Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[swindledc]

Puppy is impressive. It meets its proclaimed objectives. It can be installed on a wide range of devices. But who will use it in preference to a big OS (whether Windows or a major Linux Distro)? What will they use it for? How can we help and encourage marginal users to use Puppy rather than something else?

I'm stirring a bit, but this is a serious question. I have Suse Linux 9.3 installed on my home desktop PC and newest laptop, and use Windows XP in the office.

I can reveal in what circumstances I use Puppy in preference to a big OS, but before doing so I'd like to hear what other people use it for.

[costal martignier]

i think everyone in this forum wil tell you something other as answer

i'm using it as a portable linux on my usbstick..
able to boot directly from the stick, or with qemu directly under a running windows or linux

a complete OS on a small 512 MB stick, allways on me...
really great...

regards
costal

[raffy]

Hi.

For me it's more of a simple lifestyle. Use a PC with as little effort as possible using minimal hardware. Am also trying to teach teachers this perspective so that they can reach out to students using the Internet and with minimal effort.

I suspect, though, that I could adopt this point of view because I use mostly HTML, with which all you need to share information are graphics and text.

And since I already have Puppy and it is capable of mixing sound, I add sound to the easily handled media.

[cherriepuppy]

like many people,I have only got an older laptop, puppy has given this laptop a new lease of life due to its low memory and HD requirements.

cherriepuppy

[dewdrop]

Hi,

I use Puppy to access the Internet, and just about everything that is not related to music editing/writing/etc - for that I still need Windows. I also use Puppy for writing documents, keeping family finances up to date, etc.

But, a recently initiated questionnaire on one of the Desktop Linux basically asks people to fill out a questionnaire about what keeps them from coming over to Linux completely (what programs they can't live without that are only in Windows). If memory serves, I think it was Ubuntu that has the questionnaire.

Asking people what they want for programs, then trying to satisfy that need, is apparently a "new" concept for the Linux Community at large...at least that's the impression I got from reading the article.

It will be interesting to see if it bears any fruit.

dewdrop

EDIT #1 - I went to the DesktopLinux.com website and copied the following from the article I noted above....and it was Novell, not Ubuntu that did the questionnaire....see below.

dewdrop

"Jan. 27, 2006

Sometimes a no-brainer idea comes along, and we wonder: "Why didn't we think of that before?" Novell, writes DesktopLinux.com columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, is the company that had the seemingly obvious brainstorm -- a survey to determine which Windows-only applications people want to run on their Linux systems.

"Yes, this kind of survey has been done before, but to the best of my knowledge, no major Linux vendor has ever done it," Vaughan-Nichols writes. "It's one thing when Linux Lovers of Outer Mongolia puts together a survey; it's another thing entirely when a billion-dollar software company does it."

Novell will then take this information to independent software vendors (ISVs) and tell them: "See, here's your customers, now, how about doing some porting?" he continues."

EDIT #2

Here's a website that Novell is using to post the results of their survey.

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/16798.html

[babbs]

Hmmm...

On my desk top - Hard drive install...
On my laptop - Live CD...
On my company's laptop - USB Boot...

I use Puppy morning, noon and night

I still continue to use Fedora Core 3 some because I haven't taken the time to migrate all of my files to Puppy. I continue to use Red Hat at home because my web server is Red Hat.

Is that what you were looking for?

[Pizzasgood]

I use Puppy for anything Puppy can do. I listen to music, burn cds, web-surf, do research, do homework, write spoofs, create web sites, create art, communicate, write scripts for Puppy, help people with Puppy, make puplets, play StarCraft (with Wine), check my spelling (sometimes, an only for my homework), watch flash animations, etc.

I'm probably missing a couple things. I'd add programming a game, but I haven't gotten around to working on it in Puppy yet (though I did in Vector, and the executable runs in Puppy).

The reason I use Puppy: It's small, fast, and can still be just as nice-looking as the big distros (I'm just usually too lazy, but I did put in the smooth-peach or some such theme from Vector once). It was also a good place to learn Linux, and the community is awesome. It's also exciting to be right in the middle while Puppy grows to be "big" and strong (well, big for a chihuahua).

[basic]

Puppy can do what the basic computer user needs a computer for.
No hussle, no viruses, no nothing. Just an operating system that works.
And it doesn't need the latest & greatest hardware. Plain & Simple to you maybe, but it depends on the user.

[Lobster]

Puppy is the OS for the Tmxxine project
http://tmxxine.tumblr.com/

I use Puppy for everything

Mozilla to browse
Graveman and burniso2CD for creating CD's
Gaim for Chat
mtpaint, Gimp and Inkscape for graphics
NVU for Web pages
Sylpheed for email
Gftp for FTP
Audacity for pawed casting (podcasting in ogg vorbis - Puppy style)

Why not use Solaris, Big Linux or Windows?
Speed, reliability and Barry.
I enjoy Puppy. I find the forum and enthusiasm contagious.
I do not find Linux to be fun - I find it rather boring. Windows too. Puppy is constantly surprising. If I mess up - a few minutes - (usually 3) and I have a new Puppy running. Puppy suits me. Are you having fun yet? With another OS? Good - use it.

I use Puppy.

[Sage]

Hr prof dr Klaus stated that his groundbreaking masterpiece was originally intended merely to demonstrate the power of Linux to unbelievers. Look where Knoppix is today!
So it is with Puppy. Barry's genius is spreading well beyond his initial intent. Notably, it can bring back to life discarded older machines that might otherwise pollute our planet and threaten our heirs.
Can't forsee any similar altruism on the part of the DWintel cartel or other multinational capitalists.

[willhunt]

is there something you can't do in puppy
I have lotsa reasons to use puppy I can think
of $170 reasons right off the bat!
in my humble opion puppy is the most goof
proof distro out there I have tried most
and it works fast on everything machine
I've installed it except the 233
puppy also has to be the most striaght
forward linux distro I've seen! the forum
is lively and full of very real helpfull ppl

[deshlab]

the two things that keep causing me to boot back into winxp are connecting to my sony clie pda and the foobar2000 player (i haven't looked much into solving these issues yet - for the clie I tried following some howtos, which didn't work out; a foobar replacement hasn't surfaced yet?)

for all other major software tasks puppy works fine, only faster.

there are still many small utilities which increase my working speed under windows, but it took time to find those and i'm pretty sure that with some more time i'll find much of that for linux as well.

[swindledc]

Thanks to all who've replied.

I have more or less finished with playing with puppy and putting it into different dog-baskets. Now I want it to grow up and be a serious working dog.

Sometimes the fit in the dog-baskets wasn't very good, and there were unexpected crashes in places. I couldn't get the run-from- windows-98 version to work. The ordinary live-CD versions of 1.06 and 1.07 ran faultlessly, but running from CD they were a bit slow to boot up. I could not get the multisession versions to save onto CD.

After a lot of work I managed to get a floppy boot version to work reliably, based on a cut-down version of Barry's boot disk.

I'm sceptical about Puppy's usefulness for old computers, unless they're only 3 or 4 years old. I *did* get Puppy 1.0.7 working, after a truly enormous amount of effort, on an old Thinkpad laptop (560? 570?) with 800 MB drive and 80MB Ram, external floppy drive and no CD drive, but two PCMCIA slots. In the process I seriously damaged my existing Windows 95 installation on the drive by having to remove a lot of software to make room for Puppy. When I'd got Puppy to work, it was useless, because neither XVESA nor Xorg would cope with my Trident video and I couldn't get a display that was clear and stable enough to expect anyone else to use. End of project.

QEMU puppy is brilliant - but it's a toy. And it doesn't run reliably off the new U3 pen drives.

The only case now where I use Puppy for serious work in preference to SuSE 9.3 is when I want to switch the PC on and look at something on the Web in a hurry. Floppy-Puppy is much quicker than the big operating systems.

I think Puppy would be useful for ME users who want to move to dual-Windows/ Linux systems rather than upgrade to XP. With ME, you can't defrag the disk properly if you've ever had an anti-virus program installed, so you cant safely make a new partition to install Linux. A floppy-boot Puppy with the pup001 file in the Windows partition solves the problem.

[costal martignier]

[swindledc]

hmmm...Costal, how do you test boot a live CD from a computer that's already running?

I guess it's understandable for the Swiss to promote global warming, what with that snow and ice you have, but over here we're encouraged not to leave electronic equipment in standby mode, in order to save carbon.