[News]

News

[Stats]

Stats

Well dummy me! I recently installed DSL to an old PC with only a 1.2 Gb HD and 64mb RAM, and it works well, but then I noticed that the home directory, plus root, was taking up nearly the entire HD showing completely full except for about 80mb!?!?!?! WT HE double toothpics is that about? I thought DSL on a CD live was only 50mb, so why is my root/home directory taking up nearly 800mb??? I don't get this at all. Shouldn't it have only used up about 50+mb as on the live CD? Am I missing something here? Not comprehending it?
**********************************
UPDATE: Figured out why DSL "hulked out" seemingly

OK, redid the whole install, decided to go with frugal because I just could not deal with having DSL taking up entire small drive I have (read above). But after attempting the frugal even after I thought I had reformatted my HD, it still said I had no room! So this time I erased the partitions using command line instead of some other live CD tool (like Ultimate Boot CD).
*the command line I used was: shred /dev/hda3 (NOTE to newbies similar to me, do NOT forget to add the number of the partition to your hda/sda otherwise you will shred the entire drive! hda1, hda2, sda1, sda2 are PARTITIONS, but only hda or sda are entire DRIVES!  )
After I erased the partitions via terminal I pulled up cfdisk, deleted the entire HD partition, then reformatted three seperate partitions as per the frugal install Wiki guides "out there" and now VIOLA! Got lots of room and DSL is screamin' fast! Once and awhile I minimize my windows to see how the RAM and Swap are doing; usually the RAM (only 64mb!) is between 25mb and 40mb being used. The Swap seems to hover around 50mb or so (have it set as double my RAM--130).

So get busy you other newbies and enjoy DSL! Also, don't get discouraged as some seem to. If you follow the well written Wiki guides on the frugal or full HD installs you will be fine. If you make a mistake it only takes about 20 minutes to do it again from a fresh install; better to do it RIGHT AWAY rather than weeks later, yes?

Hi all! I have been using Linux systems for about 5 years now. Started dabbling with Puppy when I inherited an old desktop. Once I got a laptop (second hand) I had Win XP on it, but still would boot it up with a live Puppy CD when Win got cranky.

Later I got a much better hand-me-down laptop, a big "cadillac" HP/17" screen job. So I dumped Win Xp immediately and put Ubuntu on it, loved it! I needed some $$$ so I sold it to a good friend who needed a laptop, and I just used my old desktop. Later I got another old IBM Thinkpad and put Win XP on the front end and Fedora (17) on the backend. I only used the XP when playing a few games or when a friend came over and wanted to check their email or Facebook--they had a fear of Linux, even though I tried to show them that Fedora pretty much worked like any flavor of Windows.

Now, jump forward to present day; I got my backpack stolen while in the pub with a couple of friends. I just got careless and then POOF! No bag, no laptop! I have no idea why I decided to have my laptop with me that day; I certainly didn't need it. Oh well, lesson learned.

I do some work for a couple of people maintaining their websites and helping them do business emails and so forth, so I had to do something in a hurry. A friend had given me an old desktop, it was a Sony Vaio and at one time it had XP on it, but at some point someone had put Win 95 on it! Because I needed something to do word processing on, I thought I could just use it "as is"--no going. First of all the tower was fairly modern with USB and we all know Win 95 don't  know USB! So I got to messing with the HD and kept hitting a wall. Half way through the XP install it would hang up. After several tries I finally realized one of the RAM sticks was bad.

So there I was, two days from having a friend come over to have me do some letter writing and web work and I had a desktop with only 64mb RAM! It also only had a 1.2 Gb HD to boot, so Win XP, once I did get it on there, took up nearly the entire drive! What was I going to do???

Then I remembered the old Puppy days and I remember using DSL live CD once to help someone get some files off their system. So I erased the drive with lots of ZEROS and then did an HD install of DSL with a decent swap partition and did ya know? The thing works like a charm!

I am really enjoying the DSL as I never really did much with it before, my experience being mostly Ubuntu and Fedora, but I am really enjoying this little gem. I have hit a few snags, like I can't figure out why when I add some programs with MyDSL browser, some install, and others simply disappear from the menu list. I also haven't figured out how to get a desktop shortcut for my newer Firefox, though I will be looking into those matters shortly.

All in all, the system is purring a long with a cable ethernet connection and it will bog down after a bit, so I just reboot (or is there a way to purge the swap and RAM without rebooting? No idea).

Ok, thanks for letting me chew your ear for a bit. Look forward to more of DSL updates and so forth. ALoha from Hawaii by the way!
China Mike