Hi,

I have an old computer with only 128RAM. Which Linux distro Puppy or DSL requires less memory?

Johannes

Puppy requires at least 128MB to run from memory.

The minimum system requirements for dsl are a 486 processor and 8 MB of RAM. DSL has been demonstrated browsing the web with Dillo, running simple games and playing music on systems with a 486 processor and 16 MB of RAM. The system requirements are higher for running Mozilla Firefox and optional add-ons such as the OpenOffice.org office suite. It is often used in VirtualBox due to its small size and modest requirement of RAM.

You should take into account that Puppy is actually a full-fledged KDE system, whereas DSL is really lightweight and fast. That said, DSL has far more glitches and incompatibilities and is generally harder to configure; it's so stripped-down that it's actually nothing more than an "emergency" system. On my laptop, it loses keyboard functionality after a couple of minutes, and I never managed to configure the Xserver properly. I'd go with Puppy if at all possible. Or, you may try out Slitaz, a fast and lightweight French distro that's not bad at all.

I am running puppy on Toshiba satellite 2060 with 160M memory and 366Mhz processor. It is installed on harddisk. Memory is not an issue but the system might be a little bit more responsive. So I think you may easily go for puppy with 128M memory.

The default window manager for Puppy is JWM

In terms of desktop environments, I find LXDE runs very nicely, using far less resources than (say) GNOME. It's meant as a lightweight distro, so I'm pretty sure it would run okay on your system.

It might not be as super fast as Puppy or DSL, but I've found it to be very stable (unlike Puppy when I tried it a couple of years ago) and it's easy to use. On my system the only significant problems are that I haven't got sound or flash video working, but I'm going to switch from Mandriva to Debian, and hope that LXDE will work better with Debian, and maybe be lighter as well.

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We have an old P3 laptop which we have expanded (!) from 128MB to 256MB of RAM, but we learned a lot with 128MB.

Puppy was one of the few distros that would work in 128MB, and work well. OK, you cannot start 23 tabs in your browser, that will fill the RAM and once swap comes into play things get slower - without swap they stop!

We have only used DSL as an admin tool, did not get on with the mix of applications for daily use. But it would run fine in 128M.

Puppy (various standard flavours) has run reliably on this machine for nearly a year, no disappearing data, no freezing screens, the occasional slow-down with too many tabs in the browser, but nothing that would not recover. Remarkably resilient!

Various Puplets have been run, for varying lengths of time, and varying results! Some would hang occasionally, some seemed very robust. Hard to recall now which was which - we settled on the standard 412 in the end, it is installed on the HD and boots via GRUB.

If you can get accustomed to the Puppy way of doing things, I believe it well worth the effort. A seriously valuable operating system.

Good luck, Ben.

If you run Puppy on liveCD it is recomanded to have 128MB.
A friend and I we have various computers with Puppy installed on hardDisk that have just 64 MB and it is working well.
So if you have 128MB and you install Puppy to Harddrive (it will run quite fast)

I think Puppy is much more comfortable than DSL
If you have Problems you should even try SliTaz which is just ~25MB.

I am a Puppy fan and I am convinced that Puppy is the very best solution.
With old computers I either take Puppy 2.12 or SimplePUP (based on Puppy 1.0.7) but often you can take the current Puppy as well.

Best is you try out with which distribution you feel more comfortable.

I would try Puppy 4.1.2 for a start. By the way, Puppy does not! use KDE by default. 4.1.2 uses JWM, other puplets are using different window managers. If speed is important try the retro version or an older version. Check out Puplets and experiment till you find the one you like best and works best for you. As a curiosity, you could also check out Tiny Core Linux an OS weighing in at 10MB! Good luck!

Artie

Agreed, Puppy 412 is probably the Top Dog!

...but if you do try SliTaz, may we recommend the 'cooking' versus the 'stable' version. It has more/better stuff, no crashes (iirc) in a four-five months of irregular use. Pretty stable really.

There are ISOs with additional packages that you can download and burn to CD/DVD/USB stick.... here

Good luck!