require that much or more additional RAM. If you have limited RAM adding a Swapfile/partition may prevent a crash, but not provide a sustainable viewing experience. The best that might be hoped for are (a) a means to send and receive emails with attachments; (b) access one, perhaps two webpages at a time, and (c) of course engage in the common activities most of us use computers for: There are light-weight applications for non-web-oriented activities, and methods of reducing, even eliminating, their demands for RAM beyond that which is actually necessary.

I probably would not have undertaken the project if (a) I hadn’t stumbled upon an Asus 701sd, 418 Mbs of RAM buried in the back of a closet and unused for a decade; and (b) I also stumbled upon a Suite of Office and Graphic applications in an 48 Mb package, viewtopic.php?p=3412#p3412

All the actual work of stripping and remastering was done of my Lenovo 4180AP3 Laptop with 3845 MB of RAM. My objective was not to produce a Bare-bones Puppy, but rather the strip out those application no longer necessary in the light of Koffice-Suite and always unnecessary for me as I have neither a CD/DVD player/burner nor a printer.

I chose radky’s BusterPup, viewtopic.php?p=302#p302 to work with for several reasons. As a relatively new Puppy it can run current web-browsers OOTB; and debian buster, with which it is binary compatible, will be maintained into 2025. I considered josejp2424’s DpupBuster CE, viewtopic.php?p=2208#p2208, but am more familiar with how radky organizes things so took the path less challenging.

As you know, Menu>Setup>Remove builtin packages does not actually remove anything. What it does is ‘break the links’ to an application so that it is no longer available. On remaster, the broken links can’t be followed, so a ‘removed’ application is not included.

On an unadulterated BusterPup’s bootup on the Lenovo, pup-sysinfo reported:
Total RAM: 3845 MB
Used RAM: 709 MB
Free RAM: 3136 MB
Cached: 524 MB
Actual Used RAM: 137 MB Used - (buffers + cached)
Actual Free RAM: 3708 MB Free + (buffers + cached)

Booting into the ‘slimmed-down’ BusterPup on the same computer, First boot - No Save, pup-sysinfo reported:
Memory Allocation:
Total RAM: 3845 MB
Used RAM: 828 MB
Free RAM: 3017 MB
Cached: 632 MB
Total Swap: 0 MB
Free Swap: 0 MB

Actual Used RAM: 130 MB Used - (buffers + cached)
Actual Free RAM: 3715 MB Free + (buffers + cached)

with LibreOffice sfs loaded, writer displaying a draft of this post:
Actual Used RAM: 176 MB Used - (buffers + cached)

with LibreOffice unloaded and portable-gimp registered and opened
Actual Used RAM: 173 MB Used - (buffers + cached)

Installing the ‘slimmed’ Busterpup to the Asus 701SD on initial bootup pup-sysinfo reported:

Memory Allocation:
Total RAM: 418 MB
Used RAM: 334 MB
Free RAM: 84 MB
Buffers: 45 MB
Cached: 201 MB
Total Swap: 377 MB
Free Swap: 377 MB

Actual Used RAM: 88 MB Used - (buffers + cached)
Actual Free RAM: 330 MB Free + (buffers + cached)

After creating a 256 Mb SaveFile, pup-sysinfo reported
Actual Used RAM: 93 MB Used - (buffers + cached)
Actual Free RAM: 325 MB Free + (buffers + cached)

After starting the 48 Mb Koffice Workspace’s blank Text Template pup-sysinfo reported
Actual Used RAM: 111 MB Used - (buffers + cached)
Actual Free RAM: 307 MB Free + (buffers + cached)

Closing that an opening gimp-portable, pup-sysinfo reported
Actual Used RAM: 130 MB Used - (buffers + cached)
Actual Free RAM: 288 MB Free + (buffers + cached)

Closing that and starting palemoon, pup-sysinfo reported
Actual Used RAM: 177 MB Used - (buffers + cached)
Actual Free RAM: 241 MB Free + (buffers + cached)

Closing that and starting Mike Walsh’s Seamonkey 2.46 portable, viewtopic.php?p=2206#p2206,
pup-sysinfo reported
Actual Used RAM: 151 MB Used - (buffers + cached)
Actual Free RAM: 267 MB Free + (buffers + cached)

Entering “Cats Images” into a google-search in seamonkey pup-sysinfo reported
Actual Used RAM: 408 MB Used - (buffers + cached)
Actual Free RAM: 10 MB Free + (buffers + cached).

Moreover, it was also reported that 8 Mbs of the 377 has also been used. It should also be noted that it took about 3 minutes to load the web-page; and after it loaded it took over a minute for pup-sysinfo to complete and display its report.

I think this exploration pretty much confirms my guess that stripping will rarely render an under-powered computer more useful. While palemoon is often recommended, changing to the lesser-demanding seamonkey accomplished more than stripping did. For those having to work with little RAM, shinobar’s gimp-portable, http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 426#464426, requires only a couple of Mbs when not in use. Although Koffice workspace certainly can be used, you can load LibreOffice when needed and unload it when not. Unloaded, it requires no RAM. And of course if you can live with a text based web-browser well the World of the 1980’s is your oyster.

If you’re interested, you can find buster32-uefi-stripped.iso here, http://www.mediafire.com/file/ffsqqzardvbs6ll/file. As I don’t personally believe that it has any lasting value, I intend to remove it in about 30 days.

By the way, I replaced BusterPup’s builtin palemoon for mike walsh’s portable version. You can move the /opt/palemoon folder to a partition before creating a SaveFile/Folder. Updates and profiles won’t occupy your SaveFile/Folder or unnecessarily use RAM. I also substituted lxterminal for urxvt. I understand how to use urxvt. But my finger’s don’t.

[wiak]

I think this exploration pretty much confirms my guess that stripping will rarely render an under-powered computer more useful.

Yes, I think when we've been using Puppy or Puppy-like slimmed down systems for many years our brains get stuck in some kind of "legacy" mode where we can no longer really justify the effort we remain inclined to put in to effectively unnecessarily 'slim' down our systems. I have that brain problem too - I keep meaning to work on the build of a slimmed distro, but at the back of my mind I also realise that I would be wasting my time except for being able to say "I did it...". Like you say, it is not in any case hard-disk storage space that matters - almost everyone, surely, has tons of that in terms of storage required for most any distro. That has nothing to do with how well the system will perform, so truthfully you can generally worry not at all about that statistic nowadays. Basically, the two main concerns are available RAM, CPU performance, and speed of transfer to whatever storage devices you are using. So my issue with building a specially "slimmed down" system is that, at almost no cost, I have accumulated too many, power efficient laptops that of the Intel Core-Duo period and usually with 4MB RAM or 2MB (but easily upgraded to 4MB), so in practical use it really is the web browser pages that eats the RAM and that goes for most any useful browser - yes you can use a simpler browser and save a bit RAM, but generally speaking you still run into the same webpage bloat issue, which is a characteristic of the web nowadays...

I do in fact have at least two older laptops, that are perfectly usable; Pentium M class machines with around 750MB RAM on each, but again it tends to be the browser that makes them not so useful in practice whatever slimmed down modern OS I put on them, and also the CPU efficiency/performance isn't that great compared with most recent distros (and older distros lack in various ways - glibc too old or dodgy security status, for example). Hence, despite it feeling painful to have such laptops sitting in the cupboard gathering dust... they are frankly of little practical use nowadays anyway IMO, and certainly not when I have half a dozen Core-Duo 2 to 4MB RAM class laptops that cost nearly nothing anyway! Nor is there any point giving them to some old granny or the local primary school because they use web-browsers too, so the web bloat issue makes them unusable really. So not really saving anything from landfill (and these older laptops tend to consume twice as much power as my Core-Duo machines - so big electricity-cost and environmentally unfriendly comparatively... Can't win. Best I can do is pick the most stable, versatile, flexible distro I can, which provides big repository of trivial to install modern apps for whenever I want them.

But one thing that does remain a blessing... Not as I say the distro download or app storage size (irrelevant really), but the ability to be frugal installed - that remains of the jewel characteristic of Puppy and similar distros.

wiak

[darry19662018]

Hi Mike,

You have been reading my mind. I was thinking about a "Static" personal puppy like yours stripped down that had static apps.

I have a vlc portable and audacious which are from a portable apps, sourceforge site - they are not the latest and greatest but do the job i require. So I am doing something similar.

[bigpup]

the ramification of stripping a Puppy of applications

I would be very surprised if you did anything put make the main sfs file smaller and limited what programs could be used.

Just use boot config option nocopy to have more free RAM.
Keeps the main sfs from loading into RAM.

The few times I have used it.
It just takes longer for a program to startup.
But a lot of the startup speed is dependent on how fast the drive is the main sfs is on and size of the program.
Start a program and it loads into RAM.

having to use swap and what the speed of the device swap is on, is most of the slowdown.
You can adjust when swap is used.

There are all kinds of adjustments under the hood you can do to PAleMoon browser.
Put about:about in the address slot.

See what you can do in:
about:memory
about:config for different memory settings.

[backi]

Hi !

Wiak wrote:

I do in fact have at least two older laptops, that are perfectly usable; Pentium M class machines with around 750MB RAM on each, but again it tends to be the browser that makes them not so useful in practice whatever slimmed down modern OS I put on them, and also the CPU efficiency/performance isn't that great compared with most recent distros (and older distros lack in various ways - glibc too old or dodgy security status, for example). Hence, despite it feeling painful to have such laptops sitting in the cupboard gathering dust... they are frankly of little practical use nowadays anyway IMO, and certainly not when I have half a dozen Core-Duo 2 to 4MB RAM class laptops that cost nearly nothing anyway! Nor is there any point giving them to some old granny or the local primary school because they use web-browsers too, so the web bloat issue makes them unusable really.
So not really saving anything from landfill (and these older laptops tend to consume twice as much power as my Core-Duo machines - so big electricity-cost and environmentally unfriendly comparatively... Can't win. Best I can do is pick the most stable, versatile, flexible distro I can, which provides big repository of trivial to install modern apps for whenever I want them.

I think Wiak Comments brought it to the Point.

There is too much Obsession with saving old useless Garbage from the Landfills for no rational Reason.Except you have a tendency for Masochism or maybe looking for a Future speculative Investment in Antiquities.

I myself would propose buying more modern quality refurbished second Hand Equipment .
They are available in abundance for a small Buck.
They will be anyway rather sooner than later the "Next Generation" Landfill Garbage.

Regards!

[rcrsn51]

Obsession with saving old useless Garbage from the Landfills

Do you people not have e-waste recycling?

[rockedge]

I myself would propose buying more modern.....

depends if one has money doesn't it? I have very little of it so I got good at making old machines I can have for free work for me. It's a talent....the same ones I used to keep fighter jets in the air and weapon systems going to hit a target from 28 miles away while going 1500 mph and now lighting movie sets for crazy directors of photography so you can watch TV.

[mikewalsh]

It's all in the eye of the beholder, isn't it? And rockedge's comments about finances factor into it, too....

I guess most of you know about ye anciente Dell lappie at this point in time; P4-powered, and nearly 2 decades old by now. A gig-and-a-half of RAM. Upgrades have included a 64GB PATA SSD, and an external HDD for decent storage. But it's woefully slow, and despite all the tricks I pull, including running DPup Stretch as the most modern, 'lightweight' Pup I could find that would still run with some semblance of willingness, it's very behind-the-times, and limited in what it'll do.

So.....why do I bother to keep it?

Sentiment, that's why. It was the first new machine I'd had when we purchased it back in 2002. It's been a lot of places with me, and I've just got rather "attached" to it. That, and the fact it still has one of the best keyboards I've ever found, in terms of 'feel'.....

The old Compaq was rather more capable, but was limited to only 4 GB by virtue of being DDR1-gen. That had so much attention & upgrades lavished on it it WAS getting kinda silly, but for a hand-me-down it did me proud for nearly 6 years, and suited Puppy down to the ground.

When she popped her clogs back in January, I thought it was time to treat myself to summat new again. This HP Pavilion desktop was going for a pretty good price, the specs were good, and it had a decent monitor included, too. I use a lot of portables, AppImages & Electron-based apps, and they use a fair bit of RAM when they get going. 4 GB became 8 GB almost immediately, then around 3 months ago, I took the next step, and upgraded to 16 GB.

This has made an immense difference. As things stand, I can run virtually as many things as I want, whenever I want.....and Puppy shrugs it off.

I haven't got anywhere NEAR the limit, but I may yet go for 32 GB (the mobo will support it). I haven't made up my mind.....but it is SO refreshing to be able to just give Puppy her head, and let her do what she does best, without obsessing over a few MB here, worrying about a few more MB there, etc.

If I'm honest, I'm having even more fun with Puppy now than I ever have before.....and I've always enjoyed running it. Half the price we paid for the Dell all those years ago, yet SO much more capable. That's progress, I guess.....it seems silly NOT to take advantage of it, as & when you're in a position to do so.

------------------------------------------------

Do you people not have e-waste recycling?

Lots of places still don't, Bill.....and I would hazard a guess that with the current global hardware shortage, a LOT of older machines will be getting pressed back into service again over the course of the next several months (many of which are still perfectly functional, if the truth be known, and in all likelihood will keep on chugging away for several years yet.)

There's been way too much of the "shiny new toy" syndrome for years now, with older yet fully functional gear getting thrown out of the pram, simply on a whim..... Most of us are probably guilty of this at some point in our lives.


Mike.

[backi]

Hi Rockedge !
Sure it is a Talent and an Art to make the Most out of a Minimum (or even Nothing)
It also can be a lot of Fun ,inspiring and raising/enhancing Intelligence and Creativity.
Was not my Intention to discourage People to use older Hardware which they can afford.....or using it just for Fun.

But myself using an old Toshiba Satellite L40 ---1 Gig Ram--- for Years...because of frugallity Reasons (apparently happy)...
I am not that much skilled..
But felt it quite a frustrating Experience (not to call it a Pain in the Ass) in the Retrospective ...which i did not really realized ...compared to >... until i bought myself a (relatively) cheap second Hand refurbished Dell Precision with 8 Gigs Ram 17 inch Monitor ---plus an 20 Euro SSD.....
Saved me a lot of Nerves and Time---and probably estimated 5 till 10 Years of my Live.
Think it's a Question of Balance.

No offense you Guys.
Keep on rocking !

[taersh]

Obsession with saving old useless Garbage from the Landfills

Do you people not have e-waste recycling?

Hey Mike.

Look here: viewtopic.php?p=4075#p4075

[taersh]

Obsession with saving old useless Garbage from the Landfills

Do you people not have e-waste recycling?

Yes, we have e-waste recycling.
But this doesn't mean at all that the machines are repaired / prepared for a further use.
They just split the components to get out the original material like e.g. gold and copper for a reuse in new components to be built.

[nic007]

As far as RAM is related - The other day I did a bit of a test with my 2GB RAM desktop machine which I run without a swap file. I wanted to see how long I could run HD videos continuously without the system freezing up. Well, all I can say is that after 12 hours non-stop everyhing was still going smooth with no decrease in performance. Used Precise and VLC for the test. The way the application itself deals with memory plays a major role, I think. 2GB of RAM is plenty.

[oui]

Hi wiak

I think this exploration pretty much confirms my guess that stripping will rarely render an under-powered computer more useful.

Yes, I think when we've been using

....

remain a blessing... Not as I say the distro download or app storage size (irrelevant really), but the ability to be frugal installed - that remains of the jewel characteristic of Puppy and similar distros.

wiak

I am not certain that I really did understand completely your long explanations through the google translation I in that case really need to read it because of my poor knowledge of English.

You will show us, that the factor being source of futility is the (becoming low) competence of browsers to satisfy the needs of the web (caused by millions of redictions needing in the background for the observation of the user, of his interests and his position of thinking, a kind of maximal control today to produce advertising money and tomorrow to force the user in a precise direction of thinking).

If you use «links2 -g» the web become fast again and also very long and complexe web pages open immediately .

in the last years, I did experimente often with the installation of minimal full Linux parallel to the efforts of other in «Lubuntu minimal», or in the numerous dog's proposed here at the side from Puppy. in the last long mounths of the passed 1 .. 2 years also with Deepin 64 bit, where the installation of old 32 bit app's was very easy. For ex. «xombrero» or «luakit» or later in the time «vimprobable». If they open complexe web contents open very faster as in our mozilla's...

But that is not new! The same thing did happen in Windows at the time of old windows successors of Win95... If they did open complexe web contents open very faster in OB1 ( http://www.offbyone.com/offbyone/ob1_faq.htm , works probably well in wine ) as in other brothers...

The problem are not the PC's, not the software, but the gluttony of the GAFA's (and probably of our gouvernments) to control us and to manipulate us through the web and other media (certainly a certain ersatz for control through the religion )!

puppy did never really like more free solutions like konqueror and descendants (webkit family)... we did have konqueror imbedded a certain short time and abandon completely that branch of solutions... since years, it is not possible to add some webkit browser with correct visualisation in Puppy (excepted rare tentatives from for ex. josejp2424 with a modern release of midori, or in the past some special Puppy's with chrome/ium) ...

we also built in a lot of completely different services as dependencies in the back ground of applications without discernement: this produces an extreme growing of memory needs AND processor activities by multitasking...

as well Barry Kauler as Christophe, the creator of SliTaz, did take care in the past, dont to built in simultany grnome technic and Kde / Qt technic being only different solutions for the same problems

and that was a really good idea!

we would need an kind of "analysator of need and use of dependencies" (old discussion about «mono» ) showing us automaticly where we can thing about changes in our scope of packages on board, the only one needing some big dependencie, through an equivalent package for same purposes using the already integrated (releases of) dependencies being enough...

[puddlemoon]

hi all,
new member, old lurker...
this obsession with postponing the fate of these unwanted items, countering planned obsolescence. this is how i found/fell in love with puppy.
i literally found two desktop towers on the side of a backroad, it had only been raining a little... they were core2 era both and would seem useless as they tried to boot xp... but when i saw them run with puppy, the deal was sealed. about 8 years on and i'm still obsessed with "saving trash" via the magic of puppy.

at this point i use it for everything. it's actually a funny vortex that i use puppy and it's power mostly to deeper explore puppy itself and linux general. however i also have a full function music studio with puppy at it's core.
i also create sculptural refiguring of some of these computers and have vision of audio visual installations.

glad to hear of some methodical testing of this stripping and where it really counts to trim down...

still, it's the more off topic philisophical notions that move me. it's almost a revoutionary move to use old hardware and resist feeding the monster of consumerism. and of course the fact that we all can see such a percentage of system resources go to the modern browser, powering the survaillance/advertising/propaganda trap, makes it feel all the more relevant to see it beyond (but including) ones financial/computing needs. to be informed and empowered as to what our machines are acually doing.

so thanks for your thoughts and efforts always!

forgive me for prodding the off topic-ness

[mikeslr]

The title and point of my post was "The Futility of Stripping" not the Futility of maintaining old computers. The Asus 701sd which served as my test vehicle had 418 Mbs. of RAM. It was the amount of RAM, not the age of the computer which limited its ability to handle RAM demanding Web-pages and the web-browsers designed for them. If I was up to the task --small machine & all thumbs -- I think the 701sd uses the same version of RAM as the 701. And 2 Gbs of RAM for the 701 can be had for $13.95, https://www.memorystock.com/memory/ASUSEeePC4G701.html.

[Bojan]

First post from a perennial lurker (since 2007), ... mainly because of the topicality of stripping a distro. If functionality is the goal - specialized OS-es for audio only, for video streaming, for raid servers, ... respectively - then re-mastering-by-stripping Puppy is (may be?) a viable option. If resuscitating or, in my case, maintaining older hardware is of paramount importance, then there are other solutions. I am still running Precise 5.7.1 on a daily basis with the "latest" Canonical Firefox (fifty-some) retrieved from the PPM. As for 701 4G Eepc (inherited from my daughter decades ago), it is running with ease the Precise Light 5.7.2, ... although I must qualify this: upon receiving it I had to dismantle the Eepc and install 2 Gigabytes of RAM. Thus, where, or better still, when the futility of stripping sets in? Difficult to say. I am partial to single task Puppies but, this is another topic.

[Clarity]

This post, by me, has NOTHING to do with the originator's opening of this thread.

BUT, the various responses shows EXACTLY what PUPPY's problem is. Varied ideas of why it came to be and what it is now.

Reasons: Technology has changed...even in olden times...and will continue.

People(s) dont seem to realize what a "period piece" is. If you have an old machine, dont expect PUPPY to make it a new machine in either performance or behavior.

PUPs being developed today are developed based upon kernel changes made to MATCH todays technologies. The fact that there is continued efforts for backward compatibility does not and NEVER has meant to make the old something new.

If you have an old PC and you have a working PUP from days gone by, be happy. If I want to make my 1968 Hemi Barracuda do what today's Hellcats do, I have to CHANGE its internals to match. I am stupid enough to know that I'd be better using the Barracuda to the best of its ability with what it was built with. And just smart enough to know, that I need in 85000 dollars to make all the changes for it to be the highway car a Hellcat is...much less the drag car.

So, I know that is a stretch in this discussion thread, but, its just one example of how varied members here think of 'stripping', performance, capacity, cost, etc and HOW that applies to PUPPY Linux whose 2005 beginnings DOES NOT MATCH TODAY'S WORLD!

enJOY.

[darry19662018]

Exactly why I change to a retro kernel - that makes a difference.

[darry19662018]

One of the things that drives upgrading os on an old machine is the Browser.

[m-cuda]

My two cents: Low-end vintage hardware - e.g., 2010 netbooks - do not have
sufficient CPU cycles to browse many modern web sites, play YouTube or
full-screen 720p videos without dropping many frames or having persistent video
tearing.

Specifically, I am referring to a ASUS Eee PC 1201HAB netbook with an Intel Atom
Z520 1.33GHz CPU, 1GB of memory and a 1GB hard disk swap running "Precise Light
5.7.2". When doing these things htop shows one or usually both cores at or near
100% with minimal use of swap. I think this will be true of other low-end
vintage hardware of this class and other Puppy distributions. (I have tried
other Puppy distributions on this machine and don't recall having a good
experience with respect to the before mentioned activities with any of them.)

My solution was to go to BestBuy and buy the cheapest Windows laptop - a Dell
Inspiron 11 model 3180 laptop with a dual core AMD A6-9220e processor, 4GB RAM
and 32GB of eMMC for about $170 and install BionicPup64 to a SanDisk Snap USB
flash drive (3 for $10). This configuration works for most things, plays
YouTube and full-screen 720p videos without dropping frames or having video
tearing. However, it does struggle with some modern web pages - typically a
news site overloaded with far too many advertisements. This machine is my daily
driver.

To be fair Puppy on low-end vintage hardware does many things well, e.g.,
editing, playing older lower resolution videos, ... but cannot browse many
modern web pages or play modern videos.

[mikewalsh]

@m-cuda :-

Just out of curiosity.....what level do you have your "swappiness" set to?


Mike.

[m-cuda]

@mikewalsh I haven't set the swappiness so it is whatever the default is. Do you have a recommendation? I have tried many different puppies Precise, Tahr, Bionic and Precise Light and browsing some web pages and playing full-screen 720p videos on the EeePC has never gone well. If I remember correctly htop showed something like 60MB of 1GB swap used but at or near 100% for both CPU cores when viewing YouTube videos typically a VP9 encoded video at 640x360 resolution.. I really would like to improve the video performance is there a setting for swappiness that can help?

A tangential question: I usually run Puppies directly off a USB flash drive with no swap. The reason I do this is because I was told running swap on a flash drive would quickly wear the flash drive out. Is this true? The flash drives have more than enough space to accommodate a swap partition. I am just worried about the wear and tear.

[user1111]

I haven't set the swappiness so it is whatever the default is. Do you have a recommendation?
.
.
A tangential question: I usually run Puppies directly off a USB flash drive with no swap. The reason I do this is because I was told running swap on a flash drive would quickly wear the flash drive out. Is this true? The flash drives have more than enough space to accommodate a swap partition. I am just worried about the wear and tear.

Default swappiness is 60. 0 is where the system will strive to avoid using it at all except if its really really necessary. 100 and the system may start using swap immediately.

To view the value

# cat /proc/sys/vm/swapiness
60

To set it to 20

# echo 20 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

USB's are relatively slow to read and around 4 times even slower to write to. Swapping things around is also slow. Combine the two and it would be painfully slow to have swap on a USB. The high numbers of reads and writes will also shorten the usable lifetime of the USB. That said it could be better than nothing, but if you do then I'd be inclined to add a line into /etc/rc.d/rc.local containing ...

echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

I have a 26GB swap partition on my laptops HDD, I set that up to be encrypted and also remount the various layers to that size

Code: Select all

root@fatdog64-d37> free
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        3482220      556812     1320352     1265276     1605056     1272584
Swap:      27262972           0    27262972

root@fatdog64-d37> df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        1.7G  4.0K  1.7G   1% /dev
tmpfs           1.7G  6.1M  1.7G   1% /aufs/pup_init
/dev/loop0       74M   74M     0 100% /aufs/kernel-modules
/dev/loop1      516M  516M     0 100% /aufs/pup_ro
tmpfs            26G  519M   26G   2% /aufs/pup_multi
tmpfs            26G   75M   26G   1% /aufs/pup_save
aufs             26G   75M   26G   1% /
tmpfs            26G   39M   26G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs            26G  712K   26G   1% /tmp

/aufs/pup_save in Fatdog is similar to Puppy's /initrd/pup_rw i.e. the ram area where changes being stored in ram are actually stored. So as per the above I can have up to 26GB of changes being recorded in 'ram' (ram + swap) before that filled up. That can be useful at times, such as downloading a large file into /root that otherwise might lock the system up after 2GB or whatever amount of free ram space you had available. Similar if I'm editing/rendering a large video. Nothing worse than not having sourced/directed it to HDD and it getting a few hours into the render only to have the system lock up due to insufficient ram/space.

[m-cuda]

@rufwoof Thank-you very much for your very helpful answer. My experience has been:

I have 3 machines that I run various puppies (Precise, Tahr, Precise Light, BionicPup64) on. On two of these I cannot use internal swap space - the HP no longer has a working drive and the Dell only has a 32GB eMMC drive with a nearly full Windows 10 installation which I want to keep intact. However, both of these machines have 4GB of RAM and puppy runs quite well for most of the things I do, i.e., browsing and playing videos (full-screen H.264 720p). The only time puppy struggles is when browsing some web pages, typically a news site with too many annoying dynamic advertisements. In this case htop shows both CPU cores at > 90% but memory at around 55%. I don't think swap would help here as these tasks seems to be CPU bound.

@rufwoof wrote:
/aufs/pup_save in Fatdog is similar to Puppy's /initrd/pup_rw i.e. the ram area where changes being stored in ram are actually stored. So as per the above I can have up to 26GB of changes being recorded in 'ram' (ram + swap) before that filled up. That can be useful at times, such as downloading a large file into /root that otherwise might lock the system up after 2GB or whatever amount of free ram space you had available. Similar if I'm editing/rendering a large video. Nothing worse than not having sourced/directed it to HDD and it getting a few hours into the render only to have the system lock up due to insufficient ram/space.

I remember trying to transcode a 1GB+ video on the Dell machine using ffmeg and it aborted - segmentation fault if I remember correctly. Maybe the problem was inadequate size of /initrd/pup_rw. Thanks for this info.

On the Asus Eee PC netbook (Intel Atom 1.33GHz CPU, 1GB RAM) I have a frugal Precise Light installed to the internal hard disk with 1GB of internal hard disk swap space. Using Firefox ESR this machine struggles mightily to play YouTube videos (typically VP9 at 640x360) - many dropped frames, persistent video tearing (1 every few seconds if a video has much action) . htop shows both CPU cores at > 90% but swap usage at around 60MB of 1GB. I think again this is CPU bound and swap will not help.

Regarding YouTube, the best I have been able to achieve on the Asus netbook was with Dpup Stretch 7.5 (with the old kernel) and Palemoon. Palemoon plays YouTube videos quite well but while playing YouTube videos Palemoon will not respond to user input. i.e., mouse clicks. In my opinion this makes Palemoon unusable. Firefox ESR on Dpup Stretch again struggles to play YouTube videos.

The Palemoon on Dpup Stretch experience did surprise me and although Palemoon was not usable it did succeed in playing a VP9 video rather smoothly. I would think VP9 would be hard on these old machines as there cannot be hardware acceleration as the VP9 codec did not exists when the GPU was manufactured so the browser must be using software only decoding and my understanding is VP9 (and H.265 HEVC) achieve much higher compression ratios than VP8 and H.264 AVC at the expense of more CPU cycles especially when encoding but to a lesser degree when decoding.

After several years of trying my conclusion is that the Asus Eee PC simply doesn't have the CPU cycles to browse some modern web pages or play full-screen 720p videos. However, I keep seeing posts that puppy or some other distro e.g., Xtra-PC can work miracles with old hardware. Of course, they may know something I don't know but my guess is that most people will have an experience similiar to mine.

[6502coder]

@m-cuda

Your experience does match mine. I have a 2003 Compaq with a 1.3 GHz Celeron processor and 1 GB RAM. I have these 3 Puppies installed side by side, quadruple-booting with WinXP:

DPupStretch 7.5 (4.1.48 kernel)
PreciseLight (3.14.56 kernel)
Slacko 5.8.3 by SailorEnceladus (3.18.140 kernel)

All the Pups are standard frugal installs residing in the same partition. There is a separate 1.6 GB Linux swap partition which is used by all 3 Pups.

I have a single installation of PaleMoon in /mnt/home which is shared by all 3 Pups.

Using PaleMoon, YouTube is right on the dividing line between "barely usable" and "unusable" on all 3 Pups, but Slacko 5.8.3 gives the best performance, with YouTube falling on the "barely usable" side of the line, whereas YouTube on the other two Pups falls on the "unusable" side of the line.

It's clear to me that the hardware on this laptop is simply maxed out, and that there is nothing to be gained by trying yet another distro or yet another browser.

[m-cuda]

I ran the standard sysbench CPU test

Code: Select all

sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=10000 --num-threads=2 run

on the Dell (dual core AMD A6-9220E @ 1.6GHz) which can browse most modern web pages and play 720p videos and on the Asus (dual core Intel Atom @ 1.33GHz) which cannot browse modern web pages and cannot play 720p videos and the results are:

Code: Select all

Dell 10.0008 secs
Asus 51.8665 secs

so the Dell is 5 times faster than the Asus I think that may be the critical difference (or may be better hardware video decode).

[wizard]

@mikeslr

Hi Mike,
I'd like to reduce the size of the Cloudpup-Fossa64 remaster. I've already removed Palemoon, Abiword, and Gnumeric. Is there a list of built in packages that shows their sizes?

Thanks
wizard

[mikeslr]

Don't know of any list. But Menu>Filesystem>Gdmap will show what's eating RAM. Open it to /usr/bin and hover the mouse-cursor over large blocks.

RAM-Used by Applications.png (157.28 KiB) Viewed 1678 times

Opening to some folders, for example /usr/share, will present the blocks in varying colors. But, I think colors are used for organization purposes rather than to reflect size.

Stripping really come down to what you always want to be available. How often do you burn a CD? Print a document on paper? Also take a look at /usr/share/doc. Most can be deleted. How many of the fonts in /usr/share/fonts do you actually use? Wallpapers?

Just in case you aren't already familiar with it, jpep's gnewpet can be used to 'capture' all the files of an application and package it as a pet. AppImage here, viewtopic.php?p=18174#p18174. Uninstall or Remove-builtins can then be used to 'white-out' that application prior to a remaster.
Such pets --if python isn't involved-- can be rebuilt as SFSes, available as-and-only-when needed: UExtract>then dir2sfs the extracted folder. Or use PaDS, viewtopic.php?p=6355#p6355 to combine any number of pets and SFSes into an SFS.

[rockedge]

that screenshot is totally ART! Should be the basis of a wallpaper

[mikeslr]

I've had another thought. As you've published Cloudpup-Fossa64 and I expect will publish updated versions, what are you going to do with applications you remove which might be wanted occasionally. Of course, the user can install them. But that means creating and filling-up a SaveFile/Folder.
666philb placed them in an adrv.sfs. But, frankly, that created problems for me. adrv.sfses and ydrv.sfses are always used if available on bootup*. It took me quite some time to build a customized Fossapup64 when I started using fossapup64 having removed the adrv.sfs from the folder containing the other 'system files'. Some of the applications which were in the adrv.sfs now had to be installed using PPM.
An ISO can include anything, including SFSes and tar'ed folders of pets and SFSes which aren't necessary for a Puppy to boot to desktop, and a text file of what tar'ed folders contain. Just place such in the folder containing the other files before creating the ISO. Or simply make such SFSes or folders available as separate downloads.

-=-=-=-=-
* amethyst has published a great Suite of tools including one for working with adrv.sfses and ydrv.sfses, viewtopic.php?p=12983#p12983. Keep in mind the following: either an adrv.sfs or a ydrv.sfs will capture the contents of a SaveFile/Folder and application then in RAM not yet Saved. But creating a ydrv.sfs will also capture the contents of an adrv.sfs; while when copied into RAM on bootup the contents of an adrv.sfs will have priority 2nd only to that in a SaveFile/Folder.
Although there are other ways to use his tool and adrv.sfses and ydrv.sfses, this is what I do:
Anything I want to add and always have available are included in the ydrv.sfs. Applications which are likely to be upgraded often, such as web-browsers, then located in an adrv.sfs. [Before updating a ydrv.sfs an adrv.sfs is moved and Puppy rebooted without it]. A SaveFile/Folder may later be created to make it easy to take advantage of SFSes, AppImages and portables in folders. One bootlisting (pfix=ram) enables me to boot without the SaveFile (and then remove the USB-Key if booted from such). Another listing without the pfix=ram argument gives me the entire potential of that Puppy.