Distro live cd requirements/performance question

Monkey34

Monkey34

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Apr 11, 2003
Messages
5,140
Using common sense, I probably already know the answer to this, but is the performance of a live cd on a system dependant on the spec's of it? I figure - would the same live distro would run slower on say a 8x cd-rom with 128mb of pc100, than a 40x cd-rom and 512mb ddr(lets assume the same cpu)?
 
Yes, both CD drive speed and size/speed of RAM greatly impact the speed. RAM probably affects it more than CD speed, once it's up and running a given application, though.

A harddrive install will of course be faster on the same system, as it won't have a RAM drive consuming about half the RAM, and a HD is typically faster in reading than a CD drive.
 
Basically, I've got a slow laptop, and I'm trying to decide which distro to use on it. DSmall linux is a choice, but I'm looking at Knoppix too.
 
Like the man said - you can always install Knoppix directly to the HDD which not only takes the speed of the CD-ROM out of the picture but also lessens the impact of RAM on system performance to a degree.
 
Spec's of the lappy?
Click to expand...
Pentium 150, 148mb ram, 2.1 gig hdd, 2mb video
Like the man said - you can always install Knoppix directly to the HDD which not only takes the speed of the CD-ROM out of the picture but also lessens the impact of RAM on system performance to a degree.
Click to expand...
Yea, I was guessing the hdd install would be better.
 
Knoppix HDD installs are kinda funny - the system doesn't really feel like it's meant to be 'permanent". If you want something like Knoppix, but targeted at actually living on a system, go with Debian or Ubuntu.
 
go with Debian or Ubuntu
Click to expand...
I'm looking at Ubuntu now...........have to toy around with it. My lappy specs suck though, so we'll see.
I'm surprised the distro's dont have a more realistic listing of system requirements though. I've seen anything from no listing, to "i486 and up". :rolleyes:
I realize there may be alot of variables to factor in, but come on.
 
If you do a minimal install of any linux distro, you can probably boot on a 486 with 16 or 32MB of RAM. It might take forever & be absolutely useless, but it's there.
 
A good minimal live CD I found is Slax, it's based off of slackware and can have modules easily added to it.

Very nice little distro.

More info can be found at www.slax.org
 
I've got the Slax cd, just hav'nt used it much..............this will change shortly though.
I am going to forget about Ubuntu. I've done some reading, and besides wanting something lighter than Gnome(was thinking XFCE), I saw someone say this:
Well I must admit that Ubuntu is a nice easy distro to use as long as you don't want to strip it down to the bare essentials, in packages, and stripping down the kernel and recompiling it just to meet your hardware requirements. Why is it distros like these can't be easy to use, but also allow the ease of customization to those that want to run a lean trimmed down system? Try stripping down the kernel just to meet your hardware requirements - as say you could do in Slackware, the same in Ubuntu and you will soon see what I mean, this takes quite a bit of effort.
Click to expand...
I'm thinking Slax popcorn.
 
Could you try FreeSBIE on it?
I'm curious as to how it works on a slower system. It makes you choose between XFCE and fluxbox, so it shouldn't be too heavy. Worth a try.
 
Monkey34 said:
a hdd install, or live cd ?
Click to expand...
Mainly the LiveCD, to see how it compares to the other liveCDs.

The installer is a bit inelegant so far, and wants a 2gb+ /usr partition. The best solution for a similar installed system would be a carefully limited FreeBSD. (Not a bad option, but it'd take a bit of fiddling.)
 
Live? No problem, I'll burn it now, and run it tomorrow.

Looks like Slax popcorn is going onto this (after trying FreeSBIE for you). It's got a 2.1gig hdd, and I was wondering if you have reccomendations on the partition sizes? Maybe 150megs swap? I'm just not sure how to divide the user and root.
 
The most space-effective is to have everything except swap on one partition. Not recommended if you've got the space for anything else, but in your case it's worth it.
As for how much swap, that's an ancient discussion. Somewhere around 150- 200mb feels reasonable.

And thanks, btw. I've only tried FreeSBIE on very new computers, and that makes it a bit harder to get a feel for the comparative speed.
 
Any live CD is going to have a very modular kernel.... they have to support as much hardware as they can. So if you wanna build a compact kernel after installing such a distro, then you basically should grab source and configure it from scratch. That should take less than 20 minutes if you're more or less familiar with compiling kernels.

Another issue- installing a Knoppix-based distro to 2.1GB might prove tough. Knoppix installers usually require a tab bit more space. I think the latest variant of the Knoppix installer wants to have 15% space free after installation rather than a fixed size like say 2.5GB total space available for installation as in older installer variants. So the trick is to find a slightly modified variant of Knoppix that has a smaller iso size. Chances would be better then that knoppix-installer wouldn't tell you to get yourtself a bigger HDD and try again, or suggest delving into the expert mode for installing to bypass such safeguards.
 
So if you wanna build a compact kernel after installing such a distro, then you basically should grab source and configure it from scratch. That should take less than 20 minutes if you're more or less familiar with compiling kernels.
Click to expand...
I may know some, but I havnt gotten that far into Linux yet.
Another issue- installing a Knoppix-based distro to 2.1GB might prove tough.
Click to expand...
Yea, I gave up on Knoppix, and Unbutu for this, and am going to go with Slax. Although DSLinux works great, I have it on another box and want to try something else.

So far for live cd's:
Suse 9.1 - would not run (get a bunch of read and I/O errors and a message" kernal panic! attempted to kill init!")
DSLinux 9.3 - quick loading, pretty responsive, network and video correctly configured at startup
Slax 5.0.6 - fairly quick loading, fairly responsive, network not on at start, video stuck in 640x480
Slax Popcorn Edition - pretty quick loading, pretty responsive(I believe popcorn is faster due to using XFCE instead of KDE), network works at start, video stuck in 640x480
Ubuntu 5.04 - slow load, slow response, network not on at start, video stuck in 640x480
Knoppix 3.9 - slow load, slow responce, network not on at start, video stuck in 640x480
FreeSBIE 1.1 - quick loading.
Didnt get too far with FreeBSID.......no matter what option I start with(fluxbox, xcfe, command prompt ) I get put to a prompt and get an error "cannot connect to x server. make sure you started x before you start (insert gui here)" I tried to startx, but always get the error.
 
Ok. I imagine it doesn't like your graphics card.
(Which graphics chipset, btw?)
 
From the product spec lists:
Memory: 4Mbit EDO DRAM, 5V - 2 MB
Speed 50ns
Hyper Page mode support Yes
Controller Chip C&T HIQV32 (CT65550)
PCI Bus Architecture w/burst mode Yes: 32-bit, 30 MHz
Graphics Accelerator: Yes
64-bit BitBLT, LINEdraw, H/W Cursor Yes
Video Accelerator: Yes
YUV-to-RGB color space conversion Yes
Scaling Support Yes
Zoomed Video Port Support Yes
DirectVideo support Yes:w/Game SDK driver fr/Microsoft
Color Palette 16.7M colors
Internal Resolution1 1024 x 768 x 64K/64K colors
Smaller Image 640 x 480 x 64K/64K colors
Smaller Image 800 x 600 x 64K/64K colors
N/A
Virtual Display Mode 1280 x 1024 x 256/256K colors
External Resolution Colors/Palette
640 x 480 16.7M colors/16.7M colors
800 x 600 16.7M colors/16.7M colors
1024 x 768 64K colors/64K
1280 x 1024 256 colors/256K
Refresh Rate Vert.: 60Hz; Hor.: 48.5kHz (taken.@ 1024x768/64K colors Non-Interlaced)
 
Updated Suse.

Mmm...found some info here:Linux on Tecra

Also, I'm wondering if changes can be made to allow the video and networking to be run properly/ resolution changes made/etc while in a live cd. I know the os is in memory only, but wouldnt configuration changes hold while its still on? You would then need to make these changes every time you run it, right?
 
It's very possible. usually CTRL + ALT + + will change resolution on the fly. In KDE anyway. And I guess it depends on the xsession script somewhat. Knoppix-based live CD's are set to restart if the Xserver is killed. But you can boot them in text mode, create a ~/.xinitrc, run startx and then be able to kill and restart the xserver without issue. So you could make changes to its config or switch window managers and such.

Networking is easy to reconfigure on the fly in knoppix-based live CDs with netcardconfig for instance.
 
Grr........I had a 12gig lappy hdd I wanted to swap into this, but the bios wont recognise it. :mad:
Oh well, 2.1gigs 'll have to do.

Also updated Slax cd trial.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top