Thin Puppy Torture Test -- Days 17 and 18

Yesterday I took the Thin Puppy -- the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client now running Puppy Linux 2.14 -- to the brink. This thin client -- with no storage other than RAM memory (I booted it from CD and then disconnected that drive; I lost the ability to mount the external USB flash drive on day 8), has been running with about 41 MB of free RAM for storage. And as I learned before the Thin Puppy Torture Test, when I only had 128 MB of RAM (I'm now at the maximum for this motherboard, 256 MB), Puppy doesn't like it when you get really low on RAM.

I downloaded a podcast -- about 35 MB, I think, and that took RAM very low. It was "Linux Action Show's" interview with Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu (and I encourage you to listen to the show, since it's very well-done).

Well, downloads to the RAM-based filesystem take away from ... free RAM, and as I dipped below 8 MB free, the system didn't exactly cooperate. I couldn't run Gxine to listen to the podcast in OGG format -- it just wouldn't run, and there are two processes that I can't seem to kill out of memory.

Eventually I downloaded the .mp3 version and played it with madplayer, which can't be stopped or paused, but which does play .mp3s without skipping on this audio-challenged thin client.

So the Thin Puppy is now on its 18th day. I've been testing the new version of Puppy Linux (2.15CE) on my other box, and it's quite a radical departure from previous versions. First of all, IceWM is the default desktop, and there are many other differences and enhancements. A full review is forthcoming.