TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Puppy Linux is one of several lightweight distributions I've used in the past, and I remember being quite impressed with the sheer volume of features the maintainers of this ultra-lightweight managed to pack into 100MB.

It is with much disappointment that I find this latest release of Puppy no more useful than Damn Small Linux when it comes to practical, offline concerns. Allow me to expand on that.

Install:

The 100MB LiveCD starts by asking you what keyboard and screen resolution you want, then you're up with the default desktop. They won't win any awards for presentation, but at least there are helpful directions on the wallpaper.

The "install" icon on the desktop doesn't do what you might think. It actually starts up the Puppy Package Manager. I think perhaps this should be renamed.

The actual installer is found in this menu. The first screen asks you about partitions. If it can't find any you have the option of using GParted to make them. Once that's done the installer continues.

I chose the "full" install as I wasn't hurting for space. A "please wait" dialog popped up. I was then asked where I wanted the bootloader. When I finished the installer and shut down Puppy, I got an interesting dialog asking me if I wanted to save my preferences. I didn't, but I've never seen a LiveCD do this before.

My first reboot brought me to this boot screen. That's where the trouble started. I chose the first option. This brought me to a black screen. There was no indication of anything happening.

I decided to play around with the GRUB settings and see if perhaps it was a video issue. I removed the "vga=773" line and tried again. That seemed to be the problem. Note to self, next time don't choose the fancy framebuffer boot option for GRUB.

I thought I was fine, until the boot messages froze. I decided to do the rest of this rant from the LiveCD.

Software Selection:

Java and GCC were not installed, but much like DSL Linux I wasn't very surprised. A program called mtPaint replaced GIMP. AbiWord was the word processor of choice.

GAIM was installed as well, which is interesting. It must have been an older version from before the name changed to Pidgin. Mozilla Seamonkey was the default web browser. It reminded me of Netscape Navigator 4.

The game selection wasn't as extensive as DSL, but offered an interesting variety. There was a Frozen-Bubble like game called "Bubbles", a Bejeweled clone called "Gem Game", a game called "GTKFish" that I couldn't figure out, a 3D Rubix Cube, and a Minesweeper game.

Conclusion:

Puppy is a nice compromise of tiny and feature-rich. If only it would install properly on my test machine, I wouldn't have to dock it a penguin. As a LiveCD it's not bad, but its small size shows.

Much like similar micro-distros their very nature makes them hard for me to use as a regular desktop, and Puppy is no exception. Although it has a few more bells than Damn Small Linux, I still can't use it for anything other than LiveCD recovery tasks.