So Glad to Have Rediscovered Puppy

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bobnutfield
Posts: 70
Joined: Wed 23 Jan 2008, 15:59

So Glad to Have Rediscovered Puppy

#1 Post by bobnutfield »

Hello Everyone,

Well, it has been six years since I have posted on this forum. I just wanted to applaud the Puppy developers, the community and the distro itself.

I have have been away from my Linux hobby for a good while. My little daughter was born in 2011 and that is where most of my time goes now. But my story is just this:

I received a new laptop for Christmas last year. A reasonably good spec, 4 core AMD with 8GB memory. But it had Windows 10 on it, and I despise it. I would have normally just wiped the drive and installed some flavor of Linux, but my wife does not like using Linux, so I left it alone. Besides, with the new boot configurations, I couldn't figure out how to dual boot it because you have to jump through hoops to boot from anywhere but the hard drive and I just didn't the time to investigate it. So when I wanted to do anything in Linux, I had to use my 2008 Toshiba Equium AMD64 dual core. I had Ubuntu on it and originally, it ran great. But, after six years of update/upgrades of Ubuntu, it had finally become so bloated and corrupt I knew I had to get rid of it and start over. So, I backed everything up to my personal cloud at home and wiped the drive. I never anticipated what would come next. Only one or two of the new versions of Linux would even install to it. Everything would just hang during the process. The only thing that would install and run was Linux Mint Cinnemon, but it has issues as well. It will not shut down properly and it is just too slow on this old Laptop. I believe I have tried 5 or 6 live distros looking for one that would install. After a week of testing, I gave Puppy Xenial on a USB stick a try.

Wow, I have been blown away the vast difference and improvements since I last used Puppy in 2012. It runs from the USB stick on this old laptop like it was brand new: radically fast! It is also a COMPLETE distro now. I used to feel I was missing a lot when I used it last (maybe it was the bells and whistles that weren't there.)

I have left Linux Mint on the hard drive for the moment while I continue testing Puppy Xenial. I have to relarn everything I used to know. But so far, if installing it to the hard drive means I will have this kind of performance permently, I'll do a full install and leave it at that.

So, I just want to say that I am grateful that this project has continued for so long to give us the product we now have.

Thank you and long live my dinosaur laptop!!

Bob

foxpup
Posts: 1132
Joined: Fri 29 Jul 2016, 21:08

#2 Post by foxpup »

Welcome back to Puppy, bobnutfield!
Yes Puppy is very much alive.

Do you remember that the proper way to install Puppy is frugally? You can install it that way next to Mint.

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bobnutfield
Posts: 70
Joined: Wed 23 Jan 2008, 15:59

#3 Post by bobnutfield »

Thank you for your reply. I am in the process of relearning everything. I am not a Techie (actually semi-retired now at 68 years old), but I have been using Linux on and off since the mid-nineties. I can find my way around, it just takes me longer and requires a little effort on my part than someone more experienced.

As soon as I learn (or find the instructions), that is what I am going to do. As it is, running from the USB stick is pretty good. It saves all of my settings and work to the hard drive to save the live of the USB stick. But this community is wonderful (I remember that being true even way back.) When it is time to do it, I know someone will walk me through it. It feels as though this laptop has just earned another twenty years of life!

Bob

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rockedge
Posts: 1864
Joined: Wed 11 Apr 2012, 13:32
Location: Connecticut, United States
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#4 Post by rockedge »

I have such a performance boost and great stability regardless of what I throw at Tahrpup's and Xenialpups that I now use several frugal installs on the main Hard Drive..... each set up to the max for the work that system I want to do. One for a open source CCTV camera security system, ZoneMinderOne for film/video/photography one for making electronic music and one for openoffice or the free German office package...here is the site if interested...www.freeoffice.com

32bit version softmaker-freeoffice-2016_767-01_i386.deb


Each of the frugal installs take little space and all of them together compared to some of the Linux distros still take less space. Using several setups helps prevent a total loss of a whole totally well tuned system if I mess the system up with some attempts to get some programs to run and break some thing.

Lots of possibilities and really makes my older hardware fast and run like new.

What makes Puppy Linux so powerful is the community that goes with it.

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Mike Walsh
Posts: 6351
Joined: Sat 28 Jun 2014, 12:42
Location: King's Lynn, UK.

#5 Post by Mike Walsh »

@bobnutfield:-

Welcome back. Nice to have you with us again.
bobnutfiled wrote:So when I wanted to do anything in Linux, I had to use my 2008 Toshiba Equium AMD64 dual core.
Hah! You think that's old? I run 3 Pups, triple-booting on a 2002 Dell Inspiron 1100.....P4 -powered, natch. OK, she's no speed demon (that P4 is the bottle-neck, I know it - but I'm stuck with it, unfortunately). Slow and steady is the order of the day.....but as a semi-retired, full-time carer in my late 50s, I have plenty of time on my hands.

Slacko 570, Lucid 5287 & Xenialpup 7081 all run very sweetly together.....and run a hell of a lot more snappily than Ubuntu, Xubuntu or even Lubuntu ever did. She's cursed with one of the most fiendish graphics devices Intel ever turned out in the early days; the 'Brookedale'-cored, 'Extreme' graphics chip. Easy enough to work around (when you know how), but in my early Linux days, 4 years ago, I knew next to nothing about such things. Fortunately, Tahrpup came to the rescue.....and everything worked properly, OOTB.

I've been exclusively Puppy-only, also on a big old pre-HP Compaq desktop, ever since.....except for one 'weakness'. I installed Anti-X, around a year ago, following many people saying how good it was for elderly hardware. They were right.....and with using ROX as the file-manager, I felt right at home. Being based on Debian, it's very stable, too.

Yes, what makes Pup so good is this community; one of the most fantastic bunches of guys'n'gals I've ever had the pleasure to encounter.....and the friendliest, too. Do stick around; the more, the merrier!

Foxpup's right. Don't do a full install; that's only for seriously RAM-challenged machines (which yours is not). Create a small partition for Puppy (anywhere from 5-10 GB, ext3), do a 'frugal' install to that, run Grub4DOS, and.....Bob's yr Uncle. Sorted. (Sorry; couldn't resist that!) Frugals also have a lot more advantages over a 'full' install, that's for certain.....including the use of the 'load-on-the-fly' SFS packages; one of Pup's real strengths.

(And Grub4DOS is so much easier to use than GRUB2.....which is, IMO, one of the most over-complicated, bloated and misbegotten abortions ever to be foisted on the Linux community, by the likes of Canonical and RedHat. The Ubuntu community, in particular, seem to think it's the best thing since sliced bread... Poor, deluded fools. I know for a fact that one guy on the Ubuntu Forums (oldfred) specialises in nothing else but instructing people in how to use it correctly!!)


Mike. :wink:

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mikeslr
Posts: 3890
Joined: Mon 16 Jun 2008, 21:20
Location: 500 seconds from Sol

Don't do a "Full Install"

#6 Post by mikeslr »

Hi bobnutfield,

Let me repeat in capital letters what rockedge and Mike Walsh have said:

DON'T DO A FULL INSTALL.

If you've got the time to read them, here's why not:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 683#980683

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 462#979462

Suggested systems to try: You've already noticed how much Puppies have improved in their access to applications. Puppy Package Manager has become really good ('though not perfect) in being able to install applications from Ubuntu's repositories (or download them so that you can create SFSes). Slacko --based on Slackware-- has always been good. Slackware's upgrade policy has always been conservative. This translates into a more stable system, but one with fewer non-essential applications.

You already have Xenialpup. Tahrpup will run a little "lighter". Slacko 6x about the same as Tahrpup. Slacko 5.7 remain Mike Walsh and my "fall-back-workhorse": light on resources, can do pretty much anything. And don't hesitate to look at the Derivative Subforum for variations using Xfce or Lx as Window-Manager: "Modern look" -- same solid Puppy. And try out Musher0's xenialPup-7.0.6 32-bits with kernel 4.1, http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 619#971619 which was built to run Xenialpup on less powerful computers.

And check out what's available on the Additional Software-Desktop SubForum [especially FbBox] for changing the 'look and feel' of even the basic Puppy. But be careful. :wink: Once you've gotten a Puppy running on the Toshiba Equium AMD64 with a modern interface your wife may insist on a trade. :lol:

mikesLr

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rufwoof
Posts: 3690
Joined: Mon 24 Feb 2014, 17:47

#7 Post by rufwoof »

Mike Walsh wrote:And Grub4DOS is so much easier to use than GRUB2.....
I use both Mike, grub4dos menu.lst entry of ...

Code: Select all

title chain grub2
find --set-root /boot/grub/i386-pc/core.img
kernel /boot/grub/i386-pc/core.img
boot
that chains to the grub2 boot. Primarily so I can also boot a bsd.rd by including a /etc/grub.d/40_custom entry

Code: Select all

menuentry 'OpenBSD bsd.rd' {
kopenbsd /bsd.rd
}
That way in Linux I can download the latest bsd.rd snapshot (9MB file) to / and then reboot to boot that ... and run the cli installer, which takes around 5 minutes to install using http. Reboot that fresh install and pkg_add firefox .... or whatever i.e. pristine clean system fully updated to the latest fixes/security patches/versions.

I have various other boot choices hanging off either the grub4dos menu.lst or in grub2. Of the two grub4dos is my preferred choice, however kopenbsd isn't available under that.

hamoudoudou

grub4dos is the easiest..

#8 Post by hamoudoudou »

"Of the two grub4dos is my preferred choice" no doubt grub4dos is the easiest..
Ubuntu packages all has been transfered to debian.. without ubuntu scientists. the question is 'will Debian develop Ubuntu packages ? "
People coming from Ubuntu try to invent new boot system for Puppy. Grub4dos is really too easy for them. they had better to develop some applications. I don't think Debian will take care "made in Ubuntu" apps.
Some french members seem to prefer img2key compared to grub4dos, but only because img2key fails, and that makes brainstorming old neurons.

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