I wanted to run Tiny Core, but Puppy is just ... easier

In my last entry on the topic, I reveled in getting sound working in Tiny Core Linux 2.11.

Well, I did get sound with OSS, using the osstest utility to play through both my dead internal and not-dead USB external sound modules. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to get sound other than with osstest. And after trying the full ALSA, it wouldn't detect my USB sound module at all.

And ... (there's always another and ...) I couldn't seem to write to the root partition in my Ubuntu Lucid installation on the hard drive with Tiny Core. I had my "persistent" setup on a USB key, but with USB 1.1 it took forever to start up and to shut down.

I decided to give Puppy another try - in this case Lucid Puppy aka Puppy 5, which is built with Ubuntu Lucid packages.

I previously tested the sound and was able to use the ALSA configuration utility to detect and select the USB sound module.

Now I have the Firefox Web browser ... and that's all I've added so far.

Even in Puppy Linux, running from RAM, Firefox 3.6.x runs like crap. It's my hardware that can't handle it. Much like in Ubuntu Lucid proper, the Chromium browser (or any browser that isn't Firefox) will run better. But I need Firefox to do my Web-based work, so I have to deal with it.

I made a pup_save on the hard drive, and I'll see how it performs.

My "major" problem with my previous running of Lucid Puppy was gxine crashing. Now I see that I'm not the only one suffering from this bug. Hopefully all will be fixed in the next Puppy release (or Quirky, for that matter).

I still really like both the concept and execution of Tiny Core. But once I started building up the apps I wanted, it wasn't so tiny. Since it's easier to get sound with Puppy, and since I really like the Puppy application mix, it's just easier to run Puppy as my "secondary" live CD distro, which I'll do for the time being.