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Small but Featureful: Puppy Linux Reviewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bark-park dept.

norhtec writes "Puppy Linux is a small distribution that fits on a business card-size CD-ROM or on a USB thumb drive. Puppy allows users to write data back onto their CD-ROM or thumb drive and features a complete assortment of office applications."

5 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Another small distro by m50d · · Score: 2, Informative

    Austrumi is an incredible 50mb distro. Rather than mini programs, it includes full versions of abiword, gnumeric, the gimp, mplayer, inkscape, skype... loads of things.

    --
    I am trolling
  2. Really impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is my first "live-cd" linux version i've tried, i wasn't much interested in live-cd's earlier. what got me interested is usb portability and plenty of documentation found both on their site, and the contextual help.

    Its friggin fast (as it loads completely into the RAM). I was able to connect to my LAN via DHCP, mozilla has flash support preconfigured. I was able to play real audio, mp3, avi, mpg out of the box (i just tried this distro yday, wmv and wma is not playing out of the box, need to check it out). Its got a nice two click mount feature

    I am sure i am not doing justice to all its features, but these are the ones i tried and they just work

    All in all its very promising and the excellent documentation they have is very useful for nOObs like me

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    mmc

  3. Re:Loopback on the unused portion of a *RW by zmedico · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's not too difficult. Here are the basic steps:

    1. modprobe pktcdvd and use "pktsetup" from the udftools package to create a packet device.
    2. Use "isoinfo" from the cdrtools package to find out the number of sectors (2048 bytes) used by the iso fs.
    3. Use "losetup" to create a loopback device on top of the packet device from step 1 with the offset from step 2.
    4. It may be necessary zero out the loopback device with "dd" in order to avoid IO errors.
    5. Create a filesystem of your choice on the loopback device and mount it (I used "mkudffs" from the udftools package).

    If Knoppix includes the mentioned tools then you should be able to do it after consulting a few man pages...

    Combine this feature with unionfs (included with the latest Knoppix) and there are many possibilities..

  4. Re:60hz refresh rate by numbski · · Score: 2, Informative

    Least common denominator. Just switch it in your xorg.conf file. Just don't freak when you take it to a machine that doesn't support a higher refresh rate. ;)

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    Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).

  5. Puppy love by Anna+Merikin · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've been using Puppy for a while; it's my distro of choice. Why? Many reasons have been given, but IT JUST WORKS out of the box.

    For one example, last week I had SBC-Yahoo! DSL service started. It took two phone calls to SBC help to install (under Windows 98SE) the CD-ROM programs SBC bundled with, including a user name change and downloading IE-6 (which I would never, ever use) and allowing it to become my default browser. When all was done, I was told I had to reset the modem to the new username/pwd combo, which I did, all the while wondering how my Puppy would withstand the changes.

    The answer was: Windows should be so easy. All it took was to click on the Ethernet/Network Wizard and choose DHCP -- and I was connected to SBC-Yahoo! with no further work and no need to reconcile a username/pwd for SBC-Yahoo! DSL.

    Everything works and works together. I can make a graphic in Sodipodi and print it on a dead tree, or incorporate it into a document page in Scribus for typesetting or in Mozilla Composer or Abiword for export as htm.

    If I highlight a selection of part of a URL and paste it into Mozilla Composer, it comes out looking like a real html page with no further work on my part, just like the 35-meg Mozilla installations I am used to.

    There is a small database and Gaby, a personal db. Spreadsheets. A unit conversion utility (one of my main needs) and a choice of calculators.

    I am using puppy right now to write this.

    Nothing beats its speed, either (Duron 750 w/640 Mb RAM). Mozilla opens on first boot in less than two seconds (timed with a stopwatch!)

    And if you're interested in security, its linux nature, needlessness of a hard disk and ability to physically possess all your data and applications is reassuring.

    Plus it comes with exactly the applications I have been using for years under Red Hat-6.2: gFTP, Sylpheed mail, ytree file manager (in Pup-get archives) Sodipodi, Mozilla, Scribus. And did I mention it's the fastest OS I've ever used (with the exception of DOS-5 on an early Pentium) and IT JUST WORKS?