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My Workstation OS: Puppy Linux
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CommentsThe Puppy Linux distribution was started by Barry Kauler independently of any other distro. Barry went back to basics and reinvented a much better wheel. Puppy has an informed, diverse, and active support forum, a wiki (with news), and great developers who actually listen. The distribution is regularly updated.
Puppy is small, reliable, easy to use, and fully featured. Puppy boots from a CD, but I have installed it to both a hard disk and a USB keydrive. It saves configuration and data in one file on a hard disk transparently, so even though you're booting from a live CD your data is updated and saved on disk, though if you wish you can leave the hard disk untouched and use it as a normal live CD. Puppy runs in RAM, so it is fast.
Versions of the operating system will run comfortably on dated hardware. For newer systems, Puppy's USB keydrive version might be better (although if USB device booting is not directly supported in the BIOS the Puppy boot diskette can be used to kick-start it). It is also possible to load from Windows. Effectively, you can have an operating system and a wealth of software up and running on a computer that needs no hard disk, and then remove the media from which you booted, so that there is no trace of its ever having being there.
And it's amazing how much is in Puppy, running from RAM. Included are applications such as Mozilla browser, AbiWord, SodiPodi, Gaim, and Scribus, plus of course FTP, a mail client, text editors, media player, sound recorder, and utilities. It is kind of the Tardis of Linux distributions -- more on the inside than one would imagine.
Network, video, audio, Samba client, graphics, word processing, browser, e-mail -- all work. The latest Puppy version uses the Mozilla browser, and there are different editions of Puppy for Firefox, Opera, and Mozilla. These so-called Puplets were put together using Puppy Unleashed, a tool that lets you include or exclude every Puppy program in a custom Puplet distribution. Of course you can download and install Opera or Firefox in the normal way too.
Puppy is incredibly fully featured for a system that runs entirely in a RAMdisk. Its developers have chosen applications on the basis of size, speed, and reliability.
One of the aims of the distribution is to be easy to set up, so there are a number of wizards that take users through the process of a range of common tasks. A wizard takes three button clicks to connect to the Internet on my DHCP setup.
A PC for running Puppy Linux, ideally needs to have at least 128MB RAM (with no more than 8M shared video) for all of Puppy to load into the RAMdisk. It is possible for it to run on a PC with only 48MB RAM, because part of the system can be kept on the hard drive, or even run from a CD as the more common and much slower live CDs do.
My system is an Athlon 2000 with 256KB memory and a 16MB Voodoo PCI card. I was going to put another 256KB of RAM in and run Solaris. Instead I went the other way; simpler has less to go wrong. My previous OS was Windows XP, which I think is excellent, but I was spending too much time protecting it and cleansing the registry and so on. I spent 30% of my time maintaining the OS.
I have been using Puppy for about six months. I have the latest versions of Ubuntu, Kanotix, Vector Linux, and Windows XP running on separate hard disks. I still download distros, install them, see how ponderous and bloated they are, and go back to Puppy.
Puppy incorporates two easy-to-use installers: PupGet and Dotpup. Both are built into Puppy and will be merged in the future. They are both easy to use. DotPup tends contains more up-to-date or non-essential programs downloaded from the excellent Puppy wiki. PupGet contains alternative programs or those that did not quite make it into the main release.
Puppy's default window manager is Fvwm95, which provides a familiar Windows 95 retro look. However, I used the Dotpup installer to enable IceWM and Fluxbox.
I hope to eventually move to the developing Multi-Session Puppy, which saves data to a CD-RW disc. With this version, backups are automatic. Puppy is always new and exciting and has got me experimenting with programming in Gambas and Tcl.
You should try Puppy. You might just love it.
What's your desktop OS of choice? So far, we've heard from fans of FreeBSD, Mepis Linux, Debian, Xandros, Slackware, Windows XP, Lycoris, SUSE Professional, NetBSD, Ubuntu, FreeDOS, Libranet, Mandrakelinux, Arch Linux, Mac OS X, Knoppix, Linspire, Gentoo, PCLinuxOS, Yoper, Fedora Core 3, Windows 2000 Professional, Damn Small Linux, VidaLinux, Kanotix, VectorLinux, Irix, Scientific Linux, Linux From Scratch, Frugalware, Kurumin, and Foresight.
Comments
on My Workstation OS: Puppy LinuxNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
My name is Paul. I have been dabbling with a number of Linux distro's for at least 3 years now. I still consider myself a newbie. However, i have fallen in love with Puppy Linux. It is a very fast distro and I have been able to install OO.com and a number of other apps I use regularly. I have not installed Puppy on my drive. I boot from the CD and then pull the CD out and pop in an additional CD to listen to music or what ever. Because of it small foot print it runs well on my Compaq Presario 400 Mhz 128 Mg system. I have Win2K, Ubuntu and Blag on the other drive partitions. Don't get me wrong they have there qualities. But as each day passes i find myself relying on the Puppy to get the job done.
Give it a try! I am sure that you will agree that Puppy is a great OS.
Just my two cents,
Paul
Wow, puppy linux will run on 256 kilobytes of ram. I have gotta check it out.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;)
Imagine what such amazing thing could do for all those embedded systems in the world...<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-P
Best of luck to the devs on the future of this distro.
KDE
PS: I happen to be friends with barry's daughter but thats not the point<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... it in no way effects my judgement<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:P
I tried both Puppy and DSL a few days ago and I must say I like Puppy better than DSL, although for debugging computers, Knoppix is still my favourite.
Only one feature of Puppy did not work for me: The USB memory stick wizard did something, but it would not boot - the Laptop machine would crash with a screen full of binary when I tried to boot off the USB stick.
Puppy has all of what I need on a daily basis and I am already spoiled with the speed it starts and runs applications.
The best thing. This Puppy concept is so simple that it is easy to contribute with new applications compiled for puppy.
Multisession is the killer application for Puppy, if only some documentation is released by Barry for how it functions to achieve unionfs. It requires unionfs to load files in and out of ramdisk. Puppy has unionfs described in block diagram on its website. Also multisession can be done on cdr as described by all cdr burners made by Smart and Friendly. Many Puppy lovers are helping, but, documentation of Puppy is utmost of all things.
Hope this clearifies the multisession confusion.
atang1
The spirit of Puppy unlesched.
A 250 mb file on the hdd is only for Puppy developers' convenience not needed for users. So, a commercial Puppy should not load user's hdd with 250 mb pup.xxx file or even allow dual boot. A single livecd with multisession has its appeal even for public computers.
you really need a ram upgrade
Where's the quality articles that linux.com WAS famous for?
Does an article have to be ready to hand into an English professor to be informative?
I agree that serious grammar errors can be difficult to read, but I found that review well written, perhaps you should take a pill and just digest the information, instead of nitpicking
And 256kb RAM and he managed to type it twice, makes me wonder if this guy knows anything at all.
This seems more like a PR article by a Puppy employed nobrain PR manager.
Fvwm95 is that still alive?
Sadly Puppy does not have a PR department but I feel you would be perfect for the job, after all Puppy has nothing to prove or impress others with.
It works. It works for me and others who would not know an Athlon from an Athelete.
Yes Fvwm95 is alive and well as are trolls, which I believe is your esteemed role or perhaps I have misunderstood your true intentions?
If I have then I apologise.
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Recently, the capabilities of Puppy have been extended. You can now write savable content, either once, if you are using CD/R media, or multiple times if you are using CD/RW media.
Not only that, but you can also install this puppy to your hard drive or you can run it directly from RAMdisk - which, by the way, is VERY fast, faster than any disk based system you are used to using.
Finally, you can install extra packages not found on the main distribution by using Puppy-Unleashed compressed (.tgz) archives.
No much this puppy can't do. It is well trained!<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;-)
There is one other Live CD distribution that also contains really nice desktop software. That one is SimplyMEPIS. If you are intending to install to disk and you just want an easy way to make sure that Linux desktop software will work on your computer, SimplyMEPIS, in my opinion, is the way to go.
With the improvements in Puppy Linux, though, it is a viable alternative to SimplyMEPIS, whether you plan to use it as a RAMdisk loaded Live CD or as a disk based system.
Either one of these excellent Live CDs are well worth investigating. They are both simple and both have innovative ways of making it really easy to install and use their software without having a degree or weeks of training in how to install and use the software.
You are right about Puppy. It is a wonderful distro. I use it from time to time just because it is refreshing.
Something is cool about loading a whole OS from a USB stick into ram; plus it runs soo fast!
I like to keep it on my keyring for emergenies, and seeing my frinds faces when I boot thier machine(s) from it.
My Workstation OS: Puppy Linux
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 117.47.141.21] on October 07, 2007 02:33 AMPuppy rocks! Windows merely Sucks Rocks!
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 75.71.10.128] on February 05, 2008 01:45 AMIt sounds to easy to work just off-the-cd like that, but then, so does Puppy, and of course, most of the people seem to agree that it does that quite nicely. If Barry or maybe John Murga feel like paying me to write good reviews for them, I wouldn't argue, but they already GAVE me a most excellent operating system.
If the COW works as planned, it should give me the capabilities one used to only get from a Cray or similar machine. From machines that people Threw Away.
Doesn't get much better than that.
Puppy Linux is amazing
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 02, 2005 12:57 AMAnd on top of that, it runs quite snappy, even on machines slow by today's standards.
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