Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[BillK]

NewsForge is running a series on 'My Workstation OS'
They haven't done Puppy yet.
See:
<http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/06/03/2046247&from=rss>
for a sample.

One of you experts could get famous here. Get writing!

[Lobster]

OK here the start of the article if anyone wants to clean it up and send it that would be a Puppy task well done?

Anyone? (that means you dear reader)

===========

Small, self contained, comprehensive, new Linux user friendly

Puppy distribution started by Barry Kauler independently of any other distro. Barry went back to basics and reinvented a better wheel. Puppy is very small, reliable, easy to use and fully featured. The distribution is regularly updated, supported and documented. Puppy and all the applications run from RAM, making it the fastest Linux. Boot time from CD to a running environment is less than 30 seconds. Again faster than some Linux bloatware. Included are applications such as Mozilla Browser, AbiWord, SodiPodi and Gaim. Extra programs are easily installable with Pugets and Dotpups - it incorporates two easy to use installers. Puppy is considered useful for working on old computers, as an emergency rescue system, as a Linux demonstration system and increasingly as a general purpose operating system. It can boot from:

* A flash card or any USB memory device (keydrive): (flash-Puppy)
* CDROM (live-Puppy)
* A Zip disk or LS/120/240 Superdisk (zippy-Puppy)
* Floppy disks (floppy-Puppy)
* An internal hard drive (hard-Puppy)
* A network
* An emulator

The options to create a Puppy version for hard disk, USB, Zip disk etc can be done from within live-Puppy (the CD version). The default window manager is Fvwm95, which provides a familiar Windows 95 retro look. However many users use the Dotpup installer to enable IceWm or Fluxbox and end up with machines looking like KDE, Mac, XP or totally unique

When the system boots, everything uncompresses into a RAM area - the "ramdisk". The PC ideally needs to have at least 128M RAM (with no more than 8M shared video) for all of Puppy to load into the ramdisk. It is possible for it to run on a PC with only 48M RAM, because part of the system can be kept on the hard drive, or even left on the CD as the more usual and much slower live CD's do.

Puppy is incredibly fully featured for a system that runs entirely in a ramdisk, but applications are chosen on the basis of size and speed. Puppy GUI applications are considered functional and fast. One of the aims of the distribution is to be extremely easy to set up, and so there are a number of wizards that take the user through the process of a range of common tasks.

Version 1.0.3 is the latest version of the distribution which uses Mozilla 1.8. There are different editions of Puppy for each of three major web browsers: Firefox, Opera or Mozilla.

Older versions of the operating system will run comfortably on very dated hardware. For newer systems, the USB keydrive version might be better (although if USB device booting is not directly supported in the BIOS the Puppy floppy disk can be used to kick-start it). It is also possible to load from Windows (http://www.freeveda.org/linux/puppy/index.html). Effectively you can have an operating system and a wealth of software up and running on a computer that needs no hard disk, and then remove the media from which you booted, so that there is no trace of its ever having being there!

[JaDy]

Please note: PupWin98.zip from freeVEDA.org loads from Windows 98 but does not run within Windows. That is, one double-clicks on a Windows desktop short-cut icon which re-boots out of Windows, into MS-DOS and runs Puppy Linux.

[Lobster]

Thanks John
- have amended the above text - hope it is improving . . .

Have spent the morning sprucing it up and sent it to Newsforge