(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.
Every once in awhile, I check Amazon to see what books are upcoming in various categories (using the "publication date" option), and just such a search has uncovered what looks to be the first Damn Small Linux book, 
It's a small Linux, all right, and the main version is based on KDE, with the wonderful KOffice (smart quotes!!!) also on board. There is also a "Kill Bill" version that includes Wine preloaded to run Windows apps (now you know which Bill we're talking about), and a small version to fit on a 128M USB drive (now if I could only figure out how to make a USB flash drive bootable ....).
I thought that it was the power drain from the CD-R drive that made the Thin Puppy's fan turn on, but it turns out that the fan's sudden spin to life had nothing to do with the added drive. I confirmed this by pulling the drive out from the Thin Puppy, which was lying on its side to accomodate the short cables. Once I removed the CD-R, the fan stayed on. When I stood the Thin Puppy upright, the fan went off. Put back on its side again, the fan starts up. Strange. Is there a short in the wiring that somehow resolves itself when the thing is turned at a 90-degree angle? I can't worry about it too much because the Thin Puppy (Maxspeed Maxterm thin client) never gets all that hot. The VT133 portion of the chipset gets the hottest, but the Via C3 1 GHz CPU never gets that hot -- and it's got a heatsink that's piped and connected to the metal case for maximum heat transfer, so there's really nothing to worry about.
I finally got around to stuffing the Thin Puppy (Maxspeed Maxterm thin client) with 256 MB of PC133 RAM, and now I can even load dailynews.com, with all its various Flash animation components, WITHOUT killing the Thin Puppy. With the new memory, there's about 48 MB of RAM left over for Puppy Linux 2.14 to play with. I'd love to see how Damn Small Linux works with this setup, but it -- and all other Debian-based Linuxes I have on CD -- won't even boot. Something about a disk error. Well, whatever's in error there is not with Puppy, which is running fine right now.
Now that the Thin Puppy is out of commission due to the dead CF card, I booted 
Initially I wanted to have at minimum an internal CD-RW drive, and for that the Cappuccino systems excel. But for real-world use, I think a totally driveless, fanless system -- and one with a little processing power to make it all run good -- is what I want. The best I've seen is the 
For comparison's sake, here's a system from Cappuccino PC, the 
But on another front, taking inspiration from the Mac Mini for size, from Linux for value, adding the flash-memory version of Puppy Linux, 
I've been learning about what makes PCs go together, and I've been fascinated by the Mini-ITX standard, freakishly small motherboards, with cases and peripherals to go with them.