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Puppy Linux installer and memory management defects
de Achim Nolcken Lohse 01/18/2007 08:30
Encouraged by the recent glowing reviews of Puppy Linux, I went a few
rounds with it today, after reading that Puppy could boot from an IDE
ZIP or LS-120 drive.
My test system was a Gigabyte MB with 320MB of PC100 RAM and an LS-120
superfloppy. My goal was to get Puppy Linux installed on my old CF-25
Toughbook laptop which has neither CD-ROM drive nor USB support, but
does have a bootable LS-120 drive. I planned to use the desktop to
install Puppy on an LS-120 disk, then boot the laptop with it.
I found the description of the IDE ZIP/LS-120 install fairly
confusing, and ended up trying it every possible way, using two
brand-new disks. The process was very slow because the installer kept
locking up with the drive running endlessly. I frequently had to
restart X-Windows to break out. One time I let it run 20 minutes
trying to write the ".sfs" file, before shutting it down.
I tried every different MBR option provided, including repartitioning
with Gparted, and writing the mbr to disk manually. None of the
resulting installations would boot - not on the laptop, nor on the
desktop. The error messages varied - "no system", "invalid
partition", and:
s2b2 dx=0000 int13,8 cx=C3E0 dx=0701 *E1* (this result required a hard
reset to unlock the system)
And when I was done, neither Gparted nor QTparted could read either
disk (both locked up), and Win98SE couldn't format them. I had to go
to Win2K to reformat. In any case the LS-120 install option appears to
be good only for a few hours of serious frustration.
But what should be of much greater interest to potential Linux clients
(few of whom own LS-120s) is the problems I encountered with memory
under Puppy.
I first noticed a problem when the installer was writing to the
LS-120. The free memory flag in the taskbar dropped to 4MB. When I
clicked on it to see the memory allotments, it showed two ramdisks,
one with 66MB used, and 1MB free, the other with 86MB used, and 4MB
free. Add that up, and you get 157MB. Where were the other 163MB of
RAM?
I tried running the memtest shell, and it reported that it was only
able to allocate 305MB, then that it was "trying mlock", and a minute
or two later "test completed". Not very informative.
So next I tried creating a permanent home directory on a USB-flash
card. According to the documentation, this would free up RAM for
Puppy. But instead, it got worse. Where originally, Puppy had reported
88MB free after loading the desktop, now it showed 14MB free before
any applications were run!
I loaded Knoppix 5.1.1 to see if it showed similar problems with
memory, and there were none. Knoppix reported the whole 320MB of RAM
at bootup and after KDE was loaded. In fact, it had 31MB of RAM
available to Puppy's 14MB.
Before giving up on the whole project, I used the USB flash install
module to write Puppy to a Compact Flash Card, and tried booting with
the Wake_Pup floppy. It worked ok on the desktop, where the CF card
was attached to the USB2 port via a reader. But on the laptop, where
the flash had to be read from a PCMCIA adapter, it failed. I also
tried Wake_Pup with the Puppy CD in a external SCSI CD-Rom drive
attached through a PCMCIA host adapter, and that failed as well.
The Puppy boot loader doesn't provide PCMCIA support, so neither flash
adapters nor SCSI host adapters in the PCMCIA slot are detected.
Very disappointing!
--
Achim
_____/)
axethetax
| Puppy Linux installer and memory management defects | Achim Nolcken Lohse | |
| Re: Puppy Linux installer and memory management defects | Richard Steven Hack | |
| Re: Puppy Linux installer and memory management defects | Achim Nolcken Lohse | |
| Re: Puppy Linux installer and memory management defects | bambam | |
| Re: Puppy Linux installer and memory management defects | Gert van der Kooij | |
| Re: Puppy Linux installer and memory management defects | bambam | |
| Re: Puppy Linux installer and memory management defects | lisztnet | |
| Re: Puppy Linux installer and memory management defects | Achim Nolcken Lohse |