Puppy more feisty than Xubuntu

My task today was a simple one: Pull four Quicktime videos from an SD card and burn them on a CD.

I booted Xubuntu Feisty, and after a few minutes found xfburn, which came standard with 7.10. I had a couple of Thunar windows open, that was it, but xfburn pretty much crashed on launch. I went into the process manager, killed it, then closed my Thunar windows and restarted xfburn.

(The hardware: VIA C3 Samuel 1GHz processor, 256 MB RAM, TDK 32x CD-RW drive, and yes, I have a swap file.)

Selecting the files and burning the CD was easy and went smoothly. I had my CD.

Then I went back into Thunar to delete the .mov files from the SD chip. Xubuntu wouldn't let me do it. I can't remember the exact error message, but it was something about there not being enough room in the trash. In any event, I couldn't complete the task.

So I rebooted into Puppy 2.14 from the live CD. One good thing about Puppy, when you have a Linux swap file on your hard drive, the system finds it and makes use of it. Instead of a sketchy 48 or so MB of "free RAM," I have 496 MB at my disposal. All that means is that Puppy won't start dying if I download a lot of files.

I quickly mount the SD card with Puppy's MUT (Mounting Utility Tool), open the directory in the Rox Filer, select the four videos and delete them.

And ... while I'm at it, Puppy handles the multiple Flash windows full of continuous advertising crap on Dailynews.com with SeaMonkey better than Xubuntu does it with Firefox. Sure, SeaMonkey is pegging my CPU at 80 to 90 percent, but the system is still running. I couldn't open a second SeaMonkey window on my second desktop, but I was able to open two additional tabs (one with Lxer, the other with BoingBoing), and then start Abiword on the other desktop.

As an aside, I'm not alone in the opinion that Dailynews.com's continuously running Flash content is obnoxious. I've had the discussion with the powers that be -- at least the powers that know I exist, and those Flash ads are paying the bills, so nothing's changing. My solution: read Dailynews.com in the Dillo browser, which doesn't do Flash and leaves the annoying, continuously downloading videos that I'm not watching.

Flash abuse -- it's real, and it's a pain in the ass.

...

Back to today's computing challenge; once again, Puppy is my best friend. I can't wait to try Puppy 2.16 and the MiniPup I read about on Desktoplinux.com.