gnupic: Thread: Re: [gnupic] Lightweight distros with GPUTILS in repository

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 12:38 AM, Jason Hsu ####@####.#### wrote:

> Are there any lightweight distros that offer GPUTILS in the repository?  Is
> there anything I can do in a distro to substantially reduce its RAM
> requirement?
>

Usually graphical environment takes the most RAM so you may try not to
install X (and definitely not a big window manager like Gnome or KDE). With
'top' you can see which process takes most of the RAM so you may try to
remove those packages as well. You may also can try to use older kernels
with customized compilation so no unnecessary kernel modules are there.

Also you may can get a ram extention for your notebook from eBay or other
online market/store...

Tamas




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At 7:38 AM +0800 9/15/09, Jason Hsu wrote:
>I'm trying to program microcontrollers in C on a 10-year-old laptop 
>with only 256 MB of RAM and a 500 MHz processor.

...

>Are there any lightweight distros that offer GPUTILS in the 
>repository?  Is there anything I can do in a distro to substantially 
>reduce its RAM requirement?

Most distros start server process that you don't need.  If you don't need to
send and receive email directly at the box, then disable sendmail.  Don't
run Firefox; it uses tons of memory.  Unfortunately, X tends to use a lot
of memory, but you may need it to run design tools.  If you don't need graphic
tools, learn to use the command line, and log in at run level 3, where
the X server doesn't get started.  Learn about using the 'top' program to find
out how much real memory is used by various processes (this will take some
studying of the help, I really can't give a 25 word explanation of what to do).

peter

Hi,

Peter Olson wrote:
> Learn about using the 'top' program to find out how much real memory
> is used by various processes (this will take some studying of the
> help, I really can't give a 25 word explanation of what to do).

Alternatively,

    ps xauww | sort -k4n

will list all the processes on the machine in order of their %MEM
column, largest last.

Cheers,


Ralph.

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 7:38 AM, Jason Hsu ####@####.#### wrote:
> I'm trying to program microcontrollers in C on a 10-year-old laptop
> with only 256 MB of RAM and a 500 MHz processor.
>
> As I mentioned before, I never was able to get GPUTILS to work in
> Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux.  The dependency hell was too overwhelming.
>

Just wondering if you have solved this issue or not. I am now playing with
a Puppy Linux based Chinese Linux distro called Veket Linux. And this
paticular V2.39 has the development tools built-in. I just tried it and
I have no problems to build gputils with it. I also tried to build pk2cmd
(for PICKit 2) and it is also okay.
http://www.lucky8k.com/thread-66855-1-1.html ( a Chinese site)

So I think you can get Puppy Linux working. It is said to be quite
fast on slower machines. I know it is very fast on my not-so-slow
machine (also tried with Puppy 4.3.1 but I have not downloaded the
development tools).

-- 
Xiaofan http://mcuee.blogspot.com

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Xiaofan Chen ####@####.#### wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 7:38 AM, Jason Hsu ####@####.#### wrote:
>
>> As I mentioned before, I never was able to get GPUTILS to work in
>> Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux.  The dependency hell was too overwhelming.

> So I think you can get Puppy Linux working. It is said to be quite
> fast on slower machines. I know it is very fast on my not-so-slow
> machine (also tried with Puppy 4.3.1 but I have not downloaded the
> development tools).
>

I just downloaded the development tools for Puppy 4.3.1 and built
gputils without an issue. You may want to try this as well.

Download the iso and the development tools devx_431.sfs.
Then you can choose to do a frugal install (easier) to the hard disk.
http://www.puppylinux.com/hard-puppy.htm
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-4.3.1/

After that you should have the tools to build gputils source tar ball.

-- 
Xiaofan http://mcuee.blogspot.com