Lucid Puppy - so far, so great

It's not like Lucid Puppy — aka Puppy 5 — is the world's best Linux release.

But it's pretty darn good.

And as with previous Puppy releases, expect a new spin with bug fixes sometime in the near future.

I'm still in evaluation mode, and I'm still running the "real" Ubuntu Lucid (with GNOME, Fluxbox, Fvwm and Fvwm Crystal) on this system's hard drive.

But I need an "alternate" system that promises faster response on my aging hardware, offers the applications I need and delivers them in the easiest way possible.

And that works.

Thus far Puppy 5 is doing all of that well.

I managed to get sound via my USB Headphone Set module to work (and to persist after a reboot, something that for some reason didn't work yesterday).

I am able to write to the Ubuntu installation's main partition, which doesn't include the encrypted /home.

I have a recent Firefox 3.6 browser as my "default." Firefox isn't all that much better in the comparatively light Puppy environment than it is in the full-on Ubuntu. But I need it, unfortunately.

Just like in recent versions of CUPS in Ubuntu and elsewhere, detecting and setting up my networked printer was easy.

Flash was already installed. I added the Java runtime with the extremely useful Quickpet version of Puppy's PET package manager. With its simplified offering of the most popular add-on packages for Puppy, I think Quickpet is a great addition to the distro.

I have run OpenOffice on Puppy in the past, usually adding it with an SFS "squash filesystem." These days I'm doing more and more with Google Docs, preferring to store as few documents as possible on my local drive.

However, I still find Web development hard to do with Google Docs. I need to write or modify code, then either FTP it onto the appropriate server or copy/paste it into a CMS. And I still need to deal with images locally, processing and then FTPing them onto the server.

So even though I find it easier to deal with non-code documents in Google Docs, for the HTML and CSS I'm working with on a daily basis there needs to be a better way. For now that way is keeping things on local drives that unfortunately are not networked or shared.

One of the reasons I wanted to run Ubuntu Lucid in the first place was the sharing of any combination of directories and files with other machines via the Ubuntu One cloud sharing service.

The only problem is that file-manager-level sharing in Ubuntu One is only possible with other desktops running Ubuntu Lucid. And I'm using a whole lot of OSes, with Lucid on a sole laptop. I have machines running Debian, Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.4.

Even Dropbox, which allows for syncing of anything in the designated Dropbox directory across machines with OSes that aren't just Ubuntu Lucid, the problem is that I really don't want copies of those files on every machine, syncing as they are modified.

What I'd really like, and what I hope Amazon S3, Google's new cloud service, or even Dropbox or Ubuntu One to become are true cloud-accessible file repositories that look like regular directories/folders/files — sort of like what you (not me, but maybe you, if you understand it, which I don't) can do with fuse. I've heard about a fuse filesystem being deployed on Amazon S3, but if this sort of thing were easy to do, we'd already be doing it.

I do suspect that you can already so this sort of thing with JungleDisk or some other cloud-based service, but if you really could, wouldn't we all be doing it? (Note: It looks like JungleDisk offers this.)

Sorry to get so far off the Lucid Puppy track, but while many Linux/Unix users think cloud-based computing is the worst thing in the world, I continue to believe that a blend of Web-based apps and local apps that access networked files is the wave of the very near future — or should be. And Linux/Unix can, should and probably will be at the forefront of this shift in the way we use computers and store, access and manipulate our data.