Carolina 1.2 is simply the schizzle, IMHO!
Been trying out a few more recent distros lately, and was especially interested in the new LTS release of Xubuntu 14.04 and how it (and others) compare to Carolina. And... meh. Carolina does pretty much all that it/they do, but faster/flawlessly from USB stick and is easier to setup, with all of the handy little tweak apps that you devs have included. After throwing dozens of apps at it, I only once ran across an issue involving 'Lina's older glibc(?) - trying to get TeeJay's Conky Manager to work - so no big deal, really.
Just outstanding!
That said - over the months I have ran into a few (minor) glitches that may or may not be directly related to my newb hack attempts at trying out different things - but I'll throw 'em out here anyways, in case some others have noticed similar issues (hopefully providing evidence that it's not purely my fault, after all!
). These issues seemed common on a few different frugal USB installs, running on various older (2005-ish) computers here...
1) PupsaveConfig doesn't work - one must enter the desired value (in my case '0', for no periodic save) in the ramsaveinterval line 9 of 'pup_event_frontend_d' in /sbin, to reflect the '0' as set/saved in Pupsaveconfig. Searching the forum indicates this is a somewhat common, older issue?
2) Initially, the "Run Command" from the default Xfce Applications Menu did not work (entering a command and pressing "enter" did nothing), but then seemed to function normally after the App Menu plugin was removed and re-installed to the panel a time or two (a moot point for me anyway, as I'm now using the super-nifty Whisker menu instead).
3) After some odd amount of normal use installing/uninstalling packages, the PPM seems to "break" somewhat - in that, out of the blue, it begins to always display the "error - package xxx failed to install", even though the application appears to install and run just fine. This has eventually been the case on three different 'Lina USB frugal installs I've done.
Interesting to note that, when a Puppy's PPM is working normally, there appears to be a period of time (maybe 5-6 seconds) during the install process where the CPU spikes as PPM goes through some kind of file cleanup/uninstall file writing or ?? - but once "broken", the Carolina PPM doesn't display this behavior - quickly throwing the error message instead. Maybe some important cleanup/data not being done/written? Dunno, but the installed apps seem to function normally.
4) The selected mouse cursor theme (Polar, in my case) appears to have difficulty loading on boot, defaulting to the small black cursor about every other boot - adding various 'sleep' times (of a few seconds) to the '0-cursor-theme' script in the /root/Startup folder has mostly appeared to fix the problem. I think... so far, so good, anyways.
5) Might be a Firefox 26 issue - selecting "Open containing folder" from Firefox's download manager toolbar button opens
three instances of Thunar. I haven't been able to find much info regarding a fix (or even the problem, itself) whilst Googling around the 'net. Maybe a result of dragging my .mozilla folder out of the savefile space and symlinking back...? Odd, anyhow.
6) Not a Carolina issue, but the Xfce weather panel plugin only very ocassionally displays any data - and even then the data appears to be a bit out of date/erronous, compared to more local USA sources (Yahoo, Accuweather). Seems like the Norwegian source of data may not be too reliable - shame, really, as the plugin displays a very nice set of info at a very small cost in bandwidth.
Otherwise, lovin' it. Carolina is about as close a sub to my trusty ol' XP that I've run across, in hopping amongst a few dozen distros - Puppy and otherwise. Outstanding Puppy!
Bob