What I want in a to-go distribution and what puppy delivers

What features/apps/bugfixes needed in a future Puppy
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papaschtroumpf
Posts: 250
Joined: Fri 17 Jun 2005, 04:23

What I want in a to-go distribution and what puppy delivers

#1 Post by papaschtroumpf »

I made a list of what I want in a "to-go" version of linux for it to be really useful for me. Everyone has different needs. I probably forgot some stuff, especially the obvious, but off-hand that's what I remember using other liveCDs for.

Note that I want to use puppy on a 1G USB drive, with most of the space dedicated to data

The distro basically has 3 main uses for me:
- entertainment (audio,video,web and games)
- data access and remote access (upload/download and remote access to my various machines back home or at work)
- diagnostics/system both for the host machine (i.e. fix a screwed up windows machine) and the network itself.


Audio/Video
- be able to play DVDs
- be able to play (S)VCDs
- be able to play MPEGs
- be bale to play DivX/Xvid
- be able to play (and hopefully stream) Real Audio
- be able to play (and hopefully stream) Quick Time
- be able to play (and hopefully stream) WMV
- be able to play MP3s
(- be able to play OGGs)


Images (mostly as support for my digital camera)
- be able to retrieve images from my camera using USB
- be able to browse images on the drive GTK See
- be able to edit/resize/ change image format Xpaint, MtPaint?, Gimp


Internet/Remote access
- be able to retrieve files over FTP wget, Gftp
- be able to connect using telnet telnet
- be able to connect using shh (shell window) ssh
- be able to use port forwarding over ssh (more than 1 too) ssh, ssh-gui
- be able to control a remote machine using VNC client tkVNC
- be able to control a remote machine that is running windows remote desktop RDesktop, RemoteDesktop (not tried yet)
- be able to download torrents CTorrent
- be able to browse the net (firefox preferred)Mozilla, firefox
- tab support in the browser highly preferred
- want the browser to be able to remember passwords, bookmarks, ...
- be able to see flash based web sites supported
- be able to browse java enabled web sites not on CD but I think I saw a reference to a dotpup in the forums
- be able to chat (ICQ...) Gaim
- be able to place H323 calls
- be able to place Skype calls skype
- be able to use Teamspeak client

Networking
- be able to use a variety of wireless cards
- be able to "snoop" a network using Ethereal (or at worst tcpdump)
- be able to connect to a windows network (samba) GTk Samba


Storage
- be able to access the host hardrive for Read or Write
- use the same USB key that contains the OS for additional storage mount it as msdos? had permission weirdness
- be able to access files on the USB key both from linux and windows
- be able to write data CDs
- be able to write audio CDs (from wav or mp3s)
- be able to rip CDs (to MP3s)
- be able to rip DVDs (to DVD4 or to divX)
- be able to rip a (data) CD to an ISO
- be able to zip and unzip .zip archives tkZip
- be able to unrar .rar archives
- be able to work on disk partionning (add remove resize)


Office/PIM
- be able to read/write MS-Word compatible files
- be able to read/write Excel compatible files
- be able to read (write optional) PowerPoint presentations
- able to display PDF files Ghostview
- able to display PostScript files Ghostview
- be able to "print" to PDF file (both from editors but also from browser for example)
- syntax highlighting text editor with serach/replace, ... Beaver
- print to a variety of printers, especially networked
- address book
- calendar with pop-up/audio alerts


Games:
- the more the better!
- ideally I'd like an FPS game but it's probably prohibitively big because of the size of the graphic libraries like SDL. If there is a way to just not load it in memory unless used that might work though. CUBE would be a good candidate for a lightweight FPS (and it's mutliplayer)
- not that having flash and java in the browser gives acces to a lot of games, for example a number of PopCap games.


Other:
- ability to use perl
- hardware detection and listing (for diagnostic purposes)
- diagnostics tools
- antivirus (which must be able to use an up-to-date virus database) F-Prot although I haven't checked the databse up to date part yet.



I started looking through the 1.0.3 "release" ISO and added the names of the programs provided that performed the desired function. I haven't played with it for more than a few hours so I'm sure I'm missing some that are there.
Some of them (like skype, firefox and perl) are available from what I gather in the forum, even though they're not included on the CD.

There is a number of apps on the CD that I can't imagine needing (3 vector art programs???) so I could take them out if I were to build my own.

Note that I have no use for an email client since I use GMail exclusively and most ISPs nowadays offer email web-access on POP3 accounts.
Mandriva LE 2005 user and puppy newbie

EarlSmith
Posts: 198
Joined: Fri 06 May 2005, 03:23
Location: Chelsea, Alabama, USA

#2 Post by EarlSmith »

You seem to expect a lot out of our Puppy. Since we are around the 60mb size now, what do you think your final size will be? Will all that fit in 1gb. Maybe you would save time with Mandriva and just take out things you don't need.
Anyway it sounds interesting...good luck!

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BarryK
Puppy Master
Posts: 9392
Joined: Mon 09 May 2005, 09:23
Location: Perth, Western Australia
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#3 Post by BarryK »

Yes, you have missed a lot.
For example, Gxine will play most multimedia formats.
ical or Xcalendar for calendar functionality.
Linneighborhood for Samba.
...the list goes on. Your assessment so far has been too superficial.

There should be no problem with mounting the usb partition.
It is msdos, so will have the limitations of that filesystem.

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papaschtroumpf
Posts: 250
Joined: Fri 17 Jun 2005, 04:23

#4 Post by papaschtroumpf »

Sorry, I didn't mean that I was done matching my "needs" with puppy. I'm very aware that it can do more from my list than I have listed so far.

Earl, yes I expect my "to-go" linux to do a lot. Since all of knoppix fits in 700M I would think that stuff on my list should fit in something much smaller, but aos probably larger than 60M.

What I like about puppy, but may ultimately be a problem is that it stays in RAM so it's fast, but the larger the image the more RAM the host computer will need (I think, I'm still trying to figure out what happens if the cram_fs file won't fit on the ramdisk).

I am looking at feather-linux also, which is a "light" version of knoppix that weighs in at about 200M
Mandriva LE 2005 user and puppy newbie

penguinman

USB keys are cheap

#5 Post by penguinman »

USB keys are cheap.
and puppy is free.

Why not have a seperate USB key for each set of functionality.

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