Recently in Dillo Category

I've had a bit of a difficult time with my OpenBSD 4.2 installation on the $15 Laptop — a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 144 MB RAM, a 233 MHz Pentium II CPU and 3 GB hard drive. I use PCMCIA cards for networking, an Orinoco WaveLAN Silver for 802.11b wireless and a TRENDnet TE-100PCBUSR 10/100mbps for wired Ethernet.

Since I upgraded the memory from 64 MB to the 144 MB maximum for this machine, things are running much, much better.

But I'm running out of room in the /usr partition. I'm not sure whether or not OpenBSD can be installed in a single partition, but since the install FAQ tells you to set up separate partitions for everything, that's what I did.

On this drive, I set aside about 600 MB for Linux filesystems to create swap and a place to store files for Puppy Linux, leaving 2.4 GB for OpenBSD.

At the end of the OpenBSD partitioning, I had 1 GB for /usr, which is where applications are stored in the system.

For awhile things were going fine. I had our daughter's Gcompris, TuxPaint and Childsplay games on here, Firefox, the Geany text editor, plus a few console apps like nano, mc and mutt.

But it's not console apps that are taking up all the space.

I pulled the games and their libraries in order to fit the Opera Web browser and the Linux compatibility package needed to run it. That was the best thing I've done for this install since I did it. On this old hardware, the Linux build of Opera runs much faster than Firefox.

That speed really shows up when blogging with Movable Type. For some reason, even in Linux, scripts keep timing out in Firefox and the Mozilla-based Seamonkey. Now that I have Opera installed in both OpenBSD and Puppy 2.13, I'm a lot happier on this old laptop, which is about as challenged as it gets when it comes to old hardware working with modern operating systems and applications.

Anyhow, I needed to do some more "formatted" writing, and I did have the Ted word processor installed. But Ted isn't great when it comes to centering type, print previews or generating PDF output.

I needed Abiword. But I didn't have enough space.

The only thing big enough: Firefox.

Yep, I got rid of Firefox. One thing about the OpenBSD package manager that isn't helping me out here is that when you install a package, all the dependencies are checked, and the additional packages needed are downloaded and installed. But when you remove a package, the system doesn't check its dependencies for whether or not they're still needed by other applications in the system.

I'm sure there's a reason for this, and there's probably even a way around it (like the great deborphan app that I use in Debian), but I know nothing about it.

Anyhow, I managed to get Abiword installed, and I have 500 MB left in my /usr partition. Unfortunately, the spell-check in Abiword doesn't work in the OpenBSD build. Abiword spell-check doesn't work in Puppy either.
The spell-check installs and works most of the time in Debian (especially when you install it with Aptitude and get all the packages you need, rather than with apt-get, where at least sometimes you don't).

I found an old OpenBSD mailing-list hack about how to fix Abiword's spell-checking capability, but it didn't have enough information, and it didn't look like it would work anyway.

But the good news is that with this amount of memory, Abiword 2.4.5 runs extremely well in OpenBSD 4.2. Additionally, for some reason the fonts in Abiword look better in OpenBSD than then do in most other Linux/Unix systems.

So now I have Abiword, Geany, Opera and the Dillo browser as my "main" applications on this system. I don't want to forget the Rox-filer file manager. I put that on the box awhile ago. I still need space to add the Flash plugin for Abiword, and Rox is a prime target for removal so I can get that space ... or the space to install Gaim/Pidgin for IM.

But I just can't do it. I've loved the Rox-filer ever since I first used it in Puppy, and I just can't give it up.

I probably should. I removed mc (Midnight Commander) for space reasons, even though it probably doesn't take up all that much space, and since I had Rox. If mc didn't have problems with the function keys in the console (it misreads the keys for some reason), I'd be able to fit one more app in. (Note: mc works perfectly in an xterm window, just not in the console).

What I'm going to have to do eventually is reinstall OpenBSD. I need a bigger drive so I can have a big /usr partition, install everything I want on it, as well as have room for a full Linux install as well, something I could use in addition to Puppy.

So the OpenBSD install is really tight, in terms of space for applications, but it's working extremely well. I now have the ability to share files between OpenBSD and Linux via an ext2 partition, and that has added tremendous value to this laptop.

I could be using my Gateway laptop a lot more. It's got way better specs (1 GB RAM, 1.3 GHz CPU) and runs Linux way faster. But it isn't so hot with OpenBSD due to the noisy, uncontrollable-by-BSD CPU fan. And its PCMCIA slot still isn't fixed, so I can't run wireless with it.

The Compaq may be underpowered, but it has a very clear, very bright screen, an excellent keyboard, working wireless, no ACPI issues (since it has no ACPI), and there's just something about getting it to work and keeping it working that I find compelling.

And there's also something about OpenBSD that keeps me coming back to it, even on the desktop.

Last week, I went on about how much I like the Opera Web browser. I've used it in Windows, Mac and Linux thus far, and it made quite a bit of difference especially on the $15 Laptop, which has only 233 MHz of CPU and 144 MB of RAM at its disposal.

I installed Opera in Puppy 2.13 via the project's repository. It was an easy install, and Opera gave me quite a bit of additional speed compared with Puppy's default browser, the Mozilla-based Seamonkey. And since Opera is a full-featured browser, it can do a lot more than the very light Dillo, meaning I can use Opera to post to this blog with Movable Type, work on the Web interface for Dailynews.com (where I've found one thing it can't do, but only one), and to do all of my general browsing.

Again, I'm not entirely happy about using a non-open-source application, but the relative swiftness of Opera, coupled with its functionality, has kept me using it.

I know that the Opera Web browser is not a free, open-source application — which I almost always prefer — but the browser itself is a free download for Windows, Mac and in precompiled packages for many flavors of Linux as well as FreeBSD.

Question: Why another Web browser? While Windows and Mac users overwhelmingly use Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smattering using Apple's Safari, there's plenty of room for other entries in the browser space.

I don't know about you, but I'm in a Web browser about 80 percent to 90 percent of the time, both for the traditional task of looking at Web pages but increasingly to use Web-based software.

And for something so important, choice is key.

Users of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems are used to having lots of browsers to choose from, among them Firefox (and its non-copyrighted Iceweasel offshoot in Debian), Epiphany (the GNOME browser created from Mozilla's Gecko engine), Konqueror (the KDE browser/file manager from which Apple took code to create Safari), Seamonkey (the Mozilla-created Web suite that's modeled after the now-dead Netscape Communicator, offering browsing, e-mail and Web design in one application), Dillo (a very lightweight browser), Netsurf (also lightweight), a few more that I'm probably forgetting, plus text-only browsers that include Elinks, Links, Lynx and W3m.

I'd never used Opera before, mostly because of its closed-source status, although I have been "forced" to use Internet Explorer -- also closed source (hey, it's Microsoft -- what do any of us expect?), and besides, IE runs only in Windows and not in Linux (without difficulty, meaning use of WINE or a virtual machine) or Apple's OS X.

And our main Web application insists on IE not for all, but for the most "advanced" operation.

Imagine my surprise a few weeks back when I saw staff artist and Flash guru Jon Gerung using the Opera browser for the very task that usually demands IE.

Since then, I've downloaded Opera and have begun using it to work on Dailynews.com -- and for everything else, too.

There are a few instances where the CSS drops out, one situation where a link won't open, but for 99 percent of my work on this task, Opera does it as good as IE, often times better -- and always much, much faster.

That's the best thing about the Opera Web browser -- it's very fast. And that matters a great deal when doing Web-intensive work. You want to wait as little as possible for the software to do its thing so you can ... do your thing.

The company that makes Opera -- called Opera Software -- provides versions for many platforms. It's a pity you can't get the source and compile it yourself for Linux/Unix, but the speed and functionality of Opera is too good for me to pass up at the moment.

I'll still use Firefox -- probably a lot -- since it's the go-to browser for just about everybody out there, and I need to use the Web Developer add-on, but there's no denying that Opera is simply one of the best applications I've seen lately.

I tested quite a few versions of Puppy Linux in recent days on my 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt. The bad news is that version 3.01 wouldn't configure X properly. Any attempts to do so and then start X crashed the box.

The other bad news is that while Puppy 4.00 loads fine and runs fine, for some reason the load time for Abiword went from 8 to 10 seconds in previous Puppy builds to 30 seconds. That's quite a rollback. On a more positive note, start times for Seamonkey were about the same.

I don't really use Abiword all that much, but that kind of performance hit is disturbing. It could be due to the new way packages are being compiled for Puppy but is more likely something specific to Abiword, since Seamonkey appears to be unaffected.

I tried Puppy 2.17 just to see how encryption worked. It did fine. And I discovered that in the case of multiple pup_save files on a single system, the ones not in use during the current boot can easily be opened in Puppy.

One bone (pun there, intended or not) I have to pick with newer versions of Puppy Linux is the lack of the Dillo browser. I use it quite a bit. I could still add it from packages, I suppose (and I definitely will), and if the slowness of Abiword wasn't bothering me so much in Puppy 4.00, I'd be using it right now.

As it is, I will continue testing, but for now Puppy 2.13 (hopefully with Firefox added for Google Gears compatibility) remains the front-running distro for the Compaq, especially if I'm able to remove the hard drive and replace it with a Compact Flash module and CF-to-IDE adapter card.

The fact that I can move files from one pup_save to another, providing that the non-mounted one is unencrypted, gives me more flexibility as far as upgrading from one Puppy system to another and creating a new, encrypted pup_save instead of using an old, unencrypted one.

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

I didn't have high hopes for Wolvix on the $15 Laptop — a Compaq Armada 7770dmt built in 1999 — since previous attempts to load the live CD resulted in an X configuration that needed a little work.

Since then, I've had quite a bit more experience working in the xorg.conf file, and I was able to get a halfway decent X configuration going so I could test Wolvix Cub (the smaller of the two Wolvix distributions, with fewer packages than the larger Wolvix Hunter).

As I've written on many occasions, I consider Wolvix to be one of the best Slackware-based distributions available. Both the graphical configuration utility and the very flexible installation utility — also an X application — add considerable functionality to a solid Slackware 11 base.

And with Wolvix (and the rest of the Slackware-derived distros such as Zenwalk and Vector), all of the helpful Slackware console utilities are still there. Xwmconfig, netconfig, mouseconfig, even pkgtool can be used in any of these Slackware-based systems. You might not need them as much as you would in a standard Slackware installation, but they do come in handy.

Wolvix also includes slapt-get and Gslapt, the Debian-apt-like utilities that changed the way I look at package management in Slackware.

Before Wolvix, when running Slackware I dutifally downloaded updates from the Slackware FTP site, then used updatepkg to install them. One by one. By one.

One time I figured that using pkgtool for updates would enable me to save time and avoid all that typing of long filenames, or the almost-as-long procedure of copy/pasting them in the file manager for each and every package than needed updating.

I ended up with "doubles" of every updated package, since pkgtool didn't know I was doing an update and just installed the new packages without removing the old ones. So when you're talking about doing updates of Slackware packages with Slack's default tools, it's updatepkg or nothing.

All it means is that slapt-get and Gslapt, which are included in Wolvix and easily added to Slackware itself, are essential for the person whose life doesn't revolve around using the updatepkg utility.

Just the fact that Wolvix — which can operate as a live CD with a Knoppix-like save file, or in "frugal" or traditional hard-drive installs, can be brought up to date in minutes with Gslapt in much the same way that apt and Synaptic work in Debian continues to be a revelation.

Put it this way: How many longtime Slackware users don't have and use slapt-get/Gslapt? I bet not many.

Once I had Wolvix Cub running as a live CD with X properly configured on the 144MB/233MHz Compaq Armada 7770dmt, I used xwmconfig at the console to switch between the Xfce and Fluxbox window managers.

Not surprisingly, both WMs ran quite well, even with only 144MB in the live CD environment.

What astounded me were the extremly quick application-load times. In previous tests of Wolvix, it was quick but not so quick as to beat Debian Etch or Slackware 12 under Xfce and Fluxbox.

In Wolvix Cub running on live CD on the Compaq, a number of text editors, the lightweight Abiword and not-so-light Firefox all loaded relatively quickly. I need to do more tests, but Firefox seemed as responsive or more so than the Mozilla-based Seamonkey browser is in the ultra-fast Puppy Linux.

I wouldn't want to run Wolvix, even the Cub edition, as a live CD in the same way as Puppy or Damn Small Linux — especially in only 144MB of RAM, but when it comes to a traditional install, Wolvix Cub or the more application-rich Hunter would seemingly make an excellent candidate to permanently run on the Compaq.

In contrast to Debian and Slackware, Wolvix installs with just about every application and utility I like, from Abiword to Bluefish, Dillo to MtPaint, and with extremely well-organized menus in both Xfce and Fluxbox. In fact, the Fluxbox menus even include little icons next to each category of applications, something I've never seen before.

I'm "sure" I could replicate all of this goodness in standard Slackware of Debian, but the former's KDE focus and the latter's devotion to GNOME mean that it would take quite a bit of work on my part to have as good an experience in Xfce and Fluxbox as I already enjoy in Wolvix by simply loading the live CD and doing an easy installation from what I consider to be among the best installers of any Linux distribution.

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

In the battle for which operating system runs best on the $15 Laptop, Puppy Linux has pulled out front as the fastest system with the most features I need and best functionality on this 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt.

In case you're wondering, here are the specs of the Compaq:

233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor
144 MB RAM
3 GB hard drive

I recently bumped the RAM from 64MB to the maximum of 144MB. Before this increase, running Linux or OpenBSD (which I have installed on the hard drive) with the X Window System was difficult at best.

Smaller applications like the Dillo Web browser, the Abiword and Ted word processors, the Geany and Beaver text editors ran pretty well in 64MB of RAM.

But the 500-pound gorilla of graphical applications is Firefox.

It would be nice to get by with Dillo, but many — if not most — of the things I need to do with a computer these days require a fairly modern browser.

Whether it's blogging, working on Dailynews.com, or on the Movable Type back end, it all happens in the browser.

And for that I need, at a minimum, Firefox 1.5.

Now that Damn Small Linux offers Firefox 2 (under the name Bon Echo, but for all intents and purposes an early release in the FF 2 series), that system is more than fair game for use on this laptop.

Unfortunately, while the browser runs great, other things in DSL have not been working so well.

For some reason, the desktop wallpaper doesn't work. Instead, I have a plain, gray X Window background. And while JWM (Joe's Window Manager) is the default in Damn Small Linux like in Puppy, switching over to Fluxbox in DSL has been problematic. Some builds have allowed me to use the Fluxbox menu, but others don't seem to work at all.

I could live without desktop wallpaper (or I could figure out a solution to the problem), but with Puppy Linux (I'm currently using version 2.13 but could easily upgrade to the newer 4.00 at any time) I get a nice-looking desktop, the Mozilla-based Seamonkey Web suite, Abiword (about as fast as DSL's Ted word processor but with the added ability to read and write .doc files), the Geany text editor, the ROX filer and quite a few other applications I've grown to like very much over the year and a half I've been using Linux.

And as far as speed goes, Puppy and DSL are quite equal on this hardware.

Coming up:

• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

What I'm saying, basically is that if you're running anywhere near 64MB of RAM and you, say, want to run Firefox, you need more memory.

The $15 Laptop -- a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz Pentium II MMX CPU -- ran a Linux console with no problem and even did an X session, provided no "heavy" apps like Firefox were used.

But how can you get along with just Dillo as a Web browser?

It's not easy if you want to do any kind of blogging, which a) uses the more-memory-intense Firefox and b) demands much more out of Firefox and the whole system as well.

Well, I can safely say that a 233 MHz CPU and 144MB of RAM are enough to run Puppy Linux (currently version 2.13, for which I continue to have a soft spot), Damn Small Linux 4.3 and even OpenBSD 4.2.

I'm going to reboot into OpenBSD right now to see just how well the Compaq is doing with it.

(I'm now back with OpenBSD 4.2)

Things appear to work pretty well with OpenBSD as well. Though certainly more secure than almost every other operating system out there (though I miss Debian and now also Ubuntu's ability to encrypt an entire drive with LVM) and as stable as anything out there, OpenBSD is in no way faster than the fastest Linux distributions.

And speed is a bit of a problem on hardware this old.

I'd have to try Debian again. Puppy and DSL are quite a bit quicker when it comes to screen refresh time in Firefox (and generally in X). I don't remember Debian Etch as being all that sprightly in comparison.

(Changing to DSL 4.3)

There's no doubt that DSL runs the graphics in X faster than OpenBSD. The screen does a much better job of keeping up with my keystrokes in Movable Type, and if the main purpose of this laptop is to crank out blog entries, that is an important consideration.

Of course, before I pull OpenBSD off of this drive, I'll have to make sure I have the xorg.conf saved, as well as a number of other configuration files as well as the output of pkg_info so I can remember all the software I have in this install.

I should probably just get a few swappable hard drives for the Compaq. Maybe even something bigger than 3GB. Just a thought.

Other problems with using DSL as the sole distro: no Flash (but OpenBSD doesn't have it either).

... (two weeks later)

I've been running the $15 Laptop a bit more. Having a good wireless connection helps immensely. I've been most happy with Puppy 2.13 thus far, since it has Seamonkey — a very acceptable Mozilla-based browser — and all the graphics work as they should.

I still have OpenBSD 4.2 on the hard drive, and as I say above, I'm reluctant to remove it, even though I can and will save the various configuration files in case I want to do a reinstall.

I'd like to try Wolvix again, just to see if the additional memory makes any difference in loading it. I could — and probably should — try Debian again. I don't know if it'll be as fast as Puppy or DSL, but it is worth trying.

What I'll probably end up with: I might leave OpenBSD on the laptop for awhile, but I can see myself ending up with a hard drive or Compact Flash chip with IDE converter completely devoted to storage and either running Puppy Linux off of the Live CD or as a frugal install on the hard drive or CF card.

It's nice — really nice — to see via Distrowatch that development is continuing on low-spec favorite DeLi Linux. Here's the release announcement.

I've been able to install DeLi on my VIA C3 Samuel converted thin client, but not without a few tricks that I picked up from the forums (here and here). And I also recently did an entry on some good DeLi-related blog entries from others.

I never was able to get my static IP configured in DeLi, but I think I could do it now.

According to the DeLi site, you need 32 MB of RAM to run the GUI version. The Web browser is Dillo, I believe, and that runs great in 64 MB and looks like it can run about as well in 32 MB.

Probably the biggest change is a shift from GTK+1 to GTK+2, which accounts for the memory requirements rising for this release of DeLi.

When you're trying to resurrect and make an old computer useful, DeLI is a great distro to have in your arsenal, along with Puppy, DSL and even Debian (the Standard install with X and a lightweight window manager and your favorite apps added manually).

I just upgraded the $15 Laptop from 64 MB to 144 MB of RAM, and before the upgrade, OpenBSD, Puppy and Debian ran well on it with X ... unless you try to run a "big" application like Firefox. That's where Damn Small Linux leaped ahead of the pack for that low amount of memory.

Now with 144 MB, I hope that I will have more choices as to what will run on that Compaq Armada 7770dmt, but if you do have a box stuck with 32 MB (I used to run Windows 98 in that amount of RAM, and let me tell you, it was pure hell), DeLi is a great distro to try out.

Yesterday I went on about the man page for fvwm, the default X window manager in OpenBSD.

It clearly says that, in the absence of a .fvwmrc file in the user's home directory, fvwm will look in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/ for a file called system.fvwmrc:

During initialization, fvwm will search for a configuration file which describes key and button bindings, and a few other things. The format of these files will be described later. First, fvwm will search for a file named .fvwmrc in the user's home directory, then in ${sysconfdir} (typically /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm). Failing that, it will look for system.fvwmrc in ${sysconfdir} for system-wide defaults. If that file is not found, fvwm will be basically useless.

There's a file called system.fvwm2rc in that directory, but it doesn't control fvwm. I know this because I added a line to it, stopped X and restarted it. No change.

Since fvwm looks for the .fvwmrc file in the user's home directory, I decided to create one with the help of the system.fvwm2rc file mentioned in the man page.

I used the Geany editor, but substitute any text editor you wish (I'm just more comfortable in a GUI editor when it comes to things like copying and pasting. I don't use vi enough to be all that proficient).

Here's how to do it:

Log on with your user account, open an xterm window and do the following (again, substitute your favorite editor for geany, or install the geany package on your OpenBSD system with $ sudo pkg_add -i geany):

$ geany /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/system.fvwm2rc

Under the File menu in Geany, choose Save As, then navigate to your home directory and save the file as .fvwmrc (in other words, create /home/~/.fvwmrc, substituting the name of your user's home file for ~)

Now you should have a .fvwmrc file in your home directory that is editable by the user account. Modifying the menus is pretty easy. I've already added a category for applications and added all the apps I've installed thus far to it.

I'd still love to find out where the systemwide fvwm configuration file really lives. I don't have enough Unix or OpenBSD knowledge to do so at this point.

I've stuck with fvwm because it's the default window manager in OpenBSD, and it's pretty nice once you learn about it. I've got a long way to go, that's for sure.

Fvwm note: Changes in your .fvwmrc aren't implemented until you quit X and restart it.

Applications I've added to my OpenBSD box thus far:

Geany (text editor)
Dillo (lightweight GUI browser)
Firefox (heavyweight GUI browser)
Nano (console text editor; I just "get it" more than vi)
MC (console file manager)
Rox (the ROX-filer GUI file manager)
Abiword (relatively lightweight word processor)
Ted (even lighter RTF-format word processor)

I haven't added a mail client, and I might add Sylpheed or Thunderbird. I might also add mutt, fetchmail and msmtp and try POP mail from the command line for one account. Generally, though, the whole console e-mail thing baffles me -- and yes, I have done it before. I generally find a GUI mail client or Web mail interface so much easier that I don't need to spend days and days fiddling with mutt.

Essential OpenBSD reading: The OpenBSD Journal. I just found out about this, although I'm sure I've been here before.

Also: OpenBSD 101.

Ted on OpenBSD: I installed the Ted word processor -- an exceedingly light application that reads and produces files in rich text format -- which can be read and edited by most word-processing applications, including Microsoft Word.

Ted on OpenBSD ... how to actually run it:

This doesn't work:

$ ted

But this does:

$ Ted

Remember, Unix-like OSes are case sensitive, and in the case of Ted, it's really capital T, small e, small d.

I've been grumbling about Ted not working in Debian for an age, but Ted works fine in OpenBSD. I'll probably use Geany for most of my work, though. I got used to Geany by using it in Puppy Linux, and while I'm not crazy about its Windows implementation, in Linux/Unix, I still really like it.

Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 image from Wolvix.org.

After dual-booting Ubuntu (at times 7.04 and 7.10) and Debian (first Etch, then Lenny, then a couple of Lennies for a couple of days) on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), I've said goodbye to Ubuntu for the time being and decided to install the dependable Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (the bigger of the two Wolvix distros) and keep Debian (still Lenny). After "losing" two Ubuntu 7.10 installs to unknown causes -- both times processes began slowing to a crawl -- I thought rolling back to Ubuntu 7.04 would give me something stable.

But the boot process for 7.04 began stalling at something having to do with the CD drive (I turned off "quiet spash" in GRUB so I could see where it was dying). I'm thinking that either my laptop or Ubuntu itself must be somehow cursed. One of the reasons I had Ubuntu installed, besides the fact that it works pretty well (when it does work) with this laptop, is that I can easily get Internet Explorer (via IEs4Linux) on the box. There's one Web site I work on that absolutely requires IE, and my need for such access could grow from minimal to critical at just about any time. That hasn't happened yet. What I'd like to see is updated instructions at IEs4Linux to get it set up on Debian. (As far as Debian goes, IEs4Linux remains stuck in the Sarge era).

But suffering through three dead Ubuntu installs in a row has made me weary. For one thing, I'm going back to separate partitions for /home. That's how I have Wolvix set up. Wolvix can be run as a live CD, a frugal install or a full install. I believe the frugal install saves files in the same way as Knoppix and Damn Small Linux, and I want to be able to access the partition when booting Debian, so I opted for the full install. I don't think Wolvix provides updates in the way Debian, Ubuntu and other "established" distros do. No matter. It runs even better on this laptop than it did on the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client (where Wolvix was tested along with another crop of distros in my gOS comparison).

And Wolvix has another thing going for it: It's a Slackware-based distro that actually installs and runs with no trouble. Slackware 12 runs ... but I just can't get the X configuration right (and just about any other Slack-based distro offers a better Xfce experience in terms of applications and tools than Slackware itself, which remains a KDE-focused distro, albeit a faster KDE distro than any other). Both Zenwalk and Vector have been problematic; I can install, but something funky happens during booting and I can't even get to a console. I suppose I could turn off ACPI, AGP, IRQs and the like ... but if Wolvix can just run, why not the others? I probably will try to put Slackware 11 on the box at some point just to see if it's Slackware 12 that's screwing me over (Wolvix is based on Slack 11).

Anyhow, besides the fact that it runs and installs seamlessly, I really like the look of Wolvix, as well as the software mix in Wolvix Hunter (which features heavier apps like Open Office and the GIMP, along with lighter ones such as MtPaint, AbiWord and Dillo). Wolvix ships with Xfce and Fluxbox as window managers. In my recent tests, I've determined that Fluxbox doesn't provide much of a speed advantage over Xfce, and since Xfce has many more features, I'm pretty much running it exclusively, even on the aged $15 Laptop (a 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt with a 233 MHz processor and 64 MB of RAM). And while the spread between Xfce and Fluxbox isn't as wide as one would think, Xfce does provide significant speed advantages over GNOME and KDE

The Wolvix Control Panel app is excellent. For everything from configuration to installation, Wolvix is way ahead of most of the distributions I've used. While the network-configuration portion of the control panel can be somewhat confusing (it reminds me of Zenwalk), it does work. Before I figured it out, I tried using Slackware's netconfig utility in Wolvix. It doesn't seem to work, though you can go through the paces. At least Wolvix offers a utility that does work. With a distro like the highly touted gOS offering NO network configuration utility (they think everybody has DHCP), I'm thankful for any kind of help. Yes, I can hack the text files that hold Linux's network configuration, but I'd prefer not to. It's just the way I am.

Since I'm constantly switching between a static IP at the office and dynamic IP at home, it's taking me a few extra steps (I love being able to easily switch between network settings in Debian and Ubuntu), but the trade-off is worth if since Wolvix otherwise performs so well.

And the Debian Lenny honeymoon is way, way over for me. I've considered rolling it back to Etch. My Alps touchpad issues are coming back (it's not as perfect as it is in Wolvix, Ubuntu 7.04 or 7.10), and the fact that the new Lenny kernel seemed able to manage the noisy Gateway CPU fan for a day but not thereafter is very troubling. I can continue to use the Etch kernel with Lenny, and I just might do that, but I'm left wondering what's going on and whether or not there's an easier fix.

What I did do, for both Wolvix AND Debian Lenny, was put my fan-managing cron job to work. It basically checks CPU temp every five minutes and, if it goes above 60C, turns the fan on, then turns it off when it goes below 50C. Rather than a shell script and a cron job, I'd just like a single line of code that I could stick in some config file to make this work. I've seen things similar to what I need, but I haven't yet nailed it down for the Gateway Solo 1450.

I did, however, get the fan to stop in Debian from boot (using @reboot as the time element for the entry in crontab for the first instance of the cron job, then following with */5 * * * * to run it every five minutes thereafter. Again, I will detail the Gateway Solo 1450 fan-control solution, step by step, in a future entry.

And while I think a cron job is a sloppy, hackish way to deal with a CPU fan, I've done it now in Puppy, Wolvix and Debian, so I'm pretty much getting used to it. It's notable that in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, I couldn't get the system to allow me to turn the CPU fan on and off, even when sudoing the command. I guess I needed to write to root's crontab, and sudoing can't quite qet you there. At least that's my six-second analysis of the situation. I would've loved to put Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on the laptop -- perhaps it could stick around without self-destructing like 7.10 and 7.04. I seem to remember Ubuntu, at least in the alternate install, offering to create a root account. Maybe if I install with the alternate CD, I can get control of the fan. But do I really want to run Ubuntu 6.06 LTS?

Briefly, here is where Ubuntu is falling down:

$ sudo echo 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

yields the following:

bash: /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state: Permission denied

In every other distro on which I've used this line in my cron job, I need to su to root to run it (Puppy logs you on as root, so it's no problem there). But I can't seem to get it to work in Ubuntu. As it is, 6.06 LTS only has five months of support remaining still has a year and five months of support remaining (I'm no math whiz). Might as well wait until 8.04 comes out as the next LTS (or just stick with CentOS 5). ... Then again, Ubuntu 6.06 is from the Debian Sarge era. I smell another install of MepisLite 3.3 .. or maybe the recently updated -- even though I thought it was dead -- Sarge itself. I could always try to solve my Alps touchpad problems and stop my whining (if only ...).

UPDATE: I figured out how to shut the fan on and off in Ubuntu. Details tomorrow morning.

I did keep Debian Lenny (upgraded from Etch). And I know this is the testing distribution and not stable, but I was alarmed by a bug I discovered in the Nautilus file manager. When in a Nautilus window, if you right-click on a file and try to get its properties, Nautilus crashes, a bug report screen comes up, and then Nautilus relaunches. I filled out the bug report and went to the Web page for the bug. While there are about 500 reports of the same bug, it looks like the bug itself has been "closed." Well, it's not fixed, but the report is closed. It says that the bug goes away in Gnome 2.20.1. I have 2.20.2, and it hasn't gone away. I'm hoping that it will, but if the problem with the Ted word processor being catastrophically broken in both Etch and Lenny is any indication, I won't hold my breath. I guess I don't quite understand how bugs are dealt with.

As I said, I'm considering rolling it back to Etch. I'm also considering an installation of CentOS 5.0, which manages the CPU fan fine. Pros: CentOS, a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, will be supporting this distro for YEARS; if it works now, it'll get security patches for a long, long time. Cons: it's harder -- at least for me -- to find as much variety in software as there is for Debian, Ubuntu, even Slackware. I'm sure there's plenty of software out there -- and there's nothing stopping me from compiling my own -- but I just couldn't get the hang of adding repositories and GPG keys. Just finding and installing AbiWord was beyond my capabilities. Perhaps a RHEL 5 book would help me; they've got to be out there. Another con: RHEL -- and, by extension , CentOS -- doesn't play MP3s or even Ogg audio files. I'm sure the codecs are out there, but I like the fact that most Linux distros -- whatever philosophy of freedom they espouse -- at least play an MP3. Hell -- I even can play Oggs in Windows Media Player on my XP box.

But what I did do with Lenny today was pack a bunch of software onto it. I threw all the kids' educational stuff I could find, the GIMP (I can't believe Debian doesn't ship with the GIMP), plus digiKam, which the esteemed Carla Schroder recommended to me as the best Linux image editor -- one that also deals with the IPTC caption info that I need to both preserve and edit. (Both the GIMP, as well as Krita and MtPaint not only won't edit the IPTC text embedded in a JPEG by Photoshop, they completely erase the info; NOT NICE.)

By the way, I thought about doing a frugal install of Puppy Linux, but what I did was preserve my pup_save on the Debian partition so I can continue running Puppy from CD (I'm still on 3.00; I've had no problems, so I haven't tried the 3.01 CD yet, although I do have it).

I wish Damn Small Linux would run better on the Gateway, but I'm still running DSL 4.0 on the older $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt). There are new releases of DSL in the 4 series and also in the 3 series. I have to say that I like both of them. I did a lot of work with DSL 3.2 and 3.3, and I'm glad the developers are keeping both going. I am disappointed, however, that the version of Firefox (it's 1.0.something) in DSL does not work with Google Docs. I was hoping to run DSL instead of Debian Etch (the main distro on the Compaq's puny 3 GB hard drive) and gain some speed in Google Docs, but it is not to be. For better or worse, it's another point in Puppy's favor -- Puppy's Seamonkey browser/e-mail/HTML-generator app can handle Google Docs. But now that both Puppy and DSL feature MtPaint, at least they're equal in terms of image editing; for me, MtPaint is the best lightweight image editor for Linux. If it edited the IPTC info, I'd be in geek heaven. Since it doesn't, I remain on geek terra firma.

And I continue to prefer Geany as a text editor over DSL's Beaver (and over Xfce's Mousepad, GNOME's Gedit, anything that comes with KDE ... should I go on?).

I'm having one problem with Puppy: One of the Web sites I work on -- LA.com -- has an obscene amount of Flash animation, and it crashes Seamonkey every time I try to access it. I thought that Firefox might make a difference, so I installed the PET package. But the site crashes Firefox, too. I don't have this problem in any other Linux distro or in Windows or Mac, so something fishy is going on. Yeah, the amount of Flash is obnoxious, but it's not my call.

This entry is way too long, and I didn't even mention my re-flirtation with PC-BSD. After I deleted Ubuntu and before I put Wolvix on the laptop, I decided to do another PC-BSD install. The install itself went fine. I still had that weird graphic blob below the cursor. And I downloaded three PBI files to update my 1.4 release (I didn't feel like burning a new CD, since's I've only got two left in my formerly 100-CD stack). One PBI took it from 1.4 to 1.4.1, the next to 1.4.1.1, and the last to 1.4.1.2. They couldn't do this in a regular software update? Anyway, I couldn't go from 1.4.1.1 to 1.4.1.2 -- it said something about only updating from 1.4.1. And BSD is different enough from Linux that the prospect of adapting my fan-quieting cron job to BSD is and will remain way beyond my capabilities.

So PC-BSD met the same fate as it did the last few times I installed it; it came down quickly. I'm enjoying Wolvix Hunter right now.

So here's where I stand this week with the $0 Laptop: Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny on the hard drive (Wolvix with its own /home, so I can roll a new distro over it without killing out my files) and Puppy 3.00 as a live CD. But I'm thisclose to slapping Ubuntu 6.06 LTS or CentOS 5.0 in there.

Like many of you, I'm stuck between changing Linux and BSD distributions like underwear and finding something that can serve me for years without it either falling apart or me yearning for something better.

The Thin Puppy ran all the way through Christmas Day (mercifully, I wasn't here), but today something happened, and the power momentarily went out. I might've kicked the power cord, or something else nefarious happened, but the Maxspeed Maxterm converted thin client rebooted, and since there was no CD in the drive, I just shut it down. I'm sure it could've gone much longer than 13 days, but I have accepted that 30 days without a reboot won't be happening.

Anyway, I booted Puppy 3.00 on the $0 Laptop (I haven't done the upgrade to 3.01 on the Gateway yet).

One of the bigger changes recently in Puppy Linux has been the dropping of the lightweight Dillo browser in favor of NetSurf, which looks like a similarly lightweight browser based on Mozilla. I can't be sure of its origins, but it seems to work pretty well, is just as fast as Dillo, and -- most importantly -- seems to be currently in development. Work on Dillo has pretty much stalled, or so it appears. So I think of this as a good choice for Puppy Linux -- the lightweight browser is needed, especially for the lower-spec computers than many of us use to run Puppy.

I thought Puppy also had a text-only browser, but I don't see it in the Puppy 3.00 menu. I'd like to see Lynx or Elinks in the Puppy base. If you must have a text Web browser, Elinks is available as an easy-to-add PET package in the Puppy Package Manager. Even Dillo can be restored via a PET package.

The main browser in Puppy continues to be Seamonkey, which also functions as a mail client and HTML editor. I've always liked Seamonkey, and I continue to see it as an application that fits Puppy very well.

I have one nagging problem: One of the Web sites I work on: LA.com has way too much Flash on it for its own good, and while that may or may not be the cause, the home page crashes Seamonkey every time. I'm generally anti-Flash -- it hogs resources and should only be used when you need to show an actual video (and then only after a link is clicked), but I've accepted that today's Web designers have gone Flash-crazy.

Most of these developers also think that everybody runs browsers with Flash and that they have Flash enabled. I suppose it's true for 95 percent of users, but I don't have Flash activated on this very laptop's Debian partition. In Ubuntu, I do have it, and Puppy ships with Flash implemented in Seamonkey, but the ability to easily turn Flash on and off in Firefox would be welcomed by me. More welcome is the new Gnash open-source clone of Flash. I haven't tried it yet, but it's definitely on my to-do list.

$0 Laptop-and-Puppy update: Puppy runs so well on this Gateway Solo 1450, it should be noted. Since I got the fan under control via a cron job (long explanation of this STILL forthcoming -- I promise), Puppy 3.00 has performed very, very well. I've been running it from the live CD (all the better for impending and frequent upgrades, as well as ease in booting) and have a 1.2 GB pup_save in my Debian Etch partition. I've also had good luck with Knoppix 5.1.1 on this laptop, but not so much with Damn Small Linux, which has problems with the X configuration. And with 256 MB of RAM, Puppy is a much better fit than Knoppix.

I continue to warn against dual- and triple-booting, even as I continue to do it with this laptop (still, avoid pain and DON'T dual-boot -- I'm telling you). But I encourage the use of live CDs on computers with existing Linux (and even Windows) installs. It gives you a nice option and is not likely to screw anything up.

As one of the ways to keep track of my journey through the world of Linux and BSD distributions, on every CD I try to write the date I burned it. I can't remember how I found out about my first Linux live CD, Knoppix 5.1.1 (some Web story must've gone on about how great it was to run a full Linux without doing a hard-drive install), but the date I wrote on the case is Jan. 29, 2007 -- soon after the 5.1.1 release came out. And it wasn't just my first live CD, it was also the first Linux CD of any kind I made -- and my first experience with a Unix-like operating system since leaving adm3a and VT-100 terminals behind after my college days in the 1980s.

I remember running that Knoppix CD on my Dell box. I didn't know what Debian was. I had no idea that KDE was Knoppix's desktop environment -- or that there were many alternatives. I didn't know why the Web browser that looked like Firefox was called Iceweasel.

Since then I've spent considerable time running Puppy and Damn Small Linux from live CDs (and in hard-drive installs, usually of the three-or-so-file "frugal" variety).

I recently burned both Puppy Linux 3.0 and Damn Small Linux 4.0. On the one hand, I'm thinking about doing reviews of both. On the other, I think it's time to replace the Debian setup on the $15 Laptop, a Compaq Armada 7770dmt. I've been running it for months with a very basic Debian Etch install. I started with the "standard" install, then added X and Fluxbox, along with the apps I wanted. It's been running fairly well, but the problems with various applications have been piling up. I know that if I use Puppy or DSL, the apps I want should work perfectly from the get-go. Of course I could also do a fuller Debian install -- say the Xfce version -- which would include many more applications ...

So before I dive back into live CDs, here's what's been troubling me with my Debian Etch install. The laptop is so old (probably circa '98) that it doesn't have USB ports. I have my trusty Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA wireless card installed -- it works with just about every Linux distro out there -- and I have the CD drive plugged in. The floppy drive is dead, but who needs it? I have the original 3 GB hard drive, and it's pretty full, even though I've got nowhere near the full Debian install on it. I really should buy a new hard drive that's way bigger and less prone to failure.

Anyhow, the 233 MHz, 64 MB system probably could run Xfce, but I've been conservative, running both the console and Fluxbox as needed. Maximum memory for the Compaq is 144 MB, but I've been too lazy and cheap to buy the RAM. The CMOS battery is dead, and I've really been too lazy to crack the case (TORX screws aplenty) and see how to switch it out. I have the network time server app installed, and that resets the clock at each boot.

I originally wanted to handle my work e-mail over IMAP with Mutt and MSMTP. Never mind that to get a Mutt setup seems to be the height of geek competence (a height to which I do not reach), but since my original push to get the .muttrc and .msmtprc files just right, something changed and I can no longer send mail. I could never figure out how to handle multiple mail accounts over IMAP (POP is easier, since you can POP all the mail down and filter it ... and by "easier," I mean harder but doable).

So I installed Sylpheed, which I figured would be light enough for the 233 MHz box. I've always liked Sylpheed, although I've migrated over to Evolution and Thunderbird on my other boxes.

On first launch of Sylpheed, I got an error message that some parameter in some file (I confess, I didn't recognize any of it) was missing. So I went ahead and configured Sylpheed. It didn't work.

I have AbiWord installed -- my go-to lightweight word processor -- but the graphics of the laptop just can't keep up. I type, and the letters appear seconds later. Ted might work better, but it's broken in Etch. You can neither create a new file nor open an old one.

On the brighter side, the Dillo browser works great (although the fonts are better in Damn Small Linux and Vector), and I also have had no problem with Iceweasel (aka Firefox), Lynx or my favorite light image editor, MtPaint (which should be an official Debian package available via apt-get but for some reason can only be found at Sourceforge and on other distros like Vector and Zenwalk). I've also been very pleased with Mousepad as a text editor, with Nano and Vi as backups. (I'm more of a Nano users because I just don't spend a lot of time in console editors and have ragged Vi chops).

So I'm able to get my work done in Etch, but I have a feeling that I'd be better off -- especially at 64 MB of RAM -- with Damn Small Linux.

And with the release of version 4.0, what better time to re-evaluate the distro, which has been in or near the Distrowatch top 10 for quite some time.

So I pulled the CDs for Puppy 3.00, DSL 4.0 and Knoppix 5.1.1. I'm not ready to break out the Compaq laptop just yet, so I used my main test box, the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client that runs a VIA C3 Samuel 1 GHz processor and 256 MB of RAM.

I plugged in a USB drive, with my hope being that I could then unplug the hard drive, boot from CD and then have no drives whirring for the duration.

That worked with Knoppix, Puppy, even with a Vector SOHO live CD I burned a week ago (and let me say that just as Vector excels with the Xfce desktop, it also does remarkably well in KDE).

But Damn Small Linux? No, it wouldn't boot with the hard drive disconnected. I tried versions 3.3 and 3.2 as well. No go for any of them.

My USB key is a little unsual. It was a freebie, and has a CD advertising image (detected almost always as drive sr0) as well as a 256 MB flash memory. Puppy found the flash just fine (I've always had great luck with hardware detection, especially of drives, with Puppy), and I was able to boot without a hard drive, run entirely in RAM, and save my settings and files to the pup_save on the USB drive. Brilliant, as usual.

Neither Knoppix nor DSL could find the USB flash drive, but I suspect with a "pure" USB drive the results would be different.

Even so, I've done quite a few Puppy reviews, and I wanted to start out with Damn Small Linux. So I plugged in a hard drive, booted DSL (using the dsl toram boot code that loads the whole distro into RAM) and was off.

Quickly, things that are better in DSL 4.0: network configuration is smoother than ever. Once I entered my static IP, DSL guessed the rest of the info pretty darn well. I entered my local name servers, but the gateway and broadcast addresses were correct without me doing anything. I was able to get printing working with apsfilter (I could never replicate my success in Etch, by the way).

The default window manager in DSL is now JWM, and the thing I miss most is the menu that used to come up with a right mouse click. It's easy enough, however, to change window managers to the old DSL's Fluxbox, and then everything is the way I like it. But I'm getting used to JWM (Joe's Window Manager) in DSL, and I like the clickable folders on the desktop -- it's easier and more intuitive than using the file manager.

Anyhow ... I'm not ready yet for a full DSL review, so let me just tell you that to me -- and many others, I suspect -- Puppy, DSL and Knoppix are VERY important distros in the Linux universe. Going from Windows or Mac to the world of Linux might not have happened for many of us if we didn't have live CDs that actually work that way with which to experiment.

And in many cases, working with a live CD or frugal install that allows files and parameters to be saved, either on the hard drive or on removable media, can be an easy, secure and preferable way to use a PC. Especially when it comes to DSL and Puppy, upgrading can be as easy as downloading and burning the latest ISO. And if you don't want to upgrade? No problem -- just use the version you want.

I did spend at least half a day running Knoppix with no hard drive. As I said above, Knoppix didn't find my USB drive (a situation that might be remedied with a more standard flash drive). As the king of live CDs, Knoppix, which is not one of those distros that is continually coming out with new releases, runs very, very well. Even when not running it in RAM, Knoppix is surprisingly quick, even with KDE. And if you do have 1 GB of RAM, I highly recommend running it with the toram boot option. I definitely plan to get the book "Knoppix Hacks," which has a new release slated for this month, as well as the new Damn Small Linux book.

And this thought has crossed my mind: I just might hack together a PC with 2 GB of RAM, and either a Compact Flash card or USB flash drive for storage, with no hard drive at all, to run Knoppix entirely in RAM.

(By the way, Puppy seems to know when it has enough memory to run in RAM -- I don't think you have to pass that information in a boot code).

And while the live CDs of Ubuntu, Mepis and others are helpful in terms of evaluating hardware detection, they're not designed to be used day-to-day in that manner. But DSL, Puppy and Knopix are -- and they all can be installed to the hard drive if you wish.

Before I wrap up this entry, I want to say that everybody should try Puppy, DSL and Knoppix. Download the ISOs, burn the CDs and start experimenting with all the boxes you can find. I've had more fun with live CDs than in anything else I've done with Linux. After a few months in Debian, Slackware and Ubuntu, it's a nice change of pace (and yes, I've tried Slax -- which I like -- and I plan to give Wolvix a spin soon).

So burn yourself some live CDs -- and make a half-dozen or so extras to hand out at will. It's the best way to get people started on exploring the non-Windows world of computing.

(Screen shot of Puppy 2.16.1 with Open Office 2.2 -- notice the six OO icons in the upper-center of the desktop)

Everybody loves a new Puppy. And those behind the Puppy Linux distro are happy to oblige, releasing a new version every couple of months. For the user or reviewer, it's a lot to keep up with. Luckily, upgrading is as easy as popping in a new CD. Puppy excels as a live-CD Linux distribution, and for those who want to run it in a "frugal" install to a hard drive, upgrading is as easy as copying a few new files. For traditional hard drive installs (recommended for low RAM), you have to reinstall the whole system, but just like with Damn Small Linux, even that process is quick, easy and intuitive. Or you can choose not to upgrade and stay with the Puppy that works for you.

I liked what I saw in the Puppy 2.15CE "Community Edition," but felt it strayed too far from the traditional Puppy, and I was glad to be back in familiar territory with 2.16. I know that Puppy 2.17 is already out, but the crew behind Puppy is releasing new versions quicker than I can evaluate them.

So even though new Puppies are being born like puppies themselves, I'm a person of habit and familiarity, and I've pretty much stuck with Puppy 2.14 all this time.

After the IceWM window manager used in 2.15CE, Puppy 2.16 brought the distro back to its JWM roots, and the biggest thing 2.16 adds is the ability to encrypt the pup_save file (the single large file that holds the user's files and settings). This adds a measure of security to Puppy that wasn't previously available. As Carla Schroder of "Linux Cookbook" fame is fond of writing, s/he who has physical access to the machine owns the machine, and before encryption was added, the only way to keep pup_save secure was to store it on removable media and take it with you.

While working in Puppy 2.16, I placed my pup_save file on the same hard drive as Debian 4.0 Etch. When I originally partitioned the drive for Debian, I elected to have the /home directory on its own partition. And at the end of my first Puppy session, when creating the pup_save, I chose to locate it on the same partition. When I subsequently created a /home file for Puppy in which to save the SFS file for Open Office, Puppy somehow merged it with the /home file in Debian, so now my Puppy files show up in my Debian /home file -- which is more than OK by me because I can more easily navigate to everything I might need in the Debian portion of my system. I'm not sure if this would've happened if I had not created the /home folder (which I did since SFS files must go in /mnt/home, and I had /mnt but no /home), but so far it's working out great. Later I learned that you're not supposed to create /home. Either it's there and you can use it, or you don't need it. Despite my error, everything worked anyway,

But it's not all good in Puppy 2.16. The Gparted partition manager, the program that makes Puppy Linux so impressive as a live CD, is somewhat broken in 2.16. It scans for drives, but instead of finding them in a minute or so, takes much longer. For awhile I thought that it never found them, but I left Gparted running on my second desktop and returned sometime later to find all my partitions waving hello and waiting to be tinkered with. I don't know what is causing the slowdown, but I suspect it's the updated version of Gparted in this version of Puppy, and I hope the problem is addresses in subsequent releases of the distro.

Until then, I'm happy to keep the Puppy 2.14 CD handy for when a partitioning job arises and I don't have a full 15 minutes to wait for the partitions to show up in Gparted.

Visually, Puppy 2.16 does move the distro forward. Scroll bars and other little desktop features look slightly different (perhaps a tweak to JWM). 2.16 does look more modern and finished -- perhaps a concession to all the eye candy of 2.15CE.

For those unfamiliar with Puppy, one of its biggest features is that it is designed primarily to be run as a live CD, in many cases loading entirely into RAM (if you've got enough) and running extremely fast. With enough memory, you can even remove the CD during the computing session in order to burn a music or data CD, or to rip music or date from a disc. And yes, Puppy includes all the software to do these things.

One thing Puppy remains is robust. It's as solid as it was during my monthlong Thin Puppy Torture Test, during which Puppy 2.14 ran without a hard drive or storage of any kind besides RAM.

New in 2.16

-- Pmount replaces the superior MUT as the default mounting tool for all kinds of drives (hard disk, floppy, CD and flash). Thankfully both remain in the Puppy menus.

-- There's a new RAM-based filesystem designed, as in past Pups, to minimize writes to the disk, especially to flash drives, extending their lives indefinitely. I'm not qualified to go into the specifics of the filesystem, but I'm happy to know that the Puppy people are working to improve the very basis of the system.

-- As mentioned before, toolbars and windows look more modern. But JWM is still the window manager, and the great ROX Filer remains the file manager. Once you experience the speed of ROX on an older system, it's hard to even wait for Thunar to do its thing.

-- New since Puppy 2.15, and continuing in 2.16, is the use of SFS-based applications -- squash files that make it much easier to install large programs such as OpenOffice. Before the SFS packages appeared, I always had trouble installing bigger applications with the PET and DotPup packaging systems. I never seemed to have enough memory. Problem solved.

Puppy vs. Damn Small Linux

While I love Damn Small Linux and in a number of ways prefer it, Puppy wins in many key areas. It has many applications I need. Puppy also is built on some of the best configuration utilities of any Linux distribution I've used.

First of all, I need a photo-editing program that re-sizes JPGs, and mtPaint is the lightest, best Linux app I know of that can do the job. DSL's Xpaint doesn't come close. (MtPaint is also part of Vector Linux and is available in packages for Debian-, RPM- and Slackware-based distros).

For an instant-messaging client, Puppy's GAIM (now called Pidgin in its latest version) works with AOL's AIM system and Yahoo Messenger, as well as IRC. DSL's NAIM works on AOL only, I believe.

I prefer DSL's default mail client, Sylpheed, over Puppy's SeaMonkey. But I've already installed the Sylpheed PET package in Puppy, so I can use the mail program of my choice.

DSL offers my preferred console text editor, Nano. I have yet to find Nano for Puppy. An older version of Puppy -- One-Bone Puppy (hard to find but worth burning a CD of) does include vi (as does DSL), and I'd like to see either better console support in Puppy included in the base distro or easily added in bulk as an SFS file or with PET packages. For me, that would include fetchmail, procmail, mutt, msmtp, Midnight Commander, Lynx and Elinks, Nano, Vim and Emacs. I know at least a few of them are available for Puppy, but I'd really like it to be easier to run Puppy from the command line.

Still, I understand that Puppy is meant to be, well, Puppy-like, usually equipped with a single program for every task, sometimes up to three, but not 30. And I've discovered many fine apps in Puppy and DSL that I would've otherwise never known about.

One of the things I noticed in Puppy 2.15CE but can't yet find in 2.16 is the ability to easily change which app is launched by the system's generic desktop icons -- say having Sylpheed instead of SeaMonkey launch when the "e-mail" icon is clicked. But for the most part, I'm happy with Puppy's app choices, so this is far from a big issue with me.

The single best thing about Puppy 2.16 -- and the best reason to upgrade -- is the ability to encrypt the pup_save file that holds all your data in Puppy. In the process, this feature adds a kind of password protection that was lacking in the Puppy environment. It's not the same as separate Unix-style accounts (you still run as root), but it does offer some measure of security and allows for multiple users on a single system. There are provisions for normal, strong or no encryption, and with either choice, multiple pup_save files can be created and chosen from during booting.

To bypass all current pup_save files and create a new one, at the boot prompt, type:

puppy pfix=ram

and create the new pup_save when shutting down or rebooting.

The right tool for the job

Throughout the time I've been using Puppy and Damn Small Linux, I learned the value of using the appropriate apps for the given computing environment. This means paying attention to everything from hardware and the choice of window manager to an awareness of shared libraries and the user's needs from the platform.

That means AbiWord as the word processor in Puppy, Ted in DSL.

But sometimes you need the full power of, say, OpenOffice. As previously mentioned, installing large applications via the established PET package and Dotpup methods is often difficult. The filesystem in Puppy is prone to running out of space during the install.

But with an SFS squash file, installation of large programs goes much more smoothly. I downloaded the OpenOffice 2.2 SFS file into /mnt/home (just put it in /mnt if there is no /mnt/home in your Puppy system). After a reboot, a dialog box opens and asks which SFS files you'd like to load -- up to three at any given time.

Once you have successfully placed the SFS file in the proper directory and Puppy acknowledges its presence, upon the next boot, the entire up-to-date OpenOffice suite (word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation program and some kind of mathematical-equation generator) is there -- in the menus and as icons on the desktop.

Whether or not a suite the size of OpenOffice is in keeping with the Puppy ethos is debatable, but if you need what OpenOffice offers (and for me that's a word processor with way more features than the still-great AbiWord), Puppy can accommodate you.

Even so, OpenOfice runs surprisingly well under Puppy, loading much faster than in Ubuntu, for instance.

Word processor vs. text editor

When it comes to the many word processors that don't make it easy to use typographical (or "smart") quotes and em (long) dashes, I find it hard to see what they offer over a plain text editor. (I know: bold, italic, margin control ...) Since beginning this review, I've been using AbiWord more than any other program for writing, and it handles most of what I'm doing on the Linux, Mac and Windows platforms (and yes, I use all three on a very regular basis).

Certainly when it comes to items for Web publication, HTML coding takes care of all formatting, and "straight" quotation marks are perfectly OK, there's no need for a word processor, and the only thing better than a bare-bones text editor is one that automates as much of the HTML coding process as possible without adding lots of extraneous code. This is where the HTML-generating Composor portion of Puppy's SeaMonkey suite fails me.

I haven't had much success, either, with the "save to HTML" options in OpenOffice Write or AbiWord. But to be honest, I haven't spent much time trying to make them work in my situation. What I need to do is be able to copy and past from the document I'm working on and have the HTML come with it. In these apps, usually the text itself is all I get, and to bring the HTML along with it, I need to open a text editor and delete the HTML I don't need.

And if what I need is a text editor, why not just use one in the first place?

Actually -- and this is getting more off-track -- the "save as HTML" option in the online Google Docs program is a pretty good way to generate HTML. It makes up for the Google program's shortcomings when it comes to creating docs for any medium besides the Web.

So the short answer is: I wish AbiWord was better, and it's nice to have OpenOffice, even though it's slow to load (about half a minute compared to Abi's 5 to 8 seconds).

Have I mentioned MTpaint? It's the best lightweight image editor in the Linux world, loading in 3 to 5 seconds (as opposed to the GIMP's 60-second load time). MTpaint uses far fewer resources yet manages to do almost everything I need when it comes to cropping and sizing images for Web publication. Not only do I use it in Puppy, but I grab the Debian package of MTpaint for all my Ubuntu and Debian installs. It's that good.

Vector Linux 5.8 Standard also includes MTpaint -- so there's a Slackware package out there, too. MTpaint is another example of an application appropriate for the system it's running on and the tasks it helps the user perform.

On the Internet

For me, Web browsing, e-mail and FTP are a large part of what I do in any OS. Puppy introduced me, way back in version 2.13, to SeaMonkey, the Mozilla Internet suite modeled after the old Netscape Communicator. SeaMonkey includes a Web browser, e-mail client and HTML editor, all in a single application.

I find Web browsing in SeaMonkey almost identical to using Firefox, and Puppy always has Flash enabled. One thing I enjoy about SeaMonkey is its ability to use Internet search engine by typing a query in the main URL box and clicking on "search," instead of hitting Return. Internet Explorer 6 offers the same feature. (Firefox uses separate boxes for URLs and search.) And now that I have IE6 configured, like Puppy, to use Google as my default search engine, I use the feature many times per day.

SeaMonkey's mail program doesn't excite me as much on my low-spec hardware. I prefer the added speed of Sylpheed, which I easily installed in Puppy with a PET package. But for more modern systems, SeaMonkey's mail client is as good as Thunderbird.

There's also Dillo, the very-low-spec Web browser that loads in 2 to 5 seconds on any Linux box. For quick Web browsing on pages that don't rely on Flash, Java and heavy CSS, Dillo's speed can't be beat.

Puppy also includes a text-based browser, but I prefer Lynx and Elinks -- both available as easy-to-install PET packages.

More than one way to run Puppy

Recently I've had the opportunity to run Puppy as a live CD, as a "frugal" install (in which the three main Puppy files are copied to the hard drive, where they become a full Linux filesystem upon booting) and with the "standard" install (not surprisingly like a traditional install of GNU/Linux).

The latter method, while not as easily upgradable as the first two, did allow me to comfortable run Puppy in 64 MB of RAM. (As always, a Linux swap file outside of your main hard-drive partition can be your best friend.) While I had trouble in the past running Puppy in 128 MB with no swap (or pup_save or any hard drive at all), with either a swap file or a large pup_save file, the distro is quite comfortable in 64 MB of RAM. It's also not bad with 233 MHz of CPU, although Damn Small Linux is just that much better tuned to such low power -- and that has as much to do with the apps chosen for the two distros as it does with any underlying code, scripts or tools.

And while most modern Linux systems try to autoconfigure as much as possible (I've yet to find a distro that won't recognize my Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA wireless card), Puppy is -- hands down -- the best distro for configuring what the system doesn't catch at boot.

The Puppy "Wizards" for networking (wired and wireless), printing, sounds, graphics and modems are exclusive to the platform, and they just plain work. And since for most users, getting their hardware working is more than half the battle, Pupy stands very high in the top tier of distros I've tried.

Good dog, bad dog

Places where I do quibble with Puppy include the version of Gparted that came with 2.16. The 15-minute wait to read partitions needs to be addressed in future releases, and I very much hope it will be. And I've never had much luck with the Gxine media player. I much prefer XMMS (included in Damn Small Linux). But Puppy's command-line Madplayer for MP3s works flawlessly on my aging systems, and for that I am thankful.

Using both Puppy and Damn Small Linux has inspired me to install barebones Debian systems on a couple of PCs. First I do the "standard" install, then I add X, the Fluxbox window manager and my favorite apps (many of which are part of Puppy and DSL) to replicate the small-distro look and feel but with the stability and security of Debian 4.0 Etch and -- most of all -- the powerful utility apt to manage applications and the system itself.

But there's still more polish and expertise in Puppy (and DSL, for that matter) than I can bring to my own Debian build, and for that reason I recommend Puppy 2.16, especially as a live CD that can be used on a daily basis, even on a PC with no other Linux distro installed, but also with current Linux boxes. As I've said, for computers with extremely low specs (like my 233 MHz CPU, 64 MB RAM, 3 GB hard-drive laptop), a traditional Puppy install can turn an olde system into an up-to-date workhorse and keep it productive for years to come.

And Puppy 2.16's optional encryption of the pup_save file (a feature that Knoppix has had for years, I understand) adds a welcome measure of security that makes it perfect to use in a workplace environment where many others have access to your PC. The protection is especially important for laptops, which are lost or stolen all too often. At least the casual thief won't be able to steal your data, too.

I'm not sure what the memory cutoff is for running Puppy exclusively in RAM -- it might be 256 MB, maybe 512, but the system tends to access the disc as little as possible, making all the hardware appear to be faster that it is when running standard distros.

Many critize Puppy for having the user run as root -- the so-called "super user." Puppy experts say that the nature of the live CD and the use of pup_save files make it OK to run without traditional user files. I'm not technically astute enough to question this claim, but partisans of Damn Small Linux say that their distro's reliance on a user account (with the option of adding multiple users) is safer and better.

I have a pup_save file stored on my main Debian box, my Ubuntu box and my Windows box. I use the Puppy CD on just about every install I do to partition the drive, and I know that I can get my work done with Puppy's apps on just about any PC. And with the technical advances in version 2.16, Puppy is indeed better than ever -- and well worth having as a live CD in your GNU/Linux arsenal.

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Puppy versions I've used

Puppies 2.13, 2.14, 2.15CE, 2.16, One-Bone Puppy

One-Bone Puppy?

After much Googling, I managed to download and burn a disc for One-Bone Puppy. It boots to a command line and includes Elinks for browsing, Vi for text editing and Midnight Commander as a file manager. I never managed to get my static IP address configured, but I'm sure I could do it. What separates it from other live CDs that feature a command-line-only environment (what? there are others?) is the use of a pup_save to retain settings from one boot to the next.

Puppy I'm using right now and why

I use Puppy 2.14 about half the time because I need to have a well-working Gparted. However, I am using 2.16 more and more because a) I like the encrypted pup_save and b) I like the option of using OpenOffice.

Rich Text Format vs. .doc

Some time ago, a developer for KOffice told me that when AbiWord saves a .doc file, it's really saving it in Rich Text Format instead of true Word .doc format. I confirmed this when a .doc file I created in AbiWord opened in Rich Text Format in Word for OSX. The question is whether or not this matters. MS Word will always open RTF documents, and Abiword, at least, will just about always open Word .doc documents. At least the less-complex ones, anyway. So ... if AbiWord is really just creating RTF documents with .doc extensions, then the Ted word processor -- which uses RTF exclusively -- is more than worth looking into.

As mentioned above, Ted comes standard with Damn Small Linux and is a PET package in Puppy. One problem: I can't print from Ted in Puppy. I can print from everything else, just not Ted.

Puppy 2.17 reviewed

A site called ReviLinux did a nice, short review of Puppy 2.17, and the reviewer uses an aged laptop similar to (but better than) my Compaq.

What the future holds for Puppy

Barry Kauler reveals future plans for Puppy Linux on the developer's blog.

If running Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux have taught me anything, it's the value of Dillo, the little Web browser that could. It loads wicked fast on my older systems, and while it doesn't do CSS or Java, what it does do -- display Web pages and the images on them -- it does quickly and well.

Dillo isn't part of the standard Add/Remove utility in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, but it is available in Synaptic. I installed it that way and then added it to the Applications menu in GNOME via the easily-found Alacarte Menu Mditor (Applications-Acccessories-Alacarte Menu Editor).

I'm going to do the same thing with mtPaint (which I don't even think is available via Synaptic, although there is a Debian package available to download.

Funny -- I could never figure out how to add things to the menus in XFCE, but with GNOME it's blissfully easy.