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Getting to know Puppy Linux (modified 0 times) Webmaster Profile In this article at DesktopLinux.com, guest columnist Michael C. Barnes provides an introduction to Puppy Linux, a "small Linux distribution" that offers an "amazing" combination of speed, size, completeness, and ease-of-use. Starting out more as a demonstration distro than a full desktop OS, Puppy Linux has rapidly "evolved into a real workhorse distribution whose completeness is astonishing," and that "should be part of any organization's enterprise tools," according to Barnes. Read the full article . . . http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT6545156120.html . . . and then post your comments or questions here, as a REPLY to this thread. 05-17-2005 20:30:25

RE:Getting to know Puppy Linux (modified 0 times) Lobster Very comprehensive and well balanced review. I feel however this statement is misleading to most peoples experience: "The boot time from the CDROM is slow, but once Puppy Linux loads, everything works at blazing speeds." Puppy boots in 30 seconds or less, that is faster than most distros take from hard disk and in many cases faster than Windows. Once loaded Puppy is as you say 'blazingly' fast. Version 1.0.2 has just been released Hope you continue using and enjoying Puppy as I do :) 05-18-2005 04:20:40

RE:Getting to know Puppy Linux (modified 0 times) Michael C. Barnes I did a lot of testing with older and slower computers. Perhaps a faster computer would speed up the decompression process. For most of my applications, boot up speed is not a real factor. What is important is how well the applications run once the system boots up. I have tried operating several popular Live CDs. One of the big frustrations is that long load time of Open Office from CDROM. This can be particularly frustrating if Open Office is simply acting as a viewer to read e-mail attachments. Puppy Linux operates much faster once loaded than virtually any Linux. Perhaps with a faster processor, the boot time is speeded up. My comment on the boot time was not ment to be critical. 05-18-2005 08:21:04

RE:Getting to know Puppy Linux (modified 0 times) Rick I have to agree with Lobster -- Puppy boots quite rapidly from CDROM. Of course, it's so small, why wouldn't it! I'm trying it out on a 4-year-old Sony VAIO notebook computer that's loaded up with its original Win 98 OS. I'm noticing some really amazing features of Puppy, like: it manages to remember settings I make when I use it, after I power the system down and back up again! How the heck does it do that? Where is it storing variable data? I looked in the /mnt/home/ directory (which, interestingly, is the system's Windows OS root) and I don't see any obvious puppy datafiles there. Anyhow, I like Puppy so far -- totally amazing! Clean, fast, and -- somewhat magically -- works. 05-18-2005 08:25:11

RE:Getting to know Puppy Linux (modified 0 times) Walt If that part of Puppy hasn't changed, then there is a file created somewhere on the hard drive (e.g., pup0001) where the settings are stored for future use. I believe the size of the file corresponds with the amount of RAM on your system (although I may be remembering incorrectly). I gave Puppy a try a few versions back and had to give up quickly because I couldn't configure internet access with it on my laptop. The PCMCIA modem is at ttys02 - COM 3 in the Windows world, and Puppy couldn't find it, as I recall. There was also a problem with long user names and passwords in the dialup program (wvdial, I think). Anything over around 20 characters caused the setup to fail. Where version 1.0.3 comes out (fixing the printing problems in 1.0.2), I may take this puppy for another walk around the block. I'm currently using Feather as my installed system, and nice as it is, I'm looking for alternatives now that the developer has decided to step away due to time constraints. I like the idea of a distro I can download on dialup in less than a day. (I'm on a very slow dialup connection.) I also like a distro that is less than 250MB in size, since I download them on my Linux machine, then transfer them to ZIP disk so I can load it into my wife's XP machine to burn the CD-ROM. (I don't have a CD-RW as yet, and my computer is older, so a USB burner will likely be slow. Feel free to suggest other distros. I've tried SLAX 5.0.4 (haven't figured out printing yet), GoblinX 1.1 (downloaded when I had access to a network connection - booted to a black screen), BeatrIX (didn't care for it), and DSL (like Feather better). Walt walt_huntsman [at] myrealbox [dot] com 05-18-2005 10:24:42

RE:Getting to know Puppy Linux (modified 0 times) Keyfitter I didn't bother to read the article as I have already tried out Puppy Linux. It is an amazing distro that is well worth using. I'm sticking to SuSE 9.2 Pro as my main distro due to the fact it suits my needs better. At some point I may see what Puppy will do with a flash drive. I like the idea of a portable OS that goes anywhere. The only thing I question is "ease of use" for beginners. I started using Linux with SuSE about nine months ago so there was no problem using Puppy Linux but I could see that Puppy might be a challenge for someone who has never tried Linux. 05-18-2005 17:55:41

RE:Getting to know Puppy Linux (modified 0 times) jeffq This was a very good review. I have been using Puppy for a while and was waiting for someone to do a review. I think Puppy is amazing and has a bright future. Thanks for making the effort to review and share. 05-19-2005 09:04:02

RE:Getting to know Puppy Linux (modified 0 times) reeng It works very well on some of the older machines but can't recognise SATA harddrives, USB keyboard / mouse when I tried it on a newer computer. So I am sticking to Kanotix & Slax for now.. 05-21-2005 01:36:41

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