Booting Puppy 4.1.2 from a USB stick — it could stand in well for Chrome OS
I've been meaning to do this for ages, and I finally installed Puppy Linux on a bootable USB drive.
I went whole hog and used a 128 MB stick. Yep, that's it. I have a huge 20 MB left for storage. Now that I know this works (at least on my Dell, the only box to which I have access that also allows booting via USB) I'll get a bigger stick and actually have some room to, as they say, maneuver.
Doing the install was easy. I booted Puppy 4.1.2 from a CD I had previously burned (I know Puppy is up to 4.2 ... I'll have to try it). Then I used the menu to install to USB. The only thing I did that wasn't a default was selecting mbr.bin as the boot method. It works.
Things I was pleased about in Puppy 4.1.2, which blazes on a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM, include Abiword with working spell-check (never did get that together in OpenBSD; they should package it to work right ... but I digress), and the inclusion of apps that make this a great working environment.
I already loaded a couple of IMAP accounts into Seamonkey's mail client, and if I did have the disk space, I could use gFTP to load all my stuff onto the USB stick.
Considering that these sticks are pretty much laying around and can be had for free, this is a great way to put together a cloud-computing environment if you have all of your mail and files in something like Google Docs and Gmail. Who needs to wait for Chrome OS?
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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.
Puppy is very light, but there are many derivatives of Puppy that are even lighter and more comparable to the proposed Chrome OS. Check out Browser Puppy (http://www.browserpuppy.com/), which strips the "fat" out of Puppy to leave only a graphical desktop with Seamonkey supporting extras like Flash 10, Alsaplayer, and a PDF reader. You still have access to the Puppy repositories if you want to add more, but that's pretty clean to start. And at only ~70 MB, you'd have ~50 MB of storage left on your 128 MB stick!
That sounds great.
I took a look, and the project has been renamed BrowserLinux and has a new Web site: http://www.browserlinux.com/
For me, adding Java would seemingly make this extremely usable. I'll give it a try.