How did you get interested in Linux/ Puppy?

[Sylvander]

I was running Win2000Pro on an old [2003] desktop PC I'd been given by ErnieK of the PCGuide forums.
Caught and eliminated a trojan.

Decided to look for an OS that would be secure to use for online banking.
Tried various Linux distros.
Had difficulty getting them to do anything. [The command line sudo business was confusing]

Then ErnieK suggested trying Puppy Linux.
Liked it immediately.
Particularly the way it explained everything, and gave advice on how to complete the various steps in doing stuff.
Easy to do stuff, and it "just worked".

From then on, it has been an adventure...
So easy to use, SIMPLE and FAST.

[RSH]

If anyone who is owning illegal Software or anyone who knows someone that is owning illegal Software, would go to the Police and to name those Persons, our Justice-Systems will collapse. It/they could NOT handle it, because of its massive impact to the Justice-System.

And, at the police station, they will write the complaint in... a pirated version of Word, over...a pirated version of Windows...


I bet something similar in the Justice System.

Exactly!!!

In my life as a Musician I personally have met German Policemen that are using illegal Music Software and smoking Pot!!!

[James C]

I got seriously interested in Linux when Windows Genuine Advantage suddenly decided that my 100% legal retail copy of XP (purchased and installed by me) wasn't genuine.Microsoft would gladly sell me another copy...... no thanks.

Wiped the hard drive and did a full install of Puppy.

[RSH]

when Windows Genuine Advantage suddenly decided that my 100% legal retail copy of XP (purchased and installed by me) wasn't genuine.

I remember something similar happening to a lot of Windows users in Germany that have had bought a new Computer with Windows pre-installed plus a so-called OEM-CD (DVD) but can't remember how exactly this was solved. Though I've never heard of anyone needed to buy a new copy/license.

[nitehawk]

Let's see if I can remember it all...

Dos>win3.1>w95>w98se>w2kpro>Mandrake>Mepis>distrohopping>Slackware>Puppy 3.01>Puppy 4.0>Puppy 4.21>Puppy 4.31>(more and more Puppies)> now WXP & Puppies & Macpup & Vector

...when I first tried Puppy 3.01, I was sold! I still love that particular Puppy.

[vicmz]

Puppy --> Puppy

As I didn't have a computer on my own, I used everyone else's Windows computer. At first I was interested in Ubuntu Karmic, then I discovered Puppy by version 5.0, the only distro I was able to fully test because of its ability to run entirely from RAM, without touching the hard disk.

A couple of years later I got my first computer, and I already knew that Puppy Linux was the way to go in my case. In a country where prices rise largely and monthly because of hyperinflation, I didn't have much money so the quickest way to get a computer was buying an old Pentium 4 without a hard disk.

Surely Ubuntu and the great distributions are great and run fine on older machines as well, but I always liked the speed of Puppy, as well as its many original, unique tools created by members of the forum. I remember how I didn't like SeaMonkey, and now it's my default browser, I even run it as portable on Windows computers.

I can't program or compile, yet I was able to make small contributions as a way of saying thank you for this operative system.

[Karl Godt]

Linuxquestions.org :
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... ng-800043/

04-06-10
PS. Karl, you could try what vigi suggested (the Puppy Linux)

[DM was on fire!]

I was about ten years old when my dad (who was a computer tech) had heard about a new operating system named "Lindows." (The now defunct Linspire) Used it for a few years, got tired of various kernel panics, swapped to Ubuntu after getting student pack of discs from Canonical.
Lost my dualboot hard drive when the motherboard in the PC crapped out. Didn't feel like doing one on the new PC, and had heard about some Linux you could put on a thumb drive. PuppyLinux seemed neat enough. Been using it since 2008 now.

[darry1966]

...when I first tried Puppy 3.01, I was sold! I still love that particular Puppy.[/quote]

Hi Nitehawk me too.

[6502coder]

When I first discovered Puppy Linux, I had no experience with Linux per se, but a great deal of experience (over 20 years) slinging code on UNIX systems. So naturally I was very curious about Linux. I had a spare Celeron-cpu'd laptop lying around and tried the Ubuntu CD (this was Jaunty Jackalope) that came with a Linux magazine. It was not jaunty at all -- more like an elephant in molasses -- and could not connect to the laptop's built-in wireless. Plus, as a hard-core fan of UNIX and a hobbyist from the microcomputer era (Atari 800 and Commodore Amiga), I was astounded and aghast at all the bloat I found in Ubuntu.

Looking around for something much lighter, I eventually discovered Puppy, which at the time was at 4.1.2. It worked like a champ right out of the box, and I've been hooked ever since.

[mcewanw]

When I first discovered Puppy Linux, I had no experience with Linux per se, but a great deal of experience (over 20 years) slinging code on UNIX systems.

6502coder name reminds me:

I don't know when I first came across Puppy Linux, but I think it was a few years before I ever adopted it and joined the forum (I didn't adopt it earlier because I needed a multiuser system).

However, I do remember that the first programs I really wrote (aside from some earlier programming efforts with Fortran and Algol, at a time when I had no interest in computing and hence had trouble getting any programs to work...) was on the Compukit UK101 (BASIC in 8KBytes ROM and only 4KBytes of RAM... yes, KBytes, not MBytes or GBytes!!!...no hard or floppy disk - just cassette tape), which I soldered together in 1979, at a small secondary school in the scottish highlands and a colleague built a wooden case for it on my behalf:

http://www.gifford.co.uk/~coredump/uk101.htm

So first language was the tiny Microsoft BASIC on that machine (PEEKING and POKING to make simple computer games...). However, that machine also introduced me to Assembly Language programming (6502 microprocessor), which I learned by trial and error from a single-line sheet listing the available commands and their mneumonics (I had no book or no Internet at that time to find any other info). Actually, the 6502 coding was done in Hex (I almost still remember some of the 6502 hex codes on the tip of my tongue...)

That same year I also obtained a Science of Cambridge MK14 and used to interface to the 'outside world' with that too (school science experiments - I was a Physics teacher for a few years back then) - then we purchased an Acord System One before moving on to the great BBC B.

I loved that time of early days 6502 (followed later by Z80. 80x86 and 8051 with electronics interfacing) experimentation far more, to be honest, than my later dabblings with Linux (though that has its moments too...).

William

[bugman-2.0]

I'm trying to remember. Basically hated Windows and couldn't make sense of my free Ubuntu disc. Was on dialup so Puppy (1.07) was a viable option. So much simple.

[delmar]

I'm trying to remember. Basically hated Windows and couldn't make sense of my free Ubuntu disc. Was on dialup so Puppy (1.07) was a viable option. So much simple.

The only thing I ever hated about Windows is that every new incarnation of it is a bigger hog of resources than the last. Need more Ram, Need a bigger hard drive etc...

The thing I love about windows is that cheap ram, cheap storage, and cheap "outdated" hardware of just about every kind are now so readily available for those of us willing to forsake Windows.

[Packetteer]

Hi All
For me it all started with a Vic-20.
Commodore basic and like the previous poster 6502 machine programing.
Then I moved up in the world to a Commodore 64 with 300 baud dial up.
Then came the 8088.
Then the Pentium versions of PC. Windows 3.1, 95, 98 , XP, Windows 7

In the beginning I would write basic programs that started out because
I wanted to answer the question "How do you get a computer to do.....?"
Once I had a working program that answered the above question I then
deleted the program and move on to the next How do you... question.

Eventually found out that
1) In the United States you could now get
an Amateur Radio license with out morse code. (1994)
2) That you could connect your PC to your radio.

So now I write software of interest to Amateur Radio operators using
Visual Basic.
Wanted to have Linux versions of my software.
Found Puppy.
I run Puppy from a flash drive.
Came to find out that I liked Puppy a lot more than Windows.
Now I only boot into Windows when I maintain one of my Visual Basic
projects or write new software.
I use Puppy on a daily bases.

On Puppy I use Bacon to write my software. Like Puppy Bacon is light and
fast.

I at one time used Ubuntu but did not like the turn on PC and find out
that it wants to update itself.
In other words I find Ubuntu to be too much like Windows.

Thank you for reading this way too long post
Best Regards
John

[Colonel Panic]

I first got interested in Linux at the end of the 90's / early 2000s, when I had my first computer (a 486) and downloaded a "Linux on a floppy" called tomsrtbt. It was interesting and had a lot of features and tools for its size, but I didn't do nearly as much with it as we expect to do with Linux distros now. (Looking back I realise I could have done more with it if I'd known more, but there you go).

In 2003 I upgraded to a computer which had a Pentium 100 processor and 32 MB of RAM, enough to be useful with Linux. I ran DOS on it, Windows 3.1, and an amazing (for its time) version of Linux called Basic Linux which could boot off either two floppies or your hard drive (using Loadlin) and was based on an old version of Slackware.

With that one I could surf the Web (in an old version of Opera) with just 32 MB of RAM and the Blackbox window manager.

However, it started to show signs of age, so;

In April 2006 I was given a newer computer, a Pentium 3, which had Windows XP and 5 spare GB at the end of the drive, on which I installed the latest version of Vector Linux 5.1 (a distro I'd seen reviewed in the UK's Custom PC magazine a couple of years earlier and thought I'd like to try).

That was good except that the support for dialup in Vector then was patchy (unlike Puppy's).

I downloaded Puppy, version 2.00 (which I'd also read about), in June of that year and the rest is history. Eight years on I've got Puppy on my hard drive and nothing else.

[starhawk]

Colonel Panic, I'm confused about something in your sig. When was Slacko 59x released? or is it still in Beta? Also, I have a copy of Basic Linux, if you'd like to play with it again and have lost your floppies PM me if you're interested.

My story...

I had futzed around with Ubuntu in college. This was on and off in 2007 and 2008. On my old Toshiba 1415-S173 (Willamette P4 (IIRC), half a gig of RAM) Ubuntu 7.04 (and later, 7.10 and 8.04) floundered at about the same speed as my HP s7220n desktop (Celeron M, a full gig of RAM) ran XP. I was mildly impressed, and kept poking at Linux over the next couple years, even though the Toshiba died before Ubuntu 8.10 happened (to this day I'm not sure what failed; I suspect the CPU, but I never did get around to the autopsy...).

A year or so after college, a friend of mine gave me a Pentium III desktop. I attempted to load an old version of Xubuntu on it, and encountered easily the strangest hardware failure I've ever encountered. It had a CD-RW drive that, as my Xubuntu install CD was read, it wrote garbage data back and corrupted the CD itself. I'm really not sure how that works... all I know is, I replaced both CD and drive before the system would boot.

At around the same time, I started fooling around with a very strange system I'd actually purchased. It's an odd sort of computer called a "thin client" -- for those not familiar with such things, it's basically a remote-desktop sort of thing. A thin client is a small-form-factor PC with just enough brains and storage to act as a display and input adapter for a network cable, so that one can compute far away from the actual host system. All the real computation is done on a virtual machine in a server somewhere fairly distant, using SSL/SSH and VPN type stuff to link the two. For this reason, thin clients tend to be marginally more capable, performance-wise, than a graphing calculator -- and with no real hard drive at that. Almost all use what's called a "DiskOnModule" or DOM -- an IDE (or, rarely, SATA) flash disk. They're physically tiny, and I've yet to see one larger than half a gig. It's just enough space to shoehorn in XP Embedded and something like a Citrix client, to make everything work. (For those who lived through the 70s, the idea of a thin client is not too dissimilar from a VT100 terminal -- except that the serial link is now a 10/100 LAN cable, and you get real actual graphics and Web browsing and such.)

I was trying, at the time, to teach this particular thin client (which was especially anemic, since it was an older model!) how to be a proper desktop computer. I knew that XP wasn't going to cut it, and I couldn't afford a retail copy anyways. I looked around for something lighter-weight than Ubuntu (which would have very likely refused to even install on that heap) and I found something called WattOS that was just barely beginning to start at the time. I posted something on their forum that asked a few questions. Around that point, the people on another forum I browse (it's a computer performance-enthusiasts' forum, entertainingly enough) kept saying "WattOS? WTF is WattOS? You should try this Puppy Linux thing that people have actually heard of." A week went by, no response from the WattOS people... I posted on this very forum, had eager help in less than two hours (I want to say it was in less than one hour!) and the rest, as they say, was history.

I now run Puppy full-time. I've had a few Pups, but the current one is Puppy 57 non-PAE (I keep meaning to fix that) with jejy69's MATE 181 SFS plunked on top. For the record, getting used to Puppy from Win7 -- took me all of ~30 minutes.

My mother is in love with XP and Win7 and won't touch Puppy. She's been hearing "you get what you pay for" for so long that she can't seem to un-believe it. She's also convinced that learning a new OS is insanely hard. It'd actually be funny if it weren't kind of sad...

[mavrothal]

As my signature says, I got interested in the OLPC project back in 2007/8.
When I got my first XO-1 I realised that the software stack (Gnome/Python) was really killing that wonderful 400MHz/256MB machine, and after getting a bit comfortable with Linux and the command line (I'm a Mac user. Use Windows only as a last resort…) started looking for alternatives.
Five hears ago, Puppy looked as a good choice so I went for it.
With help from both the Puppy and the OLPC community, we now have puppy/fatdog running in all 4 OLPC XO models.
Too bad the OLPC project is fading away.
Oh well, was a fun 5 year ride...

[SnowShinobi]

I registered to this forum moments ago, so I figure I'd formally introduce myself here.

Puppy Linux came to me after some general interest in exploring what was beyond Windows OS -- spent a short while with Ubuntu, but I wasn't ready for it, I had interests in getting into Game Design and Windows was my platform of choice. I had looked into Puppy, but skipped past it.

Then I found myself the need to reboot an old Acer laptop - Hard drive seems to have gone dead, but everything else works. Plugged in that flash drive with Lucid Pup installed and it was like new. I spent about a month getting used to it and upgraded to the recent Precise 5.7 and I've been happy with it since.

Puppy came to me mostly as some sort of magicks I could use to revive an old laptop and it's become my secondary OS when I'm not working.

Cheers!

[Colonel Panic]

Colonel Panic, I'm confused about something in your sig. When was Slacko 59x released? or is it still in Beta? Also, I have a copy of Basic Linux, if you'd like to play with it again and have lost your floppies PM me if you're interested.

My story...

I had futzed around with Ubuntu in college. This was on and off in 2007 and 2008. On my old Toshiba 1415-S173 (Willamette P4 (IIRC), half a gig of RAM) Ubuntu 7.04 (and later, 7.10 and 8.04) floundered at about the same speed as my HP s7220n desktop (Celeron M, a full gig of RAM) ran XP. I was mildly impressed, and kept poking at Linux over the next couple years, even though the Toshiba died before Ubuntu 8.10 happened (to this day I'm not sure what failed; I suspect the CPU, but I never did get around to the autopsy...).

A year or so after college, a friend of mine gave me a Pentium III desktop. I attempted to load an old version of Xubuntu on it, and encountered easily the strangest hardware failure I've ever encountered. It had a CD-RW drive that, as my Xubuntu install CD was read, it wrote garbage data back and corrupted the CD itself. I'm really not sure how that works... all I know is, I replaced both CD and drive before the system would boot.

At around the same time, I started fooling around with a very strange system I'd actually purchased. It's an odd sort of computer called a "thin client" -- for those not familiar with such things, it's basically a remote-desktop sort of thing. A thin client is a small-form-factor PC with just enough brains and storage to act as a display and input adapter for a network cable, so that one can compute far away from the actual host system. All the real computation is done on a virtual machine in a server somewhere fairly distant, using SSL/SSH and VPN type stuff to link the two. For this reason, thin clients tend to be marginally more capable, performance-wise, than a graphing calculator -- and with no real hard drive at that. Almost all use what's called a "DiskOnModule" or DOM -- an IDE (or, rarely, SATA) flash disk. They're physically tiny, and I've yet to see one larger than half a gig. It's just enough space to shoehorn in XP Embedded and something like a Citrix client, to make everything work. (For those who lived through the 70s, the idea of a thin client is not too dissimilar from a VT100 terminal -- except that the serial link is now a 10/100 LAN cable, and you get real actual graphics and Web browsing and such.)

I was trying, at the time, to teach this particular thin client (which was especially anemic, since it was an older model!) how to be a proper desktop computer. I knew that XP wasn't going to cut it, and I couldn't afford a retail copy anyways. I looked around for something lighter-weight than Ubuntu (which would have very likely refused to even install on that heap) and I found something called WattOS that was just barely beginning to start at the time. I posted something on their forum that asked a few questions. Around that point, the people on another forum I browse (it's a computer performance-enthusiasts' forum, entertainingly enough) kept saying "WattOS? WTF is WattOS? You should try this Puppy Linux thing that people have actually heard of." A week went by, no response from the WattOS people... I posted on this very forum, had eager help in less than two hours (I want to say it was in less than one hour!) and the rest, as they say, was history.

I now run Puppy full-time. I've had a few Pups, but the current one is Puppy 57 non-PAE (I keep meaning to fix that) with jejy69's MATE 181 SFS plunked on top. For the record, getting used to Puppy from Win7 -- took me all of ~30 minutes.

My mother is in love with XP and Win7 and won't touch Puppy. She's been hearing "you get what you pay for" for so long that she can't seem to un-believe it. She's also convinced that learning a new OS is insanely hard. It'd actually be funny if it weren't kind of sad...

Hi starhawk,

I tried to download Slacko 6.0 beta from the thread, and got directed to a link for Slacko 5.9.3 instead. Here's the one I got;

http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/test/slacko/

You may have better luck in finding one for Slacko 6.0 beta.

As for Basic Linux, it doesn't seem to have been updated for a long time (five years at least). Nevertheless, I still think it's an excellent distro for very old computers. The one I used it on dated back to 1996, and had a 100 MHZ CPU (Pentium 1), a 1.2 GB hard drive, 32 MB of RAM, and no CD-ROM or DVD-ROM.

It was certainly an amazing technical achievement of Steve (Darnold)'s to pack so much functionality into something so small. I was able to surf the Web and even post on forums like this one using something I'd booted into RAM from a pair of floppies.

For that machine, and bearing in mind that those were the days before Youtube, it was fine but I wouldn't want to use it on this one.

There are better options now for those with newer computers (even an eleven year old one like mine). I'm posting this message from a full installation of Puppy EmSee 2.1, and frankly it dwarfs BasicLinux in terms of what it can do (and all without having to install any additional software).

[starhawk]

Slacko 593 appears to be an abandoned beta or an early version of Slacko 600. I find no reference to it on the Wikka or anywhere other than where you posted.

I do agree we've come a long way