Comments on: Puppy Linux: Your new best friend

By: jasonpsage

jasonpsage — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 03:06:02 +0000

Puppy, Lucid Puppy and (MY fave) Lighthouse Puppy Mariner – Are just amazing – and I’m not a newbie.

FAST… FAST..FASTER – for a desktop OS? My opinion is they are the best OS’s on the planet ;)

AWESOME! I can’t bear anything else for my desktops now – finally your PC can run at the speeds it was designed for!

Take a three year old machine… put in puppy. Take a brandnew machine – and install… ANYTHING… Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7… Even any linux or whatever.. and … well.. I’ve never seen so much packed into so little – I mean – if your a harddisk data junkie – YA HOO…

Take the PUPP-SEE-CHALLENGE!!!! (Yeah – I coined that) B^)

By: fireball_xl5

fireball_xl5 — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 11:06:11 +0000

Hello.

I’ve been trying out various live CDs on my Dell Latitude D610 running Windows XP, with the following results –

OpenSuse Gnome V11.2 – failed to load/run
Linux Mint ‘Helena’ – failed to load/run
Ubuntu 9.10 – failed to load/run
Puppy Linux 4.3.1 – worked brilliantly.

I have now turned the Dell into a dual boot pc, to get to grips with Linux and Puppy. At times it is b****y frustrating, but I’m getting there.

By: dzent1

dzent1 — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:22:10 +0000

If you haven’t been using a flavor of puppy linux, particularly dpup, you’re missing out.

Blazing fast, rock solid, customizable, uncomplicated, and killer community support..

Also wonderful are browserlinux and macpup foxy (based on e17 and puppy 4.31).

God bless you Barry Kauler, wherever you are! You did a great thing.

By: tuna

tuna — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:50:09 +0000

Funny, of all the Linux Live-CDs I’ve tried, Puppy is the only one that has successfully handled Ralink AND Atheros chipsets running WPA combined w/ Static IP addressing.

By: WB7ODYFred

WB7ODYFred — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:01:50 +0000

Butch here is some info from http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=46339

Now that Puppy is moving from kernel version 2.6.25 to 2.6.30 with the upcoming Puppy 4.3, there appears to be some (extra) confusion about drivers for Atheros wifi devices.

Under the 2.6.25.16 kernel in Puppy v4.1 / v4.2 / v4.3-retro:
- the ath_pci module from the MADWiFi project is provided as standard. It supports most, but not all, G-mode PCI and cardbus wifi devices.
- for the AR5007EG wifi chipset variant, a special version of the ath_pci driver is required, available here -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=237740#237740
- the ath5k module is also available, but at this early stage of development it’s generally unreliable.
- Atheros N-mode wifi devices are not supported.
- Atheros USB wifi devices are not supported.

Under the 2.6.30.x kernel in Puppy 4.3:
- the ath5k wifi module is now working and reliable. It supports all PCI and cardbus G-mode wifi devices.
- the new ath9k module supports Atheros PCI/cardbus N-mode wifi devices.
- Atheros USB wifi devices remain unsupported.

Butch, Maybe you have a USB Atheros device. Could you tell us which version of Atheros Chipset
chip set you have in your computer. You might check out the 4.3.1 version of Puppy or
the www.dpup.org/test try the new dpup 484 beta 4 January 25 2010 version.
Alas yes with Puppy not working with your Atheros Wifi, I do hope you find a versoin of Linux that works for you. Check out www.distrowatch.com

Fred
WB7ODYFred at yahoo dot com

By: a-non-e-mouse

a-non-e-mouse — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:35:25 +0000

Re: anti-virus

That’s interesting, I thought native Linux AV programs only check for Linux viruses and Trojans, hence the reason they’re so much smaller than their Windows counterparts 8-S. I would LOVE to get my hands on a Windows anti-virus program that runs under Linux.

By: Links 2/2/2010: Oracle/Sun Analysis | Boycott Novell

Links 2/2/2010: Oracle/Sun Analysis | Boycott Novell — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:28:19 +0000

[...] Puppy Linux: Your new best friend On occasion I have a need for a tiny, lightning fast Linux distribution to boot into in order to check various issues on a machine. Either that or I just don’t want to monkey around with someone else’ data. Either way, I will often grab for either a CD or flash drive containing my favorite “micro” distribution, Puppy Linux. [...]

By: Seth

Seth — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:37:18 +0000

woohoo,
I have used Puppy from several USB drives without problem. Are you sure the PC you tried had the BIOS set to boot from USB? Did you try a USB bootable device know to work?

Butch,
Puppy does not claim to contain drivers for every type of hardware, however, if there is a Linux drive for your Atheros chipset you should be able to install / copy to Puppy. You may also be able to use a Windows driver via ndiswrapper which is part of Puppy and included in the GUI connection tool.

By: Butch

Butch — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:25:05 +0000

I’ve wasted my time too many times on different versions of Puppy. Until
they support the Atheros chipset for networking, I don’t have much use for
the distro.

By: n00b

n00b — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:48:30 +0000

I used to run Puppy from a flash drive. I have recently started booting from a SD card (new laptop had SD reader). I have been using it for a couple of years now for.

It can be encrypted and password protected (password is preboot not unlike truecrypt).

By: woohoo

woohoo — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:10:43 +0000

Puppy is indeed a very nice distro, but it did not work for me. Installed it on two USB sticks, and it was not able to boot any of three computers I tried.

On the other hand, the latest Slax distro – worked like a charm.
Sorry about that, but the people working on Puppy still have a little work to do to make it stable.

By: Alastair Montgomery

Alastair Montgomery — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 10:15:02 +0000

There is a cool Puppy Linux derivate called “Puppy Arcade 6″ http://scottjarvis.com/page105.htm

Which has emulators for Amiga, Atari, Amstrad, Arcade Machines, Colecovision, Commodore (64/128/VIC20/PET), GameBoys (GB, GBC, GBA), GameGear, Genesis, MasterSystem, MS DOS, NeoGeo, NeoGeo CD, NES/Famicom, PC Engine/TurboGrafix 16, PSX, Scumm, SNES and ZX Spectrum pre-installed so you can have a retro gaming fix.

By: Roman ShaRP

Roman ShaRP — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:49:18 +0000

I want to add that Puppy distribution have two indispensable qualities
1) It fits itself in RAM – so your CD/DVD drive is free and can be used for something else
2) It have CD/DVD burning program on board, – so, if you don’t have appropriate CD, but have access to its image, you can access and burn it with Puppy.

And that can be done without any changes to your actual PC system if you don’t want them or can’t do them when your Windows functionality is blocked by some virus or trojan.

The second distribution allowing this is Parted Magic LiveCD (not to mentions its partition and formatting capabilities :) ) So, I would recommend to have them both burned to CD-RWs, for example.

Even if you prefer another distribution or OS, they can help you with emergency or rescue tasks.

By: djohnston

djohnston — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:08:40 +0000

There are antivirus checkers which run natively in Linux. FPROT, AVG, ClamAV, etc. Of course, the antivirus checkers are for checking the files on a Windows machine. You boot the suspect PC from the liveCD. This procedure allows a filescan without the possibility of a virus or trojan masking its identity in the Windows environment.

By: retghy

retghy — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:45:54 +0000

When you say install an anti virus to which one are you referring to? Using wine you mean?