(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

As we are coming up on the end of the year I want to take a look at a project which is unique and outside the mainstream of Linux projects. I don't think any project embodies distinct and useful technology quite as well as Puppy Linux does. Puppy's 5.4 "Slacko" edition was released recently and it struck me as an interesting and fun way to wrap up the year.

I tried running Puppy Linux on two physical machines, a desktop box (dual-core 2.8 GHz CPU, 6 GB of RAM, Radeon video card, Realtek network card) and my HP laptop (dual-core 2 GHz CPU, 4 GB of RAM, Intel video and Intel wireless card). In addition I ran Puppy in a VirtualBox virtual machine. The results were quite varied. On my laptop Puppy worked perfectly. It booted quickly, the desktop was responsive, all of my hardware was properly detected and I had no problem getting on-line. My display was set to my laptop's maximum resolution and volume was set at a pleasant medium level. On the other hand, Puppy refused to boot on my desktop box. The distribution would lock up almost immediately upon starting the boot process. I've encountered other distributions which would only boot on this desktop machine when given certain kernel parameters such as "nomodeset". Puppy was not so forgiving and I never did get it running on the desktop.