Coming home to Puppy Linux
It's been many months since I last used Puppy Linux. I bet more than a year has passed since I seriously ran Puppy, still one of the best Unix-like distributions/projects for older, underpowered computers.
I decided tonight to break out the 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt (233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor, 144 MB RAM), which has OpenBSD 4.2 on the 3 GB hard drive (yes, I know 4.5 is out, and yes I do have the CD set, and yes, I'll probably reinstall) and two pup_save files in its 0.5 GB Linux partition.
During my extensive tests of operating systems on this platform, I ended up running the aforementioned OpenBSD 4.2 and Puppy 2.13, the latter from live CD.
I'm in Puppy 2.13 right now. I know it's old. I know Puppy 4.something is out now and that the project is in some sort of turmoil.
And I've run many other Puppy releases up through the early 4 series, but for this old, slow, memory-poor laptop, 2.13 still runs the best. I would probably benefit greatly from a new Seamonkey browser, but my fondness for this particular Puppy release (yep, it was my first) has me continually returning to it.
I've been adamant about running "upgradeable" distros such as Debian and Ubuntu instead of static live CDs such as Puppy not just for the security and bug-fix updates but also for the much greater variety of software in a "big" distro.
Then I spent six months running OpenBSD 4.4. With no updates. And no, I never did figure out how to patch my way from -release to -stable.
Puppy runs as well or better than any other operating system I've used on the old Compaq (aka the $15 Laptop, named after the price I paid for it from a surplus reseller).
At this point, for the work I'm doing at present, I like having OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, the GIMP and Inkscape. Not that you can't graft most if not all of those applications onto Puppy, because you can. I've done it, and it works. But it seems like once you add all that stuff and get away from the "purity" of the live CD and the standard Puppy distro, you might as well run Debian, CentOS, Vector, Ubuntu or whatever else runs acceptably well.
Even though I probably burned live CDs of Knoppix 5.1 and Ubuntu 6.06 first, Puppy was the first Linux distro to which I had any meaningful exposure.
I learned about the Linux environment (OK, one of them anyway) and couldn't believe all that comes along with a distribution. Just the fact that you can install a distro or even run it from live CD and have a complete working environment without having to add anything remains a mind-blowingly wonder way to use a computer.
You can't get that kind of experience with Windows or Mac OS.
Applications I used for the very first time that I still use heavily today include:
- The Rox filer file manager, which I continue to consider one of the best, and which served me quite well during my six months with OpenBSD 4.4 as my main desktop OS.
- The Geany text editor, a quick and powerful application that I've used both to write HTML and CSS code as well as general blog entries and other stories/essays/diatribes.
- MtPaint, a super-light, extremely competent image editor that makes you never again want to wait for the GIMP (or Photoshop) to start up
Applications that I don't use so heavily but admire greatly nonetheless:
- The Abiword word processor, an excellent lightweight alternative to OpenOffice
- Seamonkey, the lighter Netscape Communicator browser/mail/news/HTML-creator concept updated with underpinnings of Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird
- JWM, aka Joe's Window Manager, one of the better lightweight environments.
Notice that I've used the words "light," and "lightweight" about a dozen times? Distros like Puppy and Damn Small Linux can give you many clues about how to choose applications that will lighten up systems running Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware and other "bigger" distributions.
Interesting links:
How Puppy 2.x works
Puppy creator Barry Kauler's blog (powered by the PPLOG blog software)
FYI: Federico Ramirez wrote PPLOG, which stands for Perl Powered Blog and is described like this:
PPLOG is a very simple BLOG made in PERL. Currently the version is 1.1 Stable, It does not require Mysql, it uses flatfiles!
...
PPLOG Consists on only 1 perl file, 1 css file and some images which are optional. Also it has other folder, that folder contain files for making a new style, it has a HTML file so you can see the changes on the CSS file also located there without reuploading everything.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
but it's rpm based. I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would want to run a small rpm based distro?.
Thomasw
Puppy Linux is NOT rpm based. Where did you read/hear this?
Puppy's package management is indeed not based on RPM.
Puppy uses its own form of package management. There used to be two forms of packages for Puppy, and I can't recall the difference between the two. But both, as far as I know, were written by the Puppy developers.
Puppy has a closer relationship to Slackware than it does to any other Linux distro. There were versions of Puppy, somewhere around the 3.x series, that were built with many Slackware packages and which would allow the installation of Slackware 12.0 packages.
But Puppy is definitely its own distro, with its own repositories and package-management utilities.
I've run Puppy with huge packages such as the full OpenOffice and GIMP added, and that brings yet another kind of package management to the system -- something called SFS, or "squash file system," I believe.
While it looks complex and at one level is, the result is that you can run a lean Puppy with only what comes with the live CD, you can add a few or many smallish apps, or for the biggest apps you can use SFS files.
In many ways, I could still be running Puppy full time. OpenOffice is available (and I really don't use it all that often anyway, but I do use it), the GIMP is available (even though I use MtPaint most of the time), I could probably transfer my mail from Thunderbird to Seamonkey or, better yet, just start managing it all through Gmail and using the browser.
And I should probably give Google Docs another try. It's not ready to be a full-fledged word processor, but as a text editor with HTML/CSS capability in the display, it's a pretty powerful interface.
Even though the pup_save that holds all your Puppy user files maxes out at 2 GB or so (last time I looked), I usually set up an ext2 partition in which to store any number of files.
I'm probably headed in this direction with my Compaq. It's old enough that devoting the drive (or better yet, a CF card in a laptop IDE-to-CF adapter) to storage and running the OS entirely from live CD is a very attractive proposition. Upgrading is as easy as burning and running a new live CD, and "sensitive" files can be kept in an encrypted pup_save.
Still, I usually find a few apps that I'd like to use that Puppy doesn't include but which I can always get in Ubuntu or Debian. Puppy does run faster than all but a few distros (DSL and Slitaz seem faster yet not as full-featured), and that is a major consideration on older hardware especially.