On 04-May-06 Simon Royal wrote:

I know I have posted a lot lately regarding my Linux box, so sorry if this is irritating.

Of course not! That's what this list is for!

I am looking for a possible alternative to Damn Small Linux.

I have it running on my ThinkPad 380ED and it is ok. Currently with 48MB RAM it is fine, even have a wireless card running. I have an upgrade to 80MB coming to give it a little boost.

Everything is working fine except Dillo keeps quitting and Firefox freezes the whole machine from time to time. As I will basically be using this machine as a wireless web/email machine I need a stable distro.

Are there any other distros that are easy to configure, run on a P166 with 80MB RAM at a pleasant speed, can be booted by floppy as my 380ED wont boot from CD and have good wireless capabilities. A light window manager like fluxbox or icewm would be preffered over gnome or KDE.

I'd suggest waiting for your RAM upgrade before ditching your distro. The problems you're experiencing just now may well be related to your limited RAM. See whether it woeks OK when you're up to 80MB.

Firefox itself is quite a big program -- just the main binary firefox-bin is about 9MB, and the stuff it may pull in when running can also get quite big.

Dill of course is small. But even so, web-browsing can eat an awful lot of RAM/swap, since a lot of web pages include heavy graphics.

Also, while I'm not experienced with Dillo, I suspect that Firefox itself has its instabilities -- I too get freezes in the middle of browsing some sites, and even segfaults (and the laptop I'm using for Firefox has 128MB RAM). When it freezes. I have to

killall -15 firefox-bin

and start again. For all I know, Dillo too may have its problems.

So it may have nothing to do with Damn Small Linux!

Best wishes, Ted.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 04-May-06 Time: 12:08:32 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 11:37 +0100, Simon Royal wrote:

Hi

I know I have posted a lot lately regarding my Linux box, so sorry if this is irritating.

See what happens when you post an "It's all working great" email too early. A word from the wise...never ever ever let a computer know that you are 100% happy with it...they will play about just to spite you. *grin*

Everything is working fine except Dillo keeps quitting and Firefox freezes the whole machine from time to time. As I will basically be using this machine as a wireless web/email machine I need a stable distro.

Complete machine lockup is quite rare on Linux unless there is something very serious wrong (possibly hardware related)...When the machine has locked up from using Firefox is the hard drive light blinking a lot ? It may be that because of your limited RAM Firefox is running into a lot of swap space (which I'd imagine is quite slow on a machine of this spec) or worse you don't have enough swap space, I am thinking that it may not actually be crashed, just very very slow.

Also before you do anything else I would make a Memtest86 boot floppy and let it run for several hours (or at least 5 passes whichever comes first) particularly on hardware this old.

As others have said Firefox on 48MB is a little optimistic, particularly on any "rich" sites...I'd wait until you have that upgrade (and tested the memory) before condemning DSL as you may find that the same apps on a different distro will have the same problem. Just sitting on the BBC site my copy of firefox is using 30MB alone.