Virtual Puppy

I'm running Puppy Linux on top of Windows XP with the help of the QEMU virtual machine -- and the hard work of Erik Veenstra. It's a lot slower than plain, pure Puppy, but since I can't spend all day in Puppy and must use XP to do real work, I can only snatch a few minutes here and there, and having Puppy ready and waiting in the QEMU window -- however slow it may be -- is better than no Puppy at all.

I say it's slow, and this is on a 3 GHz processor. I tried QEMU-Puppy -- the only QEMU-based version of any Linux I've been able to get working thus far, by the way -- on This Old PC at 333 MHz, and it was so slow as to be unusable. But on a fast machine running XP, you can get stuff done.

While in the QEMU Puppy, I changed the dark desktop background to the familiar Puppy blue (and now can see the names of the icons -- black on black never works, people).

I easily added the Ted word processor/text editor with Puppy Package Manager. I tried to add Open Office, but I didn't have enough space on my USB flash drive.

Ted is the word processor in Damn Small Linux. It doesn't save in .doc format, but uses .rtf (rich text format) instead -- a format still readable by Word, by the way. But I like Ted. That's one of the great things about using 10 or more different live-CD Linux distributions -- you get exposed to many different programs that you'd otherwise never see. And both Abiword and Ted have proven to be able writing programs. I like the way the characters look better in Ted, so if I can get away without using smart quotes or saving in .doc format, I will.

Those familiar with my smart-quote obsession might be interested in knowing that the smart-quote debate, while not exactly raging, is simmering in the Linux/open-source community. It seems that at one time, Abiword (which does save in .doc format, and which runs on Linux, Windows and OS X) had smart quotes added.

But in the geek world, smart quotes = Microsoft hegemony. Yes -- Microsoft is being blamed for smart quotes, and real geeks use straight quotes.

I will touch that last sentence no further. So the upshot is that of the leading word-processing programs in the Linux world, Abiword and Ted do NOT have smart quotes (I don't even know if you can drop them in manually), while the more bloated Open Office (not bloated compared to MS Office) offers them.

On the subject of working with Puppy ... there are so many ways to use Puppy. The easiest is the live CD. With that, you can save your session (and parameters) to the hard drive, to a USB flash drive, to an "open" CD or DVD ... or you can mount those drives, save the files you create (they are readable in by Windows apps, by the way -- a nice touch) there ... and do these in various combinations. You can even save multiple configurations (much like the multiple user accounts available in most Linuxes but not Puppy, in which you always work as root (if you don't know what that means, consider yourself lucky).

In fact, I'm going to try that now -- to make separate Puppy config files for running QEMU and the Live CD on two separate PCs.

Wish me luck.