Who'd'a thunk it? Puppy does heavy lifting

[seldomseen]

For the past couple of months I've been sifting through a plethora of distros, trying to find the one I can use for "just getting my work done," a mission-critical system as it were.

While I love to experiment with Linux (I liken it to trying different engines and other parts in a well-tuned and tweaked-up car that you only drive to car shows), I needed one that just works, does everything I need, doesn't break unnecessarily. One on which I can keep my business records and notes, handle correspondence, develop ideas, and surf the web. Basic stuff.

Had two projects going on at the same time: 1) Building me a long list of candidates for that mission-critical system, with the Debians and the Slackware variations (including Vector, which I found the best of the "mainstream" lot), and 2) Customizing Puppy. The more I ran the li'l guy the more I liked it, but had reservations nonetheless -- "makes a good mission-critical system, just not an industrial-strength one," I wrote in my notes about a month ago. Well, proved wrong again ... the last links in that chain were finding a DotPup for jpilot (thanks brad_chuck and the folks at the Computation freebies board -- y'all know who you are!) and figuring out the multisession CD system.

Who'd'a thunk it? The distro I originally thought (with v. 0.9.1) was little more than a curious toy is now sitting in the front line as 1.0.4 Chubby, doing the heavy lifting as my main "mission critical" system. I'm self-employed (full-time taxi driver, part-time musician, some-time freelance writer), and Puppy is an integral part of keeping all that stuff straight, as a good mission-critical system should.

Y'all rock!

[Pizzasgood]

That's more or less my initial Puppy experience too. I figured I'd use Puppy to get a hang of linux (since it was a quick download, easy to use, and didn't need a partition) until I got my laptop, then I'd test a bunch of other distros to see what I liked. I eventually wound up finding Zipslack, which also didn't use a partition, but I wound up using Puppy more. Then I decided "What the heck? I'll play with the partitions" and successfully installed Vector. I used that for a good bit and really liked it. But, sure enough, I started gravitating back to Puppy. I used Vector once during the last couple months, and that was just for a quick experiament with Lilo. Turns out Puppy does everything I need, and does it faster. Now that there is a development package and a wine package, I can even compile (one of the reasons I wanted another distro) and play many windows games.

So, when I get my laptop, I'm going to be sticking with Puppy. I'll need a version of windows too, though, because the0 college I'm going to says so. I think I'll try to get away with 98SE, though. I can put that on for free and save a few hundred bucks. Then, if I win the lotto or something, I can just put vista (ughhh) on it when that comes out. If I do get XP instead, I'm not upgrading. I'd rather go the 98SE->vista route, because if I have to pay, I mise well get the better os, you know? I probably won't even do that, though. 98SE has made it this far, why not keep going with it? Eventually, it will be as secure as Linux, because hackers will focus on Vista rather than an eight year old piece of junk operating system. Besides, I doubt I'd like Vista any more than I like XP, and I already prefer 98SE to XP. My biggest problem with 98 is that ever since I installed my wireless card, it gets bogged down after about two hours and needs to be rebooted. Probably some memory leak or a messed up logging system or something. I rarely use it that long anyways, so I'm not bothering to fix it.