zenfunk wrote:The idea is sound - reduce weight by using command line console apps instead of GUI programs. But the DOS apps generally aren't suitable for the technical reasons mentioned, and applicable Linux CLI apps don't really exist.
You know kmandlas blog?
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/
Loads of tips on CLI apps.
So far the only thing not possible on the CLI IMHO is word processing (Yes, I know wordgrinder, I just don't think it'll cut it for me). One workaround would be to run an early MS word inside dosbox.
I wouldn't. I have early MS Word here, and it works. The problem is one I mentioned previously - I need to deal with
current file formats. Early MS Word won't have a clue about current Office doc files, let alone the new XML based docx format. (MS makes changes in their underlying file formats with every new release. I wound up bringing in personal copies of Word and Excel at a former employer, because a remote office had bought and was using a newer version of Office then we had, and was sending us files we couldn't read...)
If I'm going for CLI word processing, I'll likely use SUE, the Simple Unix Editor. SUE is a Unix port in C of the VDE editor originally written in Assembler for CP/M systems by Eric Meyer. VDE was a clone of WordStar, but faster because it did things in one file with no overlays and edited entirely in RAM. It also had things WordStar did not get till later, like macros. Eric switched development to MS-DOS (and the DOS version is still maintained and supported, with a November 2009 1.96a release). He turned his Assembler source over to Carson Wilson, who continued to develop and enhance the CP/M version as ZDE. A chap named Bill Kuykendall hired Carson to do a Unix version. It's not an exact VDE clone, as some things in VDE have no Unix equivalents, but it maintains the basics including the WordStar command set. I have a Linux build that runs fine in a terminal window on Puppy.
I'd be more concerned with handling spreadsheets and Adobe PDFs.
As the computing environment evolves, there will be more hard decisions for Puppy fanciers. Internet usage is a major current issue, as there's a limit to just how small the internet apps can be and still do what people want. For instance, Dillo is a well regarded lightweight browser. Goof HTML, good CSS, no JavaScript. Oops. JavaScript support is a requirement for a large amount of what you might want to do while surfing. Witness also the issues in getting flash heavy sites to work in Puppy, like Youtube. Personally, I don't even try. My old Puppy box simply doesn't have the horsepower to do an acceptable job of rendering the video. I get a sequence of still pictures instead of smooth motion.
Although firefox takes about 20 seconds to start, once it's up and running the speed is acceptable on my PII 300 MHz. Having 15 tabs open all the time is certainly a no go, but 4 or 5 are no problem. That's also a reason why firefox is kinda the default browser in PULP- it is feature rich and is kinda fast enough for my browsing needs. If I'd have a slower machine, I'd probably go for dillo more often.
Which Firefox version? I use FF 3.6, and it takes about 30 seconds to load here, from a UDMA 4 HD using an ext4 filesystem. (It took 45 seconds to load on ext3.) Performance is sluggish but bearable. FF 3 had an assortment of memory leak bugs squashed in FF 3.5. FF 2 is too far behind the curve. Current web development efforts are focusing on things like HTML 5, CSS 3, and newer ECMAScript standards. Older browsers will increasingly be left behind, because they can't handle the newer standards.
Indeed, the development of the Internet is the biggest hurdle. Increasingly, machines are assumed to have a broadband Internet connection and run software that adheres to current standards. If either of those aren't true, the user will have an assortment of problems. If you run Puppy on low end gear, standards support is likely to bite, and lack of broadband may, too.
Dillo is a nice browser: small, light, and good at what it does. It's what it
doesn't do, like JavaScript, that make it an emergency only choice for me.
You are right, I can't watch youtube inside firefox on my machine (about 2 FPS - LOL), but a plugin for downloading the video separately is included. So, I can watch most youtube videos with mplayer just fine.
If that works for you, great. My Puppy machine is not my primary system. The desktop is a 2ghz Pentium box with 4GB RAM, triple booting Win2K Pro, WinXP Pro, and Ubuntu 9.10. If I want to watch Youtube, I do it there, or possibly on the SOs XP Pro laptop.
The notebook running Puppy is a relatively small, light, travel machine, capable of doing the basics, like word processing, spreadsheets, ebook viewing, and email. It's not a multi-media media machine because it simply doesn't have the horsepower to do it well. I knew that going in, and don't care. That's not what I use it for.
Opening doc or odt files:
You can use abiword in pulp, takes more than 5 seconds on my machine. If you just want to have a quick glance, you can double click the file and it is converted to txt by antiword and automatically displayed in the text editor- about 2 seconds.
AbiWord does everything in RTF, converting as required. If RTF is suitable, fine. If you need to save your changes back to the original format, you may have issues.
There are many ways to speed up processes- you just have to hack around the machines constraints a bit.
Which I've been doing, as the opportunity allows.
If you have to do your office stuff for your company all this is probably not enough, but for a hobby computer I don't see why your Pentium I or II should be obsolete. Also think about people that can't afford newer hardware. I think they deserve something like PULP which is IMHO a good compromise between a fully fledged Gnome desktop and a CLI distro.
I largely concur. My Puppy box is a hobbyist machine, and is in part an experiment to see what performance I can wring out of older hardware
without spending money on hardware upgrades.
And I'm aware of the folks who for whatever reason are stuck with older hardware. Puppy is an apt choice for them, as it can probably boot and run reasonably on obsolete machines. But depending upon what role it is expected to fill, some level of compromise will be required, and there will be things the user simply
can't do.
Cheers, Christian
______
Dennis