Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

theotherjeff · Joined: 26 Jun 2009 Posts: 1

It's a pretty distro and runs slowly-enough-for-demo-mode from the CD on my old junk. I only wish it would properly install its GRUB exactly the way Ubuntu does. After following the onscreen defaults and typing whatever suggestions it has about boot partitions, it reboots into nothingness - something like a bootloader not found. Teen Puppy would attract so many more users if only it were easier to install without SuperGrubDisk, RTFMs or forums.

spongedaddy · Joined: 02 Jun 2009 Posts: 38 Location: Winter Park, FL

Hello all,

Call me an enthusiastic Puppy newbie.

Over a year ago I burned CDs of both Puppy 4.0 and Xubuntu 8.04. After about a year of trying to get Xubuntu to do what I wanted and becoming increasingly frustrated with its poor performance, I stumbled upon my Puppy 4.00 CD (I had somehow lost it). I dropped it into my drive and away I went.

What a revelation! After a week of working off the live CD, I said farewell to Xubuntu and installed Puppy (full HD install) on my old Dell OptiPlex (Pentium III Coppermine/512 RAM/wireless network). As a 49-year-old ex-IBMer, current web developer/technical writer and editor/coding apprentice, I've never had a computer experience that had me amping to get home from the office to play with my computer.

Thanks to this great forum, I've got devx_400.sfs installed and am compiling successfully. Fonts are next.

So, yes, as a newbie I would certainly love to help in any way I can. I know just enough C (and Perl and PHP and BASIC) to get in trouble Wink

, but I'm pretty darn handy with documentation. Any suggestions for a good starting point would be appreciated.

Many thanks!!

johnheav2 · Joined: 26 Jun 2009 Posts: 5

Puppy is absolutely ingenious, and I am recommending to friends who fight w/ their PCs contstantly over malware. I think with just a little tweaking, it would be much more widely used.

We need a way to understand the file system. May of us cannot conceptualize how the various folders (mnt/lib/etc/) relate to one another, and what they're for. Perhaps it would advantageous to hide those from view that users *typically* do not need on a daily basis, as Windows sometimes does, with the option of making them visible if needed. Just an idea.

The pup_save file behaves strangely, at times. Mine often grows although I've added no packages, and I don't know how to prune it back. Can anyone explain this?

Which leads to my last point. I've yet to find any *clear* documentation on how puppy works. Not in Linux-speak, but in terms the average user (who is coming from a Windows paradigm) can understand.

But again, what a great package. Thank you for all you developers do. This is a tremendous distro.

ec.matter · Joined: 27 Jun 2009 Posts: 1

Installed 4.2.1 to a USB stick last night. Everything works. No complaints.

rookiet · Joined: 17 Jun 2009 Posts: 11

win7 is beautiful,hope puppy linux can be the same.

As the puppy's fonts not looks good,I have spent lots of time to study and reset the fonts.But the effect is not as good as ubuntu.

I took the snapshot in puppy,then opened in winxp,surprisingly,it looks very good.

Why?

StOlEnDeStInY · Joined: 26 Jun 2009 Posts: 22

I don't see any package which could help me join a Windows domain as a Puppy Linux user.. In Ubuntu we could use Likewise, I cant see a solution in Puppy Linux and that is giving me second thoughts about installing Puppy..

Benboom · Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 31

mikeb · Joined: 23 Nov 2006 Posts: 4378

mikeb · Joined: 23 Nov 2006 Posts: 4378

ecomoney · Posted: Mon 06 Jul 2009, 11:20 Post subject:

This thread has turned into a goldmine of information of how Puppy can be Improved. Thank you very much to everyone that has taken the time to reply and give their suggestions for positive improvement. Every Puppy Developer should read this thread for ideas to more productively spend their time.

pupfan · Joined: 06 Jul 2009 Posts: 1

A friend and I have been discussing what Puppy should have for it to really take off in popularity. The first that we agreed on was it had to auto mount and ether play audio CDs or put up an easy to understand menu. The next was it needed to do the same with DVDs. Number three, It should have non computer wording to walk a newbie through getting on the internet. It's easy enough for us, but for people new to computers the wording will just confuse them. We also believe it needs to be easier to install. When my friend and I first played with it we had a hard time installing it. I know it's a no brainer, you have to make your ext partition and swap file before installing but we were new to Linux and didn't know that. One other thing that would have been number 5 but has been taken care of is photos. If you ask new users, most of them will tell you those five things are what they want a computer for. We are big fans of Puppy and we want to see it number one. The things we like about it is it's small size and the fact that it runs in ram which makes it very fast. We are not geeks nor will we ever be, Just too old, but we sure do like Puppy. Thanks Barry and all you guys who help out.

mikeb · Joined: 23 Nov 2006 Posts: 4378

pooklaroux · Joined: 15 Mar 2006 Posts: 60 Location: Columbus, Ohio

I'm not a new new newbie to Puppy or Linux, but I am always helping other people with their older computers, and one way I do that is by burning them a disk of Puppy, and getting their old PC to bark like a new one.

I do email and blogs, and forums like this mainly. I don't personally do myspace, or facebook, or second life, or even instant messaging (actually I hate that. i had to have ICQ for a job and I've hated it ever since.) I visit you tube rarely. My biggest problems have been figuring out how to open a docx file, and printing. I love CUPS, BTW!

What the people I help generally want to do is email, surf the web, look at pictures online, watch videos on you tube, watch dvd's in their pc (if they have a dvd drive) listen to music, hook up their ipods, one person wanted to make ringtones for her phone. I never did figure that out. Ditto with the ipods. Also, it seems like you tube made some kind of upgrade recently, and some of the people I helped came back and said "Ican't watch videos anymore" -- and I still haven't gotten to the bottom of that yet. Something about flash 10, I guess.

Anyways, a puppy or puplet that does all those things in a one or two clicks way would be a major evangelistic tool for me.

ragaman · Joined: 14 Jan 2007 Posts: 186

Open Office Writer 3.x can open docx files.

To view Youtube videos, update flashplayer to version 10. Just search this forum. There's a .pet lying 'round here somewhere.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?search_id=70104333&t=27978 There's the thread on Flash 10.

My greatest headache with Puppy so far has been network printing. I've ran Puppy for months without printing. Any print job is sent to my other machines through pnethood. I wish Puppy would just autodetect network printers and then ask the user for permission to set them up. Saves us hours of futile tinkering.

ecomoney · Posted: Tue 07 Jul 2009, 08:32 Post subject:

Hi MikeB, no not a friend of mine, just someone who has made the same observation. Very Happy

The latest puppy 4.2.1 has had the flashplayer upgraded so it works with Youtube out-of-the-box, and it also (after much pain I might add) opens .docx in Abiword. You can get it at www.puppylinux.org

Ive used GtkPod for ipods

http://www.gtkpod.org/screenshots.html

Puppy Package here

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=25819

pooklaroux, I think you make another important observation, "Computer Experts" such as ourselves use different websites/programmes to most less-technical out there (pun intended), and this is where other linuxes have difficulty reaching the mainstream....if the (volunteer) developers have no need for an app/service/website support, then it doesnt get developed. Crying or Very sad

Here at Puppy we do try a lot more than most linux's to accomodate.