Installing Puppy Linux on Pentium 4 with 512 MB Ram

[asifnaz]

hi , new on the forums .

I have this old Computer Pentium 4 with 512 MB Ram . Will puppy Linux work on this computer . I am looking for Ubuntu based version .

I need you suggestions .

Please help

[puddlemoon]

HI,
yes puppy should run on that thing...
I would start with this bionic or maybe precise light is a safer bet
There are smaller/older ones out there but one of these is likely to function at least.
Burning a disk could be the best bet for boot media.
good luck

[mikewalsh]

Hi, asifnaz. And to the "kennels".

I agree with the recommendation for Precise-light. Bionic 32 is, however, pushing a P4's capabilities beyond what it will be comfortable with. A lot will depend on what model P4 you have; I know at least one Puppian on here who runs Bionic32 on a P4 system, swears by it, and will tell me I'm talking out of my backside.

I know what my old laptop is happy with. My modern desktop, however.....ahh, that's a totally different kettle of fish.

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I understand the desire everybody has to run the newest OS possible, though do be aware that any form of Linux (including Puppy) is not susceptible to virii/malware like Windows. All you need over here is a good firewall.....which is supplied.

With older hardware, you have to be sympathetic to its capabilities, and run software it will be comfortable working with. Not stuff where it'll be pushing 100% CPU usage all day long. So, of necessity, you're looking at an older OS, one which will usually be EOL. Puppy, however, even running older versions, is still more secure "by design"....

Others will have their suggestions.

You can find the 'original' Precise 571 here:-

http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/precis ... -5.7.1.iso

(That's a direct link to the ISO download.)


Mike.

[m-cuda]

I use "Firefox ESR" on "Precise Light" and with only a few tabs open it is under 512MB. This will quickly be exceeded as you open more tabs. However, I think your main difficulty may be your CPU is too slow to browse many(most) websites or play anything but the lowest resolution videos <= 360p? "Precise Light" can do some other things quite well, basic text processing, spreadsheets, ... but probably not web browsing or higher resolution videos - really depends on exactly how fast your P4 is. In my experience most activities in Puppy are CPU bound not memory bound If you have a later higher end P4 then even with only 512MB of RAM (and swap space on a hard disk) I think Puppy will do much better then I stated.

This is my seat-of-the-pants thinking - if you run the following sysbench test and get a score significantly greater than 10 seconds your machine will struggle mightly (i.e., be unusably slow) to browse modern web sites, play YouTube videos or higher resolution videos.

Code: Select all

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

--num-threads should match the number of cores.

Also, On "Precise Light" I was never able to get "Firefox ESR" and a video player to work together - after installing the video player the audio stopped working in Firefox. I suspect that may be the reason "Precise Light" does not have a video player pre-installed.

The current version of "Precise Light" is 5.7.2. Also, using Rufus or "Universal USB Installer" on the "Precise Light" iso makes an unbootable flash drive. There is an easy workaround which I can give you if you decide to use "Precise Light". This is really a shame as "Precise Light" is quite a good distribution but I think many users will really be put off when the flash drive does not boot.

If you are not totally wedded to Ubuntu I think "Dpup Stretch" (Debian based) would be a better experience. I don't use it because I am totally wedded to Ubuntu based Puppies but when I tried it I was very impressed.

And always check that the firewall is enabled - I don't know how this happened but on at least one installation of Puppy my firewall was off, I probably made a mistake somewhere but now I always verify the firewall is actually on.

ADDENDUM

I just did a session on "Precise Light" browsing with "Firefox ESR" with only two tabs open (one YouTube and the other I don't remember) but the memory usage was ~ 490MB. I think you will need swap space but I think if you have a fast enough CPU it may still work out. But, I don't think you will be able to have many tabs open - a tab these days seem to use ~ 100MB.

[trister]

I've used StretchDog 32bit (with JWM window manager) in my P4 that I have in my classes.
It runs decent and I have newest firefox & chrome browsers with libre office and other stuff.

Restrictions:
-I avoid opening many tabs in the browsers or opening many "heavy" programs at the same time.
-I use a big changes.dat file (1,5GB+) .
-Remember :512MB is low even for windows XP and winXP can'y run any recent browser.

You could burn an ISO from here (https://debiandog.github.io/doglinux/zz ... chdog.html) and see how it goes.


I've tried puppy precise in the past and It run nicely (but not much better than StretchDog 32bit) and I don't know how recent browsers you can find for it.


NOTE:
For SD32 I've made and been using these:
firefox-79.0_i386.tar.bz2_auto_v02_200729.squashfs
slimjet_i386_27.0.5.0.deb_auto_v01_200729.squashfs

[JASpup]

I'd imagine system requirement specs for every distro, even though anecdotes are generally more useful.

My oldest machine (the one I've been posting here most about), runs Lucid Puppy 5.2.8.

366MHz Celeron / 256mb


I haven't tried Precise 5.7.1 even though it's the first Puppy I've ever booted. Tahr is a little sluggish.

Experiment and post your results!