MEPIS Community Forum

Just thought I would post my recent success & fails on some old boxes>
3 machines are PIII 900mhz and 1 machine is a P4 1.4ghz ... they all have different amounts of ram. I was not able to get 11 to work on any of them with full installs.
On a Compaq Presario 900mhz with 64mb of ram I could only get Puppy Linux 4.31 to load and run and it is quite full featured and fast as well.
Next on a Dell 900mhz with 192mb of ram I was able to install Antix 8.5-486 iso and it is full featured and fast.
Next on a Dell 900mhz with 256mb of ram I was able to install Antix 8.5-486 iso and it also is full featured and fast.
And last on a Gateway P4 1.4ghz with 192mb of ram I could only get Puppy Linux 4.31 to install and it is full featured and fast. AntiX 8.5-486 would load to the desktop but attempts to install just hung forever... let one attempt try for over 30 min and gave up and tried Puppy which installed very fast and worked perfect.
These experiences have moved me to put some serious effort into learning and understanding how Puppy works. Even my hard disk installs are fast as greased lightning and only 105mb in size. It is also as full featured as any leading Distro I have tried to date. I think all developers should take a look in the rear view mirror at Puppy cause it could leap ahead and bite em all in tha hiney. I have the latest Puppy Lupu 525.iso installed at 127.7mb alongside my Mepis 11.0 final install and actually find Lupu faster and less problematic in many ways. Any doubters should give it a spin and see what else Linux is doing these days.

Just my experiences with Dualbooting AntiX 11 and puppy 5.2 on my IBM A22m 1000hz, 256MB ram Wireless G pcmcia cardbus, USB/Firewire pcmcia cardbus, DVDROM Laptop.

First off. I installed AntiX 11 Full i686 Iso off of a pendrive made with unetbootin and booted it with Plop boot manager floppy. This install was a over write of AntiX 8.5 running Stevo 3.6.34 vanilla kernel. Ran fine for over a year also.

Puppy 5.2 (frugal install/own partition) was already installed. Before running graphical Mepis installer. I always make a swap partition (in this case 700MB) before running the graphical installer on low ram gear. For a 64MB ram laptop. I would have opted for the cli install available in the menu.

Comparing free readouts in terminal between AntiX and Puppy 5.2 (running browser). Puppy 5.2 uses more ram than AntiX. AntiX runs faster on that Laptop also vs Puppy. YMMV.

I dualboot with Puppy on that laptop for one reason. I like being able to mount AntiX partitions (my /home is on a seperate partition from / in AntiX) and edit certain things as root in Puppy to edit AntiX when a dist-upgrade from Debian Testing or Unstable borks a boot or breaks a application.

bklid has bailed me in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst while in Puppy and have also re copied /etc/X11/xorg.conf (a backup I make after every AntiX install) when X failed to boot after a upgrade while using 8.5 and Debian broke xorg.

I know I can use a live cd or my AntiX live pendrive and plop floppy to fix stuff. Or, I can open mc as root in init3 boot and edit with nano. But Puppy only takes up 5 gig and is quicker Just a reboot away. I boot into AntiX though mostly on that Laptop. Even though I have Puppy tricked out. Right now pianobar is broken in Puppy. Version is too old. Pandora broke it by outdating libpiano interface. devx in Puppy is over a 100 mb sfs for compiling from source packages. build-essential in Debian testing is smaller. Haven't played a whole lot with dir2pet for making pet package out of source packages. Puppy can be like Slackware chasing down dependencies and a lot of lib links at Murga Forums are broken links now (No server any more).

Replaced bash 3.0 in Puppy 5.2 with bash 4.0 because I have inxi installed in Puppy also and bash 3.0 limits inxi readout.

Puppy is cool and I do run different flavors to get acquainted with Puppy. Looking for pet packages is like being Sherlock Holmes type quest or Indiana Jones sometimes. But AntiX is just better with apt-get and testing and smxi, and sid repos. Just my opinion though.

Puppy 5.2 screeny on that Laptop
http://i52.tinypic.com/30xaaf4.jpg
AntiX 11 FluxBox screeny on that Laptop
http://antix.freeforums.org/download/file.php?id=790
Any hows. That is what I do with my old gear.

rokytnji, Learned something new again.... never thought about creating a swap so it could install but it makes sense and I'll give it a try. I also need to get me a pen or usb flash drive for installs like this. Glad to know AntiX 11 will install and work on the 1.4ghz P4. I thought it should but pulling it off from a cd with 192mb of ram and "no swap" was a no go. Thanks very much for sharing your experiences and success. I also prefer AntiX but find Puppy quite impressive overall.

antiX-M11 has a cli-installer and that should allow you to install even on the 64MB box. It is best to have an existing swap as well.
You could use Puppy to set up the partitions how you link and then boot antiX-M11 cli-installer option. This is done outside of X graphics so less RAM is used IIRC minimum RAM is 64MB for full.

Having said that, once installed, 64MB RAM is still going to be very slow if you use antiX-full. Base will/should work better, core (without X) even better.

We are working on making antiX 'puppy-like' ie using a frugal install to hard drive or stick that can then be remastered and changes saved and on next boot, you use the new remastered file system .sfs in Puppy language. This means that users can simply run antiX from a hard drive (or from a file/folder on a hard drive) rather than installing. For antiX-base this means a frugal install size of less than 400MB and for antiX-full around 700MB. Not as low as Puppy, but you have the added axtra security in antiX of running as user and not as root. Running frugal (or even fromiso) like this means booting is very fast as the cd/dvd is not used and desktop is snappy.

@JBoman

If you use pianobar. I do in AntiX and Puppy . I made 2 Puppy pet packages with latest Debian Sid pianobar debs.
Pianobar is a pandora radio player in terminal.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=62975&start=15

Install first libao4_1.1.0-1_i386.pet as it supplies dependencies for pianobar to work.
Then install pianobar_2011.01.24-2_i386.pet. You need a pandora radio account (just register and enable account)
Then set up your radio stations at
http://www.pandora.com/

When done. Close Browser. Open a terminal.


Ignore the top 2 errors in my code tags. It works just fine in my Puppy installs. The older pianobar pet packages at Puppy Forums don't work any more because pandora changed how it interfaces with pianobar and pianobar won't start because of a My Sid packages work ok though.

Keeps getting better....
Today I used Puppy 4.31 live to partition a 30gig drive in a HP pavillion 933mhz system (it booted so used it), It only has 128mb ram so I created a swap & 4 other partitions and to my disbelief I was able to install AntiX 11-i686 to the first partition from the Antix 11 live cd..., I had already installed Puppy 4.31 to the 5th partition. And.... everything works far as I can tell. Network configured automatically and I'm posting from this setup as I type. Very happy camper here. I'll probably go back now and try it again on the other boxes I posted about before.... bet it works on them too.