tazzels wrote:Hi Dennis
Memory might be your problem in Puppy, too. Programs that must create thumbnails may not have the resources needed to do the work.
Yes, I think you are right. I am in a bit of a muddle now and need to get my head around this memory issue. LOL That sounds funny.
It can be confusing.
Linux, like windows, is a virtual memory system. RAM is divided into 4K pages, and the OS keeps track of what pages are used by what processes. When more actual RAM is needed for something, the OS takes RAM pages not recently accessed and swaps them out to disk to make room. Under Windows, swapping takes place to pagefile.sys in the root directory of the boot drive. Under Linux, swapping normally takes place to a swap partition. If something tries to access a swapped out page, a "page fault" is generated, and the OS swaps the page(s) back in to RAM. This happened transparently to you and your programs.
Total memory under Windows and Linux is considered to be the amount of physical RAM installed plus the size of the swap area.
This is why the best performance improvement you can make for Windows or Linux is to add more RAM. Memory is an order of magnitude faster than disk, and you want to reduce the amount of swapping the OS must do. More RAM = less need to swap = better performance. On my Lifebook, XP only had 256MB of RAM, and was spending more time swapping than doing actual work. It took a long time to boot, and a long time to actually load programs and use them, because there simply wasn't enough RAM to hold everything needed at the same time.
While extra RAM is available for my old Lifebook, it's expensive, and a 128MB expansion module would cost more than 2GB of RAM for my desktop. I installed Puppy on the Lifebook to get a usable system
without spending money on it.
If you
can get more RAM for your old Compaq at a decent price, it's recommended.
<...>
All looked good and I decided to try to move on to viewing my photos. I installed various programs as recommended but this 2nd Puppy became corrupted probably through lack of memory I guess, as its on a 2gb partition. I have now gone back to the first puppy Puppy1 save which is housed on my now small 10gb windows partition and at least I am back on the web. (which is really fast
) Maybe I should now try getting back to corrupted Puppy2 which is on partition ext2 and delete some downloaded programs to create some space. Perhaps it will work again. I have only put one folder of photos onto my PC to get working in Puppy so they don't take up much space.
Partition size isn't the problem. Puppy in on an 8GB partition here (in a full install) and has no problems.
I believe you are running Puppy in a Full install? What sort of swap file do you have?
I'm sure its not a full install as it runs from CD with puppystart1 on my PC in my windows NTFS partition. My Puppy2 (corrupted) is correctly on my PC on ext2 with a linux swap file whose size is 17gb.. I think it was called a frugal install as I didn't copy any files from CD. I haven't a clue what size swap file puppy1 is using in my NTFS partition or where to find it. It says there is 378m free in the bottom corner. The attached screenshot shows what system info says.
If you are using a Frugal install, I don't believe there is a swap file.
In a frugal install, your user file system is in an SFS file that actually lives on the Windows partition. Windows sees the SFS file as one big file. Puppy sees it as a complete file system with directories and sub-directories, with programs and data living on it.
With only 128MB of RAM, a full install with a swap file might be a better bet for you.
It might be interesting if you opened a terminal window and ran XnView or whichever from the command line. It will open in a new window, but it may print diagnostic messages to the terminal window that will help you narrow down what is going on.
A good idea but a bit beyond me. I have an rxvt terminal emulator. I may try that when I reboot to puppy2 where the programs are. I have lost internet with puppy2 somehow as part of the corruption.
Rxvt is the default terminal emulator on Puppy, and what you get if you open a terminal window. You'll get a bash shell with a # prompt. It's equivalent to doing Start/Run/CMD under XP and opening a window to a C:\ prompt.
Thanks for trying the files out for me on your machine. Its great that everyone is so helpful here. Hopefully this info and my struggle to understand this will help others with the same problem.
It only took a few minutes. I haven't needed to do picture viewing/manipulation in Puppy - my gigabytes worth of digital photos are on the Windows desktop - so while I have the software installed, I hadn't really played with doing it. Reproducing what the other person sees is useful in trying to fix a problem. Sometimes the fact that you
can't reproduce it is significant, as you can narrow down the differences between your installation and the other person's, and say "A ha!
That's your problem..."
______
Dennis