Other Distros

[Colonel Panic]

I've just installed the latest testing version of Vector 7.2, A0.3.6, and it's working well and is one of the few distros available now which allows you to log in as root.

One thing I don't like about it though compared to earlier releases is that they've gotten rid of the Quick Picks, which was a really good way of installing some of the more popular software packages people would use.

Also, Vector has a simpler installation process than Slackware, which is a plus for new users in particular. However, this comes at the cost of being able to set up the ability to mount USB drives and windows partitions automatically when the distro boots up, when you're installing the distro; as you can in Slackware and other Slack-based distros such as Salix and Zenwalk.

[bark_bark_bark]

I installed Slackware 14.1 yesterday alongside Windows 7. The only thing different I really had to do this time was install the binary nvidia drivers, and that went smoothly.

[starhawk]

For once I took a look at a non-Pup.

Linux Mint "Rosa" XFCE.

Compared to Puppy, there's a lot more of what I'd term "polish" -- it fits together better if you know what I mean. Puppy is kind of cobbled together from whatever works and fits... Mint is a bit more elegant in that regard. (Ever watch Star Trek...? Think of our stuff as a bit like the Borg... crude but highly effective tech. Mint is more Federation style, hardly a cable in sight.)

That said, I couldn't get the old Chromium offered (v.34) to install while running from DVD, and it is rather obese at 1.3gb of download. Took nearly an hour just to get it downloaded!

[bark_bark_bark]

star trek references do not compute. I myself am a Doctor Who fan.

[starhawk]

Off Topic: Dr Who is one show I wish I knew more about. I've only ever seen one episode. Loved it to bits, but haven't had the opportunity to catch more since (USA, no operable TV signal -- with few exceptions I find TV to be mostly trash, so up till now I've not really felt like I was missing anything of importance).

On Topic: there are scripts in Puppy that barely sort of work but haven't been touched since 2003 or so. I once asked my local guru friend to help me understand a script that's part of PetGet -- he ragequit about halfway through because of how badly it was written. Something about taking an MD5sum of an MD5sum, IIRC... the overarching philosophy of Puppy is that if it works, it's good enough -- even if the thing that works is really just a bandaid fix that isn't meant to be permanent. Heck, there are parts of mainline Puppies still extant, I'm told, which date back to about v.2.14...

Let me take a different tack with metaphors, then. Cars.

There was a car in East Germany called the Trabant. It's probably the most well known car of its kind... it had its fifteen minutes of fame as the most common make of vehicle to find its way through the Brandenburg Gate immediately after the wall came down -- but there's a lot more to it than that.

A Trabant is a crude machine as far as automobilia (I think that's a word) is concerned. Its body isn't sheet metal, but rather a composite of cotton canvas and plastic called "Duroplast" that can be pressed into shape like sheet metal despite being a little easier for the government of the time and place to source and produce. The engine in a Trabant isn't sophisticated, either -- it is the mechanically simplest two stroke smoke-bomb that they could come up with, and IIRC it has a nasty habit of drinking oil almost by the gallon -- and not just what you have to mix in with the gas! It is simple, basic, clunky and clumsy to the point of brutish -- but dreadfully effective if what you want is simple and basic transportation with absolutely as few frills as you can stand. The upshot is that a particularly gifted chimpanzee can be trained to fix one when something breaks down (okay, I exaggerate -- but only slightly!) and with regular attention, it will last until the body panels disintegrate entirely... and, depending on the condition of the chassis (it's hardly a monocoque type construction!), it very well could outlive even that prediction.

But the Trabant was one more thing -- transportation for a population that desperately needed that brutishly simple vehicle. It could be said that the Citroen 2CV, Fiat 500, Renault 4CV, and indeed the original VW Beetle were all intended for the same purpose -- but they all manage to pull it off with more panache and flair -- and in some cases, elegance -- than the Trabant.

Puppy is a Trabant. It is simple, effective, functional -- but its construction (not to mention the stuff under the hood) is truly frightful! With regular tinkering, of course, it will run virtually forever -- and while you may need to pull it completely apart and rebuild it every so often just to keep it running, it's worth it because it gives you exactly what you want, nothing more, nothing less. (You wouldn't be using it otherwise.) True, there are other choices (in the relevant car paradigm that would be Volkswagen's Type 1 (not yet called the Beetle) and a number of offerings by Wartburg) but there's just something about this particular one that makes you smile, even if it does take most of a weekend to fix it when you go 'round that one bend a bit too fast.

[Colonel Panic]

Puppy as a Trabant? Quite good, except that Puppy is one of the fastest distros out there, whereas a Trabant is, er... slow.

I think if Puppy was a car it would be something like an old Lotus Elan;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT7bAd9Pra0

[Keisha]

Hi everybody,

In case anyone is wondering where I disappeared to, about a year ago...I tried Fedora, and then soon thereafter Korora which is a fully-fleshed-out family of Fedora spins (mainly, Korora includes the gcc compiler. This was helpful, because I needed to compile my wifi driver first before I could get online). There's a KDE spin, a Mate one (in regular Fedora the Mate spin comes with Compiz, not sure if the Korora one does or not), a Cinnamon one, a Gnome 3 one, and an XFCE one.

I placed the (64-bit) XFCE spin on a 16 GB usb 3.1 stick, which did take a bit of trickery, and there are a few quirks in Fedora/Korora which require some learning...but, once accomplished have never looked back. It boots reasonably quickly, is absolutely reliable, it Just Works, is almost as fast as Puppy/Quirky, and the package manager is about the equal of Synaptic (in other words, superb).

If someone could take the principles involved in creating DebianDog and apply them somehow to Fedora/Korora 23, to come up with a slimmed-down loads-in-ram version, I think it would be a world-conqueror. At least, on equipment new enough to run it.

PS Yes it is possible to boot Korora from the grub4dos on my first hard disk. Here is the relevant section of menu.lst. An empty marker file named korora-23-usb resides in the top directory of the usb stick where Korora is installed. A copy of the Korora kernel is in /mnt/sda1 (where grub grldr and menu.lst reside) in subdirectory /Korora-23.

Code: Select all

# menu.lst produced by grub4dosconfig-v1.9.2
color white/blue black/cyan white/black cyan/black
#splashimage=/splash.xpm
timeout 10
default 2

title DebianDog-Jessie-686-pae on sda1
root (hd0,0)
kernel /DebianDog-Jessie-686-pae/live/vmlinuz1 from=/DebianDog-Jessie-686-pae/ changes=/DebianDog-Jessie-686-pae/live/ base2ram copy2ram noauto init=/bin/systemd nomodeset irqpoll
initrd /DebianDog-Jessie-686-pae/live/initrd1.xz

title TahrPup-605CE
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd  /this-is-sda1
kernel /TahrPup-605CE/vmlinuz
initrd=/TahrPup-605CE/initrd.gz

title korora-23 on usbstick
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd  /korora-23-usb
kernel (hd0,0)/Korora-23/vmlinuz-4.3.4-300.fc23.x86_64 root=/dev/mapper/korora-root ro rd.lvm.lv=korora/root rd.lvm.lv=korora/swap rhgb quiet LANG=en_US.UTF-8
initrd /initramfs-4.3.4-300.fc23.x86_64.img

Cheers from the dark side!

[6502coder]

Puppy as a Trabant? Quite good, except that Puppy is one of the fastest distros out there, whereas a Trabant is, er... slow.

I think if Puppy was a car it would be something like an old Lotus Elan;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT7bAd9Pra0

I'm with you! That Colin Chapman beauty with the stainless-steel backbone and minimal weight is very much like a classic Puppy! My first dream car...never did own one of course.

[Fbang]

I've yet to see a decent Windows PE live disk desktop.

[cthisbear]

" I've yet to see a decent Windows PE live disk desktop."

Falcon boot cd.

Chris.

[Colonel Panic]

Puppy as a Trabant? Quite good, except that Puppy is one of the fastest distros out there, whereas a Trabant is, er... slow.

I think if Puppy was a car it would be something like an old Lotus Elan;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT7bAd9Pra0

I'm with you! That Colin Chapman beauty with the stainless-steel backbone and minimal weight is very much like a classic Puppy! My first dream car...never did own one of course.

Me neither, but it remains one of my favourite cars. Right at the end of its production run, in the early 70s, Lotus produced a version called the Sprint with an uprated engine and several other modifications, and these are very much sought after nowadays.

Here's a video which shows why (if you want to skip to the bit where the car is actually being driven, it starts at 6:50);

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3KWU1qlfIM

[starhawk]

Puppy as a Trabant? Quite good, except that Puppy is one of the fastest distros out there, whereas a Trabant is, er... slow.

I think if Puppy was a car it would be something like an old Lotus Elan;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT7bAd9Pra0

Well, if you must have it as a Lotus, it would probably be an Eclat Puppy does need tinkering!

[Puppus Dogfellow]

I'll agree -- nice, fast and doesn't tax my dated ride.

Though it doesn't remember my interface, Android tethering works without a hitch.

i was booting from more than one cd and had the add-in packages on three different old two-gig thumb drives--thought my lack of interface persistence was because i couldn't keep track of anything, but perhaps it wasn't. unpleasant old machine with a droopy lid and a loud fan, but i could hook it to a t.v. large enough to place at a distance, get a long cord for an external keyboard...may play some more in the near future. think i'd also like to see what the distro's like on a more capable machine.

[Burn_IT]

I would have likened it to a Reliant Scimitar if you're going to use a vehicle.

[starhawk]

Oh boy, I'd somehow managed to forget about that one.

Good choice

[Colonel Panic]

Oh boy, I'd somehow managed to forget about that one.

Good choice

I think this discussion deserves its own thread - what car would Puppy be

Yeah, I'd settle for Puppy as a Reliant Scimitar; it was a great car (I like the name too). Just one caveat though, from experience of a short drive with a friend giving me a lift in one; if you're more than six feet (1.83 m) tall as I am, don't sit in the back.

[Billtoo]

I've been using wmlive for several weeks and have now installed it to
the hard drive of my 2008 intel imac:

Summary
Computer
Processor 2x Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8135 @ 2.40GHz
Memory 4032MB (1844MB used)
Operating System Debian GNU/Linux 8.3
User Name bill (Bill)
Date/Time Sun 14 Feb 2016 02:10:47 PM EST
Display
Resolution 1680x1050 pixels
OpenGL Renderer Gallium 0.4 on AMD RV610
X11 Vendor The X.Org Foundation
Multimedia
Audio Adapter HDA-Intel - HDA Intel
Operating System
Version
Kernel Linux 4.2.0-0.bpo.1-amd64 (x86_64)
Compiled #1 SMP Debian 4.2.6-3~bpo8+2 (2015-12-14)
C Library Unknown
Default C Compiler GNU C Compiler version 4.9.2 (Debian 4.9.2-10)
Distribution Debian GNU/Linux 8.3

I added many applications with the package manager (synaptic)
kodi,kdegames,etc. and after adding gdebi I was able to download and
install 64 bit versions of Google Chrome and Google Earth from the root
terminal.

Works great.

[Colonel Panic]

Excellent! Window Maker's one of the best window managers out there.

I've always liked Exton's spins on popular Linux distros (including Puppy of course), and the latest one I've tried is Ex GENT, a live DVD wich is based on Gentoo and has Opera installed instead of Firefox.

It works well but for an over 2GB disk I think it should have LibreOffice installed as standard instead of AbiWord.

(I've also tried ExTix, another good distro and one based on Ubuntu 15.10. It's very good but oddly it doesn't come with XArchiver, so you have to download that if you want to unzip / untar anything.)

[Burn_IT]

The Scimitar was always sold as a two plus two so that doesn't surprise me at all.
It was also a strictly dry weather car both because it leaked like a sieve and, more importantly, it was nose heavy and handled like an excited puppy or a pony on its first outing (it had an affinity for lampposts and hedges.)

[Colonel Panic]

The Scimitar was always sold as a two plus two so that doesn't surprise me at all.
It was also a strictly dry weather car both because it leaked like a sieve and, more importantly, it was nose heavy and handled like an excited puppy or a pony on its first outing (it had an affinity for lampposts and hedges.)

LOL. One good thing about it though is that it wouldn't rust, being made of fibreglass rather than steel.

There was another car from about the same time which also was made of fibreglass and had a Ford engine - the Gilbern. They were made in Wales and were very rare (I think I saw one once, but I can't be sure). Here's one of the later models, the Invader;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbern#/ ... 994_cc.JPG