Sorry about that, Puppy Linux

Now that the Thin Puppy is out of commission due to the dead CF card, I booted Puppy LInux 2.14 on the Dell (3 GHz, 512 MB RAM), and it ran like a champ. Video looks GREAT. I opened up a bunch of Web pages in SeaMonkey, and all displayed perfectly, even the Flash animation classified ads at DailyNews.com that brought the Thin Puppy to its knees.

I needed to get a bunch of pictures off of an SD card, and the card reader wasn't working in Windows XP, so I fired up Puppy again, and it was extremely easy to get the photos off of the SD card and into a directory on my hard drive. Puppy just makes it so easy to find drives, mount them and navigate with the Rox filer.

So sorry, Puppy, it could be that the Masxpeed MaxTerm thin client's design isn't conducive to working with a full-fledged OS ... or it could be the memory. More testing is needed, but if you have the kind of power that this Dell has, your Puppy Linux experience will be a good one.

It just underscores the rule that one OS doesn't fit all computers or computer users, and it pays to check out an operating system on many different kinds of hardware to determine the proper fit. Yep, it's like shoes. You don't know how good they are until you've walked that proverbial mile.

That said, the next step is to get a CD-ROM drive hooked up to the Thin Puppy and start pumping other OSes into it, everything from Damn Small Linux to the bigger DSL-n, Puppy from CD, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Zen Walk, Mepis Lite, and probably more.