Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Sage · Joined: 04 Oct 2005 Posts: 4622 Location: GB

I posted that yesterday, CP!
Deli is not quite what it seems. Maybe it will run in 8Mb RAM, but this is a truncated console mode. For full GUI with Firefox, 32Mb is needed. Puppy can do that with swap space. ...And it is 130Mb.
Jinx is the one to beat.

Colonel Panic · Joined: 16 Sep 2006 Posts: 1224

I think you can get by with 16 MB of RAM in Deli if you use Dillo and links graphic, but it's more limited than Puppy offers with Seamonkey or Firefox. The biggest problem I had with Deli (0.7.1) was that the video settings only went up to what was possible with about 1 MB of RAM, so if you wanted, say, 1024x768 you were stuck with 8 bit colour.

It's a good attempt at a Linux distro for old computers though, and I'm glad it's found someone (Henry Jensen) to work on and develop it.

wdef · Joined: 13 Apr 2007 Posts: 91

I'm very familiar with DamnSmallLinux, some of my scripts are in there.

It's quite different to Puppy in most respects, so how-long-is-my-organ type comparisons are a bit silly.

Puppy is probably easier for newbies in that there are more generous configuration GUIs and (eg) gxine and abiword are there ready to go.

For an old machine with 48MB ram though, provided I had a little geek aptitude, I'd go with DSL and then learn a about how to install uci and unc extensions to conserve ramdisk.

Where Puppy shines is probably running off flash, since it has the write-to-flash every 30 min architecture. Also, Puppy has a 2.6.xx kernel, gtk2, and Xorg, not to mention things like ipw2200 drivers, so it's consequently bigger and will run things that won't run on dsl out of the box. But dsl is designed to be light, small and stable, and it's very solid if you know how to use it and you don't need all the latest packages (though I've compiled quite a number of new progs to run on it).

Puppy is easier to compile things on.

I agree not a huge amount changes between dsl releases, possibly partly because the formula is not so bad as it is, but there are ongoing bug fixes and improvements, Geeks and geek-in-training who use dsl tend to be fans of unix minimalism, want the lightest possible system, and don't care much for bloat, KDE, Gnome, etc.

It's also nice to do whatever silliness you want on dsl and not have it bugger up your backup. On Puppy, everything is getting put into your pup_save.sfs, so, if you break your system, you usually have to throw that file (and whatever is it in) away, unless you want to mount it and try a repair. Not so with dsl. If it hangs and you reset, there'll be no backup. Or if you don't want to keep whatever you've installed/broken, you just disable the backup.

A plus for dsl is it's Knoppix heritage, which means it's got Klaus Knopper's virtuoso bash scripts doing things like hardware autoconfiguration. I do admire Mr Knopper's elegant and very tidy code (even if he is fond of opening subshells at the drop of a hat and doesn't seem to believe in indenting). Knoppix proper I always find just too big.

But Puppy's great too. These are different things.

Sage · Joined: 04 Oct 2005 Posts: 4622 Location: GB

A more informed and eloquent assessment than the one I gave above, but I arrived at the same basic conclusions from the user's perspective. Not a scintilla between us, wdef. It is ludicrous to dismiss DSL - there are many more worthy distros meriting the torch - start with Zenwalk, for example!

Bruce B · Posted: Sat 19 May 2007, 15:33 Post subject:

Lobster · Posted: Sat 19 May 2007, 21:34 Post subject:

Colonel Panic · Joined: 16 Sep 2006 Posts: 1224

Arachne's still being developed and has reached about 1.90, but it's quite limited for anything other than routine site browsing. It has a couple of good features that I wish other distros woul;d copy though, suich as favourites getting saved in an HTML file which can easily be used by another browser without the hassle of having to import them.

Here's the URL if anyone's interested;

http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/

I'd quite like to have a DOS partition on my machine, but Windows XP occupies this computer's primary partition and AFAIK DOS won't install on a logical partition.

Colonel Panic · Joined: 16 Sep 2006 Posts: 1224

HairyWill · Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 2949 Location: Southampton, UK

wdef · Joined: 13 Apr 2007 Posts: 91

GuestToo · Puppy Master Joined: 04 May 2005 Posts: 4078

Flash · Posted: Sun 20 May 2007, 15:20 Post subject:

Colonel Panic · Joined: 16 Sep 2006 Posts: 1224

Yes thanks, I'll be using that one too

HairyWill · Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 2949 Location: Southampton, UK

Seamonkey preferences now includes an experimental section for a roaming profile.
You have to enter the details for an ftp account that you can write to and presumably it saves and loads your profile there automatically. I haven't used this.

I have a script set to automatically ftp my bookmarks.html to my webspace every hour. What is weird is sometimes when I am doing a web search I actually get directed back to my own bookmarks file. I must be a world expert on some of the stuff I'm interested in. It is really handy when I'm somewhere else knowing I can still access my bookmarks.

Another way of doing this is to use an online social bookmarking/tagging service such as http://del.icio.us.

stevesr0 · Joined: 24 Jun 2007 Posts: 169

I am an old but nonadvanced user of Linux and have been using an old laptop (foreign generic 266 Pentium MMX w 192 MB RAM and 6 gig harddrive) to learn more about linux.

My primary strategy has been to use live CDs to test suitability of different distributions. Some have rather easily booted the machine and found the old sound chip and smoothly played internet radio stations (Knoppix 5.1.1), while others needed a nudge (DSL 3.3 needed a modprobe opl3sa2) and others needed the ALSA Wizard (Puppy 2.16.1). The Debian etch live cd, recognized my sound card automatically, but I couldn't get the radio to play. For others, I struggled but haven't managed to get sound working (Kanotix, which is based on Knoppix, Mepis 6.5.02 and 'buntus).

After trying many distributions, it dawned on me that I would confuse myself less if I limited myself to distributions that ran relatively fast as live CDs on this machine. I have been impressed with the subjective quickness of DSL, Puppy and also Wolvix (although I haven't performed objective measurements), and have been most recently trying to compare DSL and Puppy.

At this point, DSL is working better on this old laptop than Puppy in the following ways:
(1) Boot up time is much faster (on almost all live CD distributions other than DSL, I experience a 4 and a half minute pause while the program searches for the linux distribution on the CD).
(2) When the system is up, I can make sound workable in DSL simply by a modprobe command; in Puppy, modprobe gives me an error message and I have to go through the ALSA wizard configuration.
(3) When I try to play an internet radio station, with Puppy (Gxine) the sound cuts off frequently and seems sensitive to use of other windows, while it is continuous in DSL (XMMS) and not affected by activities in other windows.
(4) Since the laptop case is partially broken and I need to keep it taped to a surround, I am no longer trying to use my wi-fi cards on this machine, but rather just a Netgear NIC. With DSL, the connection was automatic, while I had to tell Puppy to use a tulip driver.

Overall, both of these distributions are good performers on this laptop, compared to most other live CDs which continually need to access the CD.

As I get more knowledgeable, my preferences will likely change.

In a few months (I am retired and don't need to rush this <g>), I will advance to trying a hard drive install.

Steve