Mean Puppy was one of our fastest Puppys. It used Opera so was not for me but many people recognised the innovation and I always thought you would combine MurgaLua and MeanPup . . .
Oh well.
Glad you did an open letter. I started one (so it is a bit raw - see below - it contains the original piece and my comments)
The good news, is the bad news has been good. We were 23 on Distrowatch (7 day listing) now we are 13 - this normally happens only with a new release.
Just recently Borat (aka Ladislav) was contemplating abandoning Distrowatch. Even though I was banned for a while from posting in the comments section, I love Distrowatch, it is biased and unfair. Why was I banned? Probably my humour does not come over. Who knows. Distrowatch is a personal effort and interpretation. I do not believe Ladislav is being unkind or malicious, he is an amateur journalist who loves Linux. Good luck to him. Maybe we can look forward to an even better Distrowatch?
One year with Puppy Linux (by Mark South)
The sad tale of how the hope and excitement of a promising distro turned to fear and loathing in Linux land.
Puppy Linux Most distro reviews focus on installing and using one release of a recent distro. But when people decide to stick with a distro, or abandon it after a longer period of use, the reasons are more to do with the entire distro experience, which includes the distro technology, its package management, the size and reliability of its package repositories, the ease and speed with which bugs are reported and fixed, the quality of the documentation, and the social experience of being part of the distro's community, as exemplified by its forum and IRC channels. Here I relate my personal experiences with Puppy Linux over the course of approximately one year.
The sad thing is that Mark has created more interest in Puppy through this article, then I could through being positive. I resign as Puppy publicity officer (and official cructacean) and offer him the post . . .
I hated Puppy Linux the first time I saw it on my screen. Well, why was it on my screen in the fist place, you may very reasonably ask? The time was early 2005, and I had been spending some of my spare time searching out and testing small Linux distros for use on older computers. Where I live in Switzerland, there are numerous home users (including many of my friends and neighbours) still running Windows 98 on modest hardware, and finding a Linux distro that they could easily convert to seemed like a worthwhile use of the aforementioned spare time. Also, I had recently become acquainted with Knoppix, which had impressed me with the power and potential of live CDs. I had also already tried Damn Small Linux (DSL), which (in spite of its appallingly naff name) had been interestingly usable on my already-ancient Toshiba portable from the mid-1990's, although it would only run in live mode on that machine, and simply refused to install at all.
I too was an avid user of Knoppix, turning it from a live CD into a full Debian hard drive install. I regularly test out and download other distros. Puppy used to be very plain. It was also one of the few distros that seemed radically different in how it worked. Puppys potential seemed in place. I regularly went to the Puppy community and web pages to learn about other distros I was downloading and for general Linux information.
The Puppy community were the most helpful to new users and that is still the case. Puppy was function above form. The substance worked. It seemed to have working software at a time when Linux distros included unfinished or not working software. It was developed as a working Linux, running fast in Ram. That suited me because I knew window dressing is the minor part of Linux and the bulk of Vista. Is the core working?
Puppy was designed to be an English only distro, so language and keyboard support is a bonus. Language support has been applied and we now have Puppy derivatives such as Hacao Puppy with tens of thousands of Vietnamese users and Chinese, French, Italian and other languages being supported with specialised derivatives. The main Puppy forum hosted by John Murga, supports a variety of languages.
So when I looked back through the distro release announcements on DistroWatch and observed that Puppy 0.9.7 was less than 60 MB to download, I didn't have to think very hard about giving it a try. Naturally, I was expecting it to be something like DSL. I was totally disappointed. The display was stuck at a clunky-looking and somewhat flickery 800x600 (even though my display would do 1280x1024), and there seemed to be no way to get onto the net without using a dial-up modem. To clinch matters, there was a freaking SEAGULL on my desktop! If the seagull hadn't clinched things already (and pretty much everyone who's ever lived by the sea knows what I'm talking about
, things were made even worse by the fact that after I removed the Puppy CD and rebooted, there was a file called PUP001 that had been written to my hard disk's first partition entirely without my permission. I promptly tossed the Puppy CD into the round file and resolved never to allow any kind of Puppy near my beloved computers ever again.
It takes more than a seagull to keep me from the sea. When I started using Puppy, vesa was the norm. It now also supports xorg. For about three months I would occasionally try Puppy and think 'This would be good but the scrolling is too slow'. Luckily a comment from the forum ('simple forum' at the time) helped and Puppy sped up. So it was working. Could I put up with Dillo though; the very fast but archaic browser? Maybe.
Well, it turns out that even the strongest resolutions don't always stand up well against everyday human curiosity. Fast-forward the clock ahead to early 2006. It was now about a year since I had first tried Puppy. It was a new calendar year and I was inclined to forgive and forget, especially since Puppy's version number had passed the magical milestone of 1.0 in the meantime. The release announcement promised that 1.08 was full of new stuff, and besides that there didn't seem to have been any fun new live CDs released in the past couple of weeks, so what hardcore distro junkie could resist? So I downloaded the ISO and burned that fateful CD.
I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised. Well, that's an understatement. I was impressed. And even that's an understatement. I was delighted to see how far Puppy had come during the course of the year for which I had left it entirely out of consideration. The new live CD booted smoothly and ran quickly. After answering a few start-up questions about mouse and keyboard, the system was up and running. There was a simple wizard interface to set up the network, and another to set the desktop resolution to 1024x768, correct for the machine I was using. There was also quite a useful choice of software available in the menus. The window manager and general graphical design were still pretty basic and really quite ugly (and that blasted seagull was still lurking around somewhere!), but looking beyond that to the actual functionality of the system gave me a strong sense that Puppy had entered onto an interesting trajectory that could, in time, make it a really important and useful distro.
An innovative new Puppy is released every 6-8 weeks. This can only happen because of the intrinsic simplicity of the 'designed from scratch' development used by Barry Kauler, assisted by a growing team of Puppy developers. EZpup is a Puppy enhancement that adds XP, Vista and other themes that are familiar and attractive. Mark Ulrich's background changer allows the Seagull and other backgrounds to be easily changed. Pizzapup and Grafpup (now a separate distro) were the first puplets or Puppy derivatives that focussed on good looks. Some of our intrepid Puppys (Puppy users) have got compiz fusion (Beryl) and Matisse 3D environments running and we support Enlightenment and KDE too. In fact Puppy is now gorgeous. The community edition Viz used transparent glass icons and a clean IceWm layout.
When this Puppy started up, it brought up a web page in a modest browser, namely Dillo (sadly now deceased, and deeply missed by many small and light distros). The page contained a selection of links that directed the user to the Puppy home page (informative), the project's documentation Wiki (thin), and the main user forum for Puppy. Now, I had always tended to stay away from forums of all kinds because of the high levels of flaming and social ignorance that they often contain. But, what the hang, I had already broken a resolution by just booting the CD. So over to the forum I went. I lurked for a few days while I picked up useful tips and tricks on how to get the best results from Puppy. At the same time, I was experimenting with a new capability that had appeared in Puppy 1.08, which was the ability to use a multi-session CD and have the session saved back to the live CD in place of needing to save to a hard disk or a USB key. Neat as the multi-session CD idea was, there turned out to be several complications in getting it to work properly, so I registered on the forum and began asking my questions. The responses I received were generally very helpful and so I persisted (although I never actually did get the multi-session CD to work until after Puppy 2.0 came out).
I was the first person (after Barry created it) to try the multi-session. It was an amazing concept. Very useful. Run from CD and save data to CD. Very few distros can do that. On this very first test on different sides of the globe with different equipment, the principle worked and has been honed ever since.
The forum is helpful and is paid for and hosted by John Murga who also develops MurgaLua which is in both Puppy and Damn Small Linux.
As I hung about in the forum learning the quirks and strengths of Puppy, I began to notice that many of the questions being posted by other Puppy newbies were about things to which I knew the answers, so I began getting involved with helping others to get better results from their Puppies. I saw this as giving back to the community a fair share of some of the help that I had already received. Besides, the more I used Puppy, the more I came to appreciate its almost unique mix of small size, efficient use of resources, compatibility with a wide range of hardware, and genuinely useful range of built-in applications, and the more I became an enthusiast and a dedicated supporter of the Puppy project.
Yes indeed. That is the experience of many of us. I never thought of myself as a Puppy expert but realised that by helping out on the wiki I would learn. Now I have my own 'Linux Tmxxine' Puppy derivative.
So when Barry announced that he was beginning work on a redesigned Puppy, to be designated as Puppy 2.0 and based on the 2.6 kernel series, I eagerly joined the alpha testing programme, downloading and trying out each new alpha as it was released. The pace of development was exciting, with a new alpha being released almost every week or so. The mood in the forum was intense and highly competitive. Every participant wanted to be the first to get their test reports in, and to be the one to flush out the most bugs, especially because the earliest test reports were the most likely to be the ones to be acted upon. If you waited 24 hours to download and run an alpha of Puppy 2.0 you may as well not have bothered, someone else would already have been there ahead of you.
Like Puppy we run fast and frisky. Many people still run Puppy 1.08r1 and Puppy1.09CE because of inherent stability and simplicity. Puppy was at its peak when Barry more or less rewrote and implemented Puppy in a new way, giving the community wider hardware support and even more included software
Finally, after what seemed like an age, but was, in reality, only a few weeks of test programme, Barry released Puppy 2.0. It was fantastic. Here was a 60 MB ISO image that could be downloaded in a few minutes, burned to a CD in a few more, and booted up and running in another five minutes after that. There were wizards to set up Ethernet, wireless, sound, printing, and so on, and they all worked pretty well. The running system could be installed to the hard disk or a USB key, or you could simply run from the live CD and when you chose to shut the system down, it would ask you whether you wanted to save the settings to a save file on the hard disk, a USB key, or even the CD itself (if you had burned the CD as multi-session). While the system was running, it fitted entirely into memory, so long as the machine it was running on had at least 128 MB of RAM. This meant that the newest Puppy ran respectably quickly as a live CD on systems that would have struggled to run heavier distros, even if they had been installed on the hard disk.
It is all about the distro. The rest is fluff.
By now I was thoroughly convinced of the potential for Puppy to be a near-universal solution for revitalising numerous computers that had become too old and too slow to be able to run either "redmondware", or even the majority of other Linux distros. I had become an enthusiastic advocate of Puppy, deliberately promoting Puppy to other Linux users, to my everyday acquaintances, and to the DistroWatch readership. For example, I was one of the first to nominate Puppy for the monthly DistroWatch award, which was eventually given to Barry in late 2006.
Well done and well deserved. Barry promptly spent the money on new testing hardware and offering to support some of our mirror providers and site hosters. Barry does not seem to have much money and yet continually pours time and resources into Puppy.
During this phase I had developed, thanks to the intensive alpha testing phases, quite a lot of experience in making Puppy run on a variety of hardware. I had even managed to make it run on a 133 MHz Pentium with 40 MB RAM, which was not as simple a task as one could have hoped, and which involved a certain amount of preliminary trickery with Smart Boot Manager and a TOMSRTBT floppy! By this stage, instead of mainly asking my own questions, I was mainly answering questions in the forum, especially those related to getting Puppy to boot, run, and install. And here is where I committed my first major mistake.
It all started innocently enough. A new user on the forum posted a question about booting Puppy, saying that the boot was hanging at the message "looking for puppy on hdc...." When I first saw the thread, one of the forum moderators had already replied, saying that the D was probably a bad burn, and they should burn a fresh one and try again. However, I knew better, being quite familiar with that message from one of my own testbed machines. So I replied as well, saying that in cases like this, it was worth trying booting with "ide=nodma" to turn DMA access off. This did actually turn out to be the solution to the problem, so at first I was filled with that pleasant feeling that one gets when one has been able to help someone else by leveraging one's own store of experience, at very little cost to oneself. I was so wrong.
No I think you were right.
That is what many of us do. The community includes an incredible diversity of experience and information. Puppy deserves far wider support. It grows so rapidly in terms of the code. A problem with the forum or an inability to get a Swiss keyboard working immediately is solvable. Use the forum you started, if you feel John's has problems.
With hindsight, I realise that I should have expected what followed, but hindsight wasn't available to me at the time. Shortly after this episode, my posts began vanishing from the forum. I would post a reply to a thread, see it in the thread, and a few minutes or hours later it would be gone. Posts to inquire if there was anything wrong with the forum were met by responses that said "the posts don't always go through if you make a mistake while sending them, or if you refresh the page too soon, etc, etc." It isn't only the private detectives among my readership who have already deduced that these explanations were coming from the same moderator with whom I had had the temerity to disagree on a technical matter. When I complained to the forum owner about my posts being randomly deleted, he asked me to show him proof. Which I couldn't easily do, since a vanished post doesn't look like much! I did begin quietly asking around among other forum users, and was even more dismayed to discover that I was not the only victim, and that several other people were having their posts silently deleted.
So become a moderator and help out. I am sure some of my posts have gone missing. Reasons are from my mistakes (using preview and forgetting to submit), postings being moved by Flash to try and ensure threads are in the right place (that can be disconcerting). I am a forum moderator myself for two or three forums but have very few powers. If I asked for more I would probably get them. It would mean more work. The current situation of being a moderator and doing nothing is easy enough even for a lazy lobster. The new 'spam catching' coded by John Murga seems to be working BUT it might be deleting peoples posts. I really hope not. John Murga has kept a very open door but that means the potential for abuse is open too. It is even possible that either John Murga or Flash are dedicated to restricting your helpful posts because they want only their helpful posts to be seen. That is possible. Not likely. The reason this forum is so good compared to others, is because of the hard efforts behind the scenes of John Murga and Flash.
The records show how much cheerleading I did for Puppy, and the positive results for the project. In October 2006, Barry received an award from DistroWatch, which he used to support the various hosting efforts being managed by himself and others in the Puppy community.
Well overdue and much appreciated award. I too nominated for the award.
Around this time, under the huge load caused by numerous newcomers interested in Puppy, the Puppy forum began to go down (or, more frequently, simply slow down so far as to time out on every request) almost routinely. There was no unified strategy that the community chose to implement. Different groups reacted differently. Barry himself stopped visiting the main forum and set up his own forum, for Puppy developers only. Astonished as I was at this turn of events, I suggested that Puppy, like many other popular distros, should have its own forum at LinuxQuestions.org. Bary gave his agreement in principle, and so I went off and conducted the necessary negotiations with Jeremy at LQ.org. This included getting links to LQ.org from the Puppy site, as well as setting up several other Puppy regulars with special accounts at LQ.org. The main forum was eventually moved to a better server and the problems decreased in severity, but the LQ forum was an invaluable backup during the long phase during which Puppy had no effective forum of its own.
It wasn't the only backup forum. I had an emergency forum. Other forums appeared. We became overloaded and out of his own pocket, John Murga moved the server to a new host and we were OK again. About every 3 months I go to the LQ forum. It did not replace the Puppy forum, so clearly Johns forum is preferred by most people. Keeping a forum running and spam free is a full time job and I feel that both John and Flash have kept it open, tidy and spam free. It has proved a popular and useful resource. They deserve full credit for the success and usability we experience.
Barry continued making changes and enhancements to Puppy through all of these tribulations. Occasionally he asked for suggestions. I particularly asked for support of RTL818x wireless drivers, which were eventually included (although I never did get any of my Realtek wireless cards to work with Puppy, alas). Along with several others on the main forum, I also requested that the Swiss keyboard map should be built in to Puppy - the Swiss keymap is different from both the German and French keymaps - but this never happened. The only result of my request was that one of the forum moderators told me that I should edit my Xkbdlayout in xorg.conf. This rather missed my point. I didn't want only to use a Swiss keymap myself, I wanted to be able to distribute Puppy to my friends, neighbours, acquaintances, and business associates. They all use Swiss keyboards here in Switzerland, so without a Swiss keymap there was no point in me promoting Puppy to my potential Linux market.
Not everything can be done and prioritised. Any distro soaks up developers and offers of help. In fact from reading the forum it seems that you were given considerable, help and support. Could you be offered more? No doubt.
At this point, any reader is wondering something along the following lines: "Puppy has included some neat tools for remastering the live CD, why not just include a Swiss keymap file and build a new ISO for distributing in Switzerland?" Obviously, that was my first thought. And here is where my enthusiasm for Puppy took another blow. Once I considered distributing a remastered Puppy, the first step was to read carefully through the licence on Puppy. It was not a pleasant surprise to realise that Puppy was under a purely proprietary licence! It's easy to fall into the habit of considering the GPL to be a relatively unimportant part of a Linux distro's attributes, until the absence of the GPL stops one from distributing one's changes. Instead, in this case, I would have needed explicit written permission from Barry to distribute a remastered Puppy. I obviously wasn't the only one who felt restricted by the licence, because about this time there were a couple of other people agitating for Barry to open the licence, including Nathan Fisher, who distributes Grafpup, a derivative of Puppy. Barry did eventually announce on his developer blog (in response to a direct question from me) that he had changed the licence on his proprietary components to the LGPL. By the time that had happened, though, my relationship with Puppy had already taken a fatal turn.
In 2005 I asked for permission to use Puppy as the basis for Linux Tmxxine. It was granted. It is quite possible I was entitled to it anyway. I have no idea. Barry is wary of marketing and licensing politics. Internal community squabbles are something that he just does not care about. Too busy improving Puppy.
We have had people insist on source code and licensing clarity in a very unhelpful way and it is true we never much bother reading legal documents. I always thought LGPL stood for 'Let's Get Puppy Linux', which everyone should. Puppy is Free and Open Source. Nathan Fisher has replied to your misunderstanding at grafpup.com. Puppy code is written mainly by Barry but considerable portions are now written by others. I use Puppy and not Suse, Mandriva, Xandros and other commercialized Linux because of Puppys open and free nature.
What you are really saying is Barry is not a licensing expert. Barrys web site skills are also limited (though they have improved greatly). His code and good nature makes up for it.
Barry has provided a wealth of tools and support enabling others to build their own versions of Puppy. He is not a 'bread head'.
My posts, as well as those of others, were continuing to vanish, while the forum moderators (whose posts never vanished spontaneously, strangely enough) continued to deny all knowledge. A new thread in the forum was begun by someone with the title "Suggestions for Forum Improvement", and I posted a suggestion, with a note at the end asking anyone who saw my post to quote it before it vanished. The next thing, my post was moved to a different section of the forum, under "Totally Off-Topic Conversations"! Some other forum members complained in the original thread. Their posts were also re-filed as off topic. It got rapidly worse. I received a message from the forum owner, quoting my request that others quote my posts before they were deleted. He said "I don't know what you are trying to do" and issued me with a banning order. I would have thought it was obvious that I was trying to avoid having my posts vanish with no trace....
John Murga is deleting your posts? Threatening to ban you because you are reporting posts as missing? The motivation is? You are providing more helpful postings than him? He does not post much. Maybe he is just mean? After all his version of Puppy is called MeanPup. So it is possible. It is also possible that wires have crossed and something else is going on. Wouldn't it be great to find out what?
Well, I still kind of like Puppy the distro, but I no longer run Puppy at all. Linux isn't just about the distro. It's about the community that one learns from and shares with, it's the ability and freedom to take a distro as a base and change it for one's own needs. It's about being valuable and respected based on one's own contribution, not just sucking up to forum moderators, even when they are wrong. I'm still somewhat sad that all the fun and potential of Puppy was eventually flushed away by the sum total of the bad experiences. But the year I spent with Puppy not only taught me a little bit about Linux, but it taught me a lot about people, and it taught me that choosing a Linux distro is about a lot more than reading package lists.
We all have a lot more to learn. Puppy is a great distro. We have a great forum, with improvements always being possible. Is what you say true or representative? I am sure you have experienced posts being moved, I have - maybe some of them have even gone. I don't know. Let's find out. Maybe you give up too easy?
Anyway enjoy your new role as publicity officer . . .