(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Having used Puppy as my main OS for a few months now, it struck me that there are some pretty cool things you can do with it. For me, it was they way you can do a frugal install. This is something I never heard of before and thought was so cool!

I'd like to hear what you have to say. What features etc... really amaze you about Puppy Linux. It could be something very simple but I think that this could really help out newbies as well as seasoned users who have come to love this amazing distro.

Hello.

My first puppy was Muppy 08.3F which came along with two sfs files.

Those who knows the LazY Puppy, should know this already. For the others: it was the possibility to use programs from sfs instead of installing.

I think, the LazY Puppy shows this in each and every possible way...

RSH

2) sfs files (not only the main, but..) and saving space - you really don't need a 512mb savefile for dinky stuff like your personal settings & etc! Roll all the big static stuff into your personal sfs (dir2sfs) and sym to it.

3) for liveCD multisession users, the swap-discº upgrade - it can be tricky at first getting all your personal prefs back if the fresh pup 'updates' them, but it's a good education in how pup works (defaults, OEM settings and so on), don't blank your old cdrw 'til you take the new pup thru a shakedown cruise

º - this involves burniso2cding a fresh pup (next version of the same family) to a new disc, then swapping it for your old disc just before end of session/save (thus retaining most if not all of the good stuff you're used to)

^·^

the xrandr command is cool, though not unique to puppy

to zoom and pan see-
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 917#550917

rmcellig wrote:Having used Puppy as my main OS for a few months now, it struck me that there are some pretty cool things you can do with it. For me, it was they way you can do a frugal install. This is something I never heard of before and thought was so cool!

I'd like to hear what you have to say. What features etc... really amaze you about Puppy Linux. It could be something very simple but I think that this could really help out newbies as well as seasoned users who have come to love this amazing distro.

Everyone probably already knows this, but I just found out that I can burn mp3 music files as data and really put a lot of songs on a single cd.

Burning as audio, I was able to get about 20 songs or 80 minutes of music on a single cd/r. Burning as data, I placed 162 songs on a cd/r and it was less than half full.

I was unable to tell any difference in the sound quality. My cd player only handles one cd at a time and this really extends the play time.

Long Live Puppy Linux!

majorfoo wrote:Burning as audio, I was able to get about 20 songs or 80 minutes of music on a single cd/r. Burning as data, I placed 162 songs on a cd/r and it was less than half full

You may be saving audio files which were originally in the uncompressed WAV format as mp3 files which have lossy compression and are typically 1/10th the size of the original WAV file, so you can get 10x more on the CD. However listeners may be able to tell the sound quality has been compromised though, depending on the mp3 bit rate setting used.

Barkin wrote:

majorfoo wrote:Burning as audio, I was able to get about 20 songs or 80 minutes of music on a single cd/r. Burning as data, I placed 162 songs on a cd/r and it was less than half full

You may be saving audio files which were originally in the uncompressed WAV format as mp3 files which have lossy compression and are typically 1/10th the size of the original WAV file, so you can get 10x more on the CD. However listeners may be able to tell the sound quality has been compromised though, depending on the mp3 bit rate setting used.

This recorded for my personal use. Properties show:
MPEG ADTS, Layer 111, V1, 160 kbits, 44.1 khz, stereo.
Probably not good enough for a serious musician, however, sounds great to me.
Point is - I did not know I could record as data.

The easy way in which you can change the options in the bootup menu. Just adding a few lines to menu.lst. I recently had to do some changes of that kind in Ubuntu and it was a real PIA.

And, also regarding bootup, the capability to install Puppy from within windows, using an .exe file

Barkin wrote:

majorfoo wrote:Burning as audio, I was able to get about 20 songs or 80 minutes of music on a single cd/r. Burning as data, I placed 162 songs on a cd/r and it was less than half full

You may be saving audio files which were originally in the uncompressed WAV format as mp3 files which have lossy compression and are typically 1/10th the size of the original WAV file, so you can get 10x more on the CD. However listeners may be able to tell the sound quality has been compromised though, depending on the mp3 bit rate setting used.

Just to set the record straight, so to speak, I convert audio books and also some music CDs to mp3 so I can put more of them on my mp3 player. After initial experiments, followed by years of experience listening to mp3 audio books, I find that I can't tell the difference between an mp3 created at 32 kbps mono setting, and the original audio CD it was created from.

But, back to the topic of the thread, I suggest that anyone who hasn't tried the latest version of Pburn will be surprised at its capabilities.

Flash wrote:... I find that I can't tell the difference between an mp3 created at 32 kbps mono setting, and the original audio CD it was created from.

You must be getting on a bit :¬) , a 32Kbps mono mp3, even though it may be labelled as 44100Hz, will cut off the higher frequencies as if the sample rate was 16000Hz, (i.e. maximum frequency is 8KHz), which is OK for phone-quality speech but not good enough for music, unless you like how music sounds down the phone).

I typically save audio books at a low bitrate as well, since you are listening to speech, you can get good quality from a high level of compression because there are less changes in the source audio than one encounters with music.
For music I use FLAC and CD paranoia to ensure that the music does not get corrupted by being fed through the audio circuitry on the mobo. This gives me a permanent backup of the original. Then, I encode at the highest level of quality using ogg-vorbis for portable players and much of the other stuff I listen to at home as well. If I am ripping classical or acoustic jazz, it has to be FLAC all the way, as there are just too many changes, transitions and harmonics in acoustic music for a compression algorithm to deal with successfully.

Barkin, I am getting on. (I'm not going to say just how old I am though.)
And the before and after hiss both sound exactly the same to me.

I have found so far that Puppy manages Java much easier than other distros I have used:

• Upgrading Java is a breeze if you use the sfs version,
  Start a program by simply clicking the appropriate jar file instead of having to use the command line as with many other distros.

Here's a comparison: while things have improved with Debian Squeeze, when I was running Debian Lenny (previous version) I found out at one point when I was having some difficulty with running a program that had some java based dependencies that in fact there were three different flavours of Java running on my system...

Java applications may run slower than many other programs, but when you need them, they are a must... for me, one example is CharMap4 a java based Character Map.

Monsie