Partitioning and Installation on ThinkPad 600E w/ 64 MB RAM

[Bandito]

I'm trying to persuade my niece to adopt linux by breathing new life into her old ThinkPad. Right now it has win98 installed and I'm running Puppy off the CD. System is very basic 64, MB RAM and 3 GB hdd. For now I want to keep win98. So I want to do a full install and use Grub as the boot loader. Regarding partitioning, I think I need to shrink the windows partition down to say 1 Gb and then create a linux partition of say 1.55 Gb and a swap of 0.45 Gb just in case I upgrade the RAM to a max of 288 Mb. Ext2 or Ext3? Pro's, con's? Presumably when I do the full install Puppy will install itself to the linux partition and install Grub automatically. Advice? Recommendations? Otherwise I think she will be thrilled with Puppy. I'm writing this from the machine now everything works great.

[rcrsn51]

The beauty of Puppy is that if you are not happy with one installation method, it only takes a few minutes to set up a different one. With only 64 MB of memory, a full install with a swap partition is recommended.

Before shrinking the Windows partition, I would run a scandisk and defrag to make sure that it is in good shape.

[nitehawk]

Isn't win98 something like 1.48 G when installed? I think it was something like that the last time I looked. I used to use ol' win98 for years! I still have win2k installed with PC-Bsd on my first HD,....then Puppy4 on my secondary HD (but I actually use Puppy Linux more than the others). Could you do a frugal install of Puppy with the win98? I think you can do that without changing your FAT32 partioning,....
(Somebody more experienced and smarter in Puppy Linux help me out here,.......)

[muggins]

Puppy can happily live on a win98 partition in frugal mode. The easiest way of achieving this, without messing with the computer's MBR, is to follow ICPUG's guide here.

But, as rcrsn51 points out, with 64Mbytes of RAM it would be advisable to create a separate partition for puppy & do a full install. Unless adding more RAM is an option.

[Bruce B]

Puppy can happily live on a win98 partition in frugal mode. The easiest way of achieving this, without messing with the computer's MBR, is to follow ICPUG's guide

Muggins,

I like GRUB.EXE and wouldn't discourage it, because it's great and would lend itself well to Windows 98.

What I don't understand are what are the considerations of messing with the MBR.

If I want to get rid of GRUB on a machine like this one, I just type: fdisk /mbr at the prompt.

That's why I don't understand the considerations. What are they?

Bruce

PS (Usually, I save MBRs but that's another story).

[Bruce B]

I'm trying to persuade my niece to adopt linux by
breathing new life into her old ThinkPad. Right now it has win98
installed and I'm running Puppy off the CD. System is very basic 64,
MB RAM and 3 GB hdd. For now I want to keep win98. So I want to
do a full install and use Grub as the installedboot loader. Regarding
partitioning, I think I need to shrink the windows partition down to
say 1 Gb and then create a linux partition of say 1.55 Gb and a
swap of 0.45 Gb just in case I upgrade the RAM to a max of 288
Mb. Ext2 or Ext3? Pro's, con's? Presumably when I do the full
install Puppy will install itself to the linux partition and install Grub
automatically. Advice? Recommendations? Otherwise I think she
will be thrilled with Puppy. I'm writing this from the machine now
everything works great.

Welcome Bandito,

Puppy's published minimum RAM requirements for version 3.01
was 64MB. I don't know what they are for 4.00

If I did a Full Install of Puppy 4.00 with 64MB RAM and applied
some tricks, I could get it to do respectably well at 64. It would
however take some techniques to keep it running in RAM and off
the swap file.

Frankly, I think you'll be happier by far in terms of overall
performance, if you double your RAM. Depending on the way the
chips are priced and the available slots it might be a much better
buy for the money to get a bigger chip. For example, I can buy a
1GB chip and it is much cheaper than a 64MB chip for the money.

Beyond that, you've thrown me a curve ball, because I would tend
to think the maximum RAM would be more likely 384 MB and not
288MB and if 384MB - I presume three slots supporting 128 MB
each.

I don't know if you made a typo or not. But not a big deal, the more
RAM the better, unless you run into a financial snag where the
price goes up exponentially. Weird things can happen with the old
RAM market. Meaning, chips which aren't being mass produced
today can be priced disproportional to their size.

I also don't think it wise to invest too much money in old machines.

-----------------------

As far as partitions are concerned. Suppose you had a Linux
partition for Puppy and a FAT partition for Windows 98. You would
very easily be able to read and write from Puppy to the FAT
partition.

I don't know of any extenders that would allow you to write to a
Linux partition from Windows 98. But you can read, meaning copy
files from Linux to the FAT.

You don't have a large disk, (by todays standards), for this reason I
recommend not making a swap partition. Linux will do just as
well with a swap file. The advantages of a swap file, when
space is constricted, is you can change its size quite easily and
thereby modify it to your usage, so it's not overly big and neither too
small. Moreover, you can put it on either partition. You don't really
have to know in advance how big it needs be, because you can
discover this as time goes on.

Presumably when I do the full install Puppy will install itself to
the linux partition and install Grub automatically.

True, even to the extent of writing an accurate GRUB menu.lst file,
which is the configuration file used to boot. Although you will
probably want to dress it up some.

------------------------

Another subject altogether, this has to do with BIOS settings and
older machines. Let's take Advanced Power Management. In my
opinion, APM in 1998 was not Advanced, I think it was just born, a
toddler, still in its crib or something like that.

Even DMA16 maybe didn't enhance performance much either.
What I'm saying is, some of those features where in my mind
questionably developed on the older machines. Frankly, I've had
better overall stability on older machines turning them off in the
BIOS and on the Kernel command line.


Linux is not a plug and play operating system. Your BIOS may have
plug and play OS enabled. When I used Windows 9x, even though
it was 'supposed' to be plug and play, I turned off the plug and play
OS option in the BIOS.

The BIOS has its own way of managing plug and play devices, it
doesn't need a plug and play OS to play with the configuration.

Windows 98 for example, might run great, then one day for no reason
you can account for, it decides to assign different resources to
devices. This kind of behavior won't happen if Windows was
installed with the plug and play option disabled.

I only run Linux and always turn off plug and play. I won't know how
it behaves on older machines with it turned on anyway. Probably,
won't make a difference one way or the other.

-----------------

Preparing the disk. I'd get rid of all recycler and temporary files, do
some housecleaning. Run Scandisk surface test, then defrag it.

I'm fine with shrinking it and making a Linux partition, that's how I'd
do it.

But even if you don't go for a Linux partition, by defragging the disk,
your frugal files, pup_save and your swap file won't have much if
any fragmentation.

--------------------

A last space saving tip. You can set your Windows swap file to a
fixed size and use it for purpose of Puppy swap file. Let me know
when you get around to it and I'll write up how.

Bruce

[Bandito]

Thanks gentlemen, just the clarification I needed.

[muggins]

Hello Bruce,

the forum has plenty of posts where people, trying to install puppy, have scrambled their windows. ICPUG's technique offers a methodical way to install puppy to a windows partition.

It's just another option for commandlinephobic pupsters.