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Small but Featureful: Puppy Linux Reviewed
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."
Wow, considering that the definition of CD-ROM is "compact disc, read-only memory" it is quite the technical achievement to write to it. Just imagine what Puppy Linux could do with a CD-R!
"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
A puppy might be a chick magnet in a park, but using puppy linux or calling your distro puppy linux will not get you laid. Ever.
According to informed sources (http://wiki.tcl.tk/11951) a lot of Puppy Linux is done with Tcl and Tk. Reminds me to some degree of ETLinux:t ml
http://www.prosa.it/etlinux/papers/linuxandc.en.h
although of course that was aimed at much smaller targets.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
The post contains a link to an article, which contains a link to the Puppy Linux page on Distrowatch, which then contains a link to the Puppy Linux home page.
So I figured I'd give you a shortcut straight to the home page...
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Carrying both the OS and your home directory on your thumb drive is kinda interesting. I usually think of storing your home directory on a thumb drive, and then have whatever *nix loaded on various systems that know about your user account via either /etc/passwd, NIS, or LDAP. Simply plug in the drive and log in. The other way around is to store your home directory in a centralized, network-accessible location, perhaps secured via ssh/ssl (haven't put much time into this to be honest) then carry your OS on your keychain drive.
;) I'm curious about NIS or LDAP support in the Puppy distro, so far as being able to recognize user accounts from a centralized location.
/.'ers could help me out with the whole 'home directory synchronization' thing too. Right now I feel I have two options: local home directory, or remote home directory. With local, at specified intervals I can copy or sync back to the server, but I don't know if I can set up something like 'roaming profiles' a-la windows, other than maybe adding an rsync command to .login (anything for syncing back at logout?)
:)
Never really considered doing *both* though. Other than thinking you'd be really screwed if it ever got lost (then again, how hard is it really to plug into a machine and home, dd if=/dev/myusbdrive of=/home/myuid/backup.todaysdate && tarthefile && bzipit && ftpitsomeplace ?
Makes backing up easier anyway.
While I'm on the topic, perhaps
Okay, enough ranting for me.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
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
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
--
mmc
People invest so much time in figuring out how to run this sort of thing from a USB stick, and then they fail to make it trivial to install it on a stick.
Please, instead of lots of DOS commands, create a little self-contained application (e.g., in FLTK) that pulls over all the necessary files, finds the memory stick, copies everything over, and makes the thing bootable.
That's particularly important given one of the likely user communities for these kinds of Linux distributions: people who want to start experimenting with Linux without devoting a whole machine to it.
It's not too difficult. Here are the basic steps:
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..
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. ;)
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
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?