How to force Puppy NOT to load in RAM on a PC with 512MB?

[panzerpuppy]

The thread title says it all.

This is possible to do in Puppy 4.3 and newer by booting with the "noram" parameter, but not in Puppy 4.2.x or older.

I'd like to trade the overall OS snappiness (of a Puppy 4.2 frugal install) for ~128MB more available memory on a box with 512MB of RAM.

[MU]

I think up to Puppy 4.2, it did not load to ram.
Instead, you had to use
puppy pfix=copy
to force to copy to ram at startup.

I was not aware, that this changed in 4.3 (use it too seldom).

Mark

[Flash]

I used to run multisession Puppy in a computer with 512 MB of RAM and no hard disk drive (hence no swap memory.) If I remember right, just loading Puppy used up all but about 200 MB of the RAM. Is that about what you see?

[lapis]

you had to use
puppy pfix=copy
to force to copy to ram at startup.

I think in the earlier Puppies if you had 256MB or more ram then it automatically loaded the pupxxx.sfs into ram. At some point the 256MB was changed to a higher number and the pfix=copy was introduced.

A pfix=noram can be added by editing /sbin/init from initrd.gz but there are a number of Puppies where this is already done although I think the parameter is sometimes pfix=noramfs rather than noram.