On 1/23/07, Jon Pruente jdpruente@gmail.com wrote:

I can appreciate using very low-end machines for certain tasks, as I've got a pair of old Toshiba laptops that just can't take any more than 48MB RAM total. i've run DSL on those before.

Jon.

I just spent the better part of the night being my usual insomniac tinkerer. I played with DSL and various limitation configs on my machine. Mostly I was trying to see what RAM limits are effective for using Firefox on DSL. I'd let it boot, kill off Dillo and start FF. Then try to read the BBC headline stories from the RSS feed button in the FF toolbar.

boot: lowram dma noswap mem=64M

Ok performance, ok browsing. Useful even. It's nice to know that a cheap system and a bit of RAM, and no HDD, can mean a decent surfing box with a modern browser.

boot: lowram dma noswap mem=48M desktop=jwm

Slower than previous, but still functional.

boot: lowram dma noswap mem=40M desktop=jwm

Slow, not truely useable, but passable in a pinch with time on hand.

boot: lowram dma mem=40M desktop=jwm

Better than noswap, and performs somewhere around the 48M/noswap, but not nearly as good as 64M/noswap.

boot: lowram dma mem=32M desktop=jwm

Slower than 40M noswap, but even Dillo ran slow. Dillo acted like FF on 40M noswap.

All of these were booted from the LiveCD of DSL 3.2. I feel confident that if installed to HDD it would perform much better, as it wouldn't have to constantly deal with a compressed filesystem in low RAM. With low RAM there isn't much buffer space, so it must keep reading/decompressing/flushing the same stuff over and over to get something done. An uncompressed system would be able to read as needed right off the drive and would save quite a few cycles and some RAM space. Swap certainly helps when diving under 48MB. Of course, if the RAM is available, running

boot: dsl toram

gives a very fast and responsive system. I've even run BeatrIX and BeaFanatIX with toram, and they run great.With a decent CD-ROM and a smaller distro, it boots in a decent time.

Jon.