Following on from last week’s look at Puppy Linux, I thought that I’d go into a little more depth about this undeservedly underused operating system.

I’m grateful for all the comments on last week’s post (it seems that many other people are also passionate about Puppy Linux) and I am going to take them into account within this post.

I should start off by saying that I posted the wrong link last week…..

My link was to Puppy 5.0; there is a newer (and better) version (5.01) available at http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-5.0.1/lupu-501.iso (thanks; Joe Plaziak for that heads up!)

ICPUG suggested that I should be showing a link to….

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-5.0.1 as this would show the distribution directory and allow you to download the MD5 file to be able to check the download.  As he said… “Nothing worse than having users say Puppy doesn’t work but in reality they got a bad download or burnt the CD incorrectly!”

Quite right too!

There were many other comments about last week’s post and you can read all of them at http://www.kmeckstein.com/linux/and-they-call-it-puppy-love/#comments

Before I get started I will mention that, when I have to take clients’ machines away to be backed up and rebuilt, I leave a small loan machine in its place.

These small machines are small format 600 MHz Celerons with an 8GB hard drive and 256MB of RAM.  The clients, without exception, have no problems doing their normal day to day work (or pleasure) using Puppy – the only adjustment for them is to use Pigeon rather than MSN for their instant messaging.

My clients love these machines but what they really love is Puppy.  “So fast”, “So easy to use”, “So quick to boot up…” (mostly I’ve taken their machines away to back them up and re-install Windows XP because of boot times in excess of 5 minutes!) – these are the sort of comments that I hear!

So, what is it that makes Puppy so special?

10 Reasons to love Puppy Linux

1). Speed : Puppy is fast; no two ways about it!

By that I mean the speed with which applications load and the ensuing responsiveness.

Often, even when running Puppy in a virtual machine or on an old 600MHz Celeron with 256MB of Ram, I find myself considering reducing the sensisivity of the mouse.

I wonder how often Windows users ask themselves “How do I slow this machine down?”

Now, I know that fast modern machines are becoming very affordable and the machine that you can buy in your local supermarket for a few hundred euros will run pretty much any operating system but….

Because Puppy runs so well on older systems, we don’t need to spend money upgrading.  Also, Puppy makes it possible to run some of the new, energy efficient small format systems such as Netbooks and Net-tops.  The cost savings (in terms of energy consumption) and the reduction in desk space and noise make this an attractive proposition.

I’ll just say one last thing about the speed of Puppy; on my virtualised copy of Puppy 5.01, AbiWord, Gnumeric and Inkscape all load in about a second!

2). Ease of use : Puppy has got to be the easiest system to install since DOS 3.3

If anything, it’s got to be even easier to install than DOS!

Once installed, a simple wizard sets up networking and then, when you click on the Browse icon (for web browsing), you are offered a choice of browsers to install…..  Firefox, SeaMonkey, Chromium, Opera or Dillo.

That’s clever; that’s democratic, that’s sweet!

The icons are all labelled according to functionality rather than program name. And, whilst that might not make any difference to experienced users, it’s got to help “Great Aunt Edna” who may have come rather late in life to home computing.

3). Software : Just what you need…..

Earlier versions of Puppy (prior to 5.0 Lucid Puppy) came with a restricted set of installed and installable applictions.

I think that this was largely to ensure that those applications matched the Puppy ethos; small, fast and simple. Obviously, with a small team porting applications to the Puppy install format, these sorts of applications are going to take priority.

Now, however, (from the current version – Lucid Puppy) with the Ubuntu repository (or a subset of it – I haven’t quite been able to work that out yet) behing Puppy, there is a far larger range of tried and tested applications available.

The software available from the QuickPet installation icon on the desktop covers most bases though….

Amongst the applications available are Gimp, Songbird, Thunderbird, Dia and Foxit.  That pretty much covers all bases for me, or rather, my clients.

4). Stability :

I’ve been using Puppy (one version or another) since 2006. I’ve lent machines running Puppy to clients when I’va had to take their own PCs away for repair and I’ve installed Puppy on friends’ machines when they wanted a lightweight system just to do the basics. On my own machines I’ve had Puppy running for months without a reboot.

More often than not, I’ve had trouble getting my loan machines back; the clients are so impressed with the speed and functionality.

I’ve never had to respond to a support call on any of the loan machines or the systems I’ve installed on friends’ PCs.

Whatever I’ve thrown at it, I’ve never had Puppy lock up or let me down.

This is how an operating system should be! This puts many other operating systems (including some flavours of Linux, I’m sad to say) to shame.

5). Cost :

Obviously, Puppy, like all other Linuxes, is free.

The applications that come with it are also free. No news there.

Where Puppy really shows a cost saving is that it’s minimal hardware requirements allow one to reuse old equipment that would struggle with pretty much every other common operating system.

I’m running Pupppy on a 600MHz Celeron with 256 MB of Ram. These days I’d find it hard to buy a machine that slow. If I could find one, it’d only cost pennies!

I’ve started looking at very small Intel Atom powered desktop machines (commonly known as Net-tops, I believe) as a possible replacement for my server (I don’t really need a Xeon powered SCSI based machine that is realistically coming to the end of its life.)

If I get one, before installing a minimal Debian server configuration, I’ll certainly have a play around with Puppy on it.  I guess that Puppy will fly on a dual core atom with 1GB of Ram!

6). Interface :

Puppy has a menu where most Windows users would expect to find one; in the bottom left hand corner. The same menu is also accessible by right-clicking the mouse anywhere on the desktop. The large and clearly marked icons are well chosen to describe their function to people who prefer to launch their applictations that way.

The setup wizards assume no technical ability from the user; in this they far exceed those found on Microsoft systems.

The only changes to the loaner systems (that I lend to clients) that I make are to rename the hard drive from sda1 to Hard Drive; I can’t expect my clients to understand Linux drive naming conventions.

I also delete some of the icons for things like Mount, Install and Setup – I don’t really want my clients to be playing around with these things; why should they?

Finally, I create a desktop link to My Documents – that saves the clients from having to hunt around an unfamiliar file system to find their saved documents.

7). Customisation :

Which, I suppose, brings me to customisation. Even using the standard desktop (which uses the JWM Window Manager), there are 4 different sets of icons that can be used (although I like the standard icons well enough) and six different themes. Once again, the standard theme works fine for me.

For further customisation there are other window managers that can be installed; a quick look at the list shows LDXE, Gnome and KDE, amongst others, althogh I haven’t tried them yet.

8). Community :

There’s a lively and active Puppy forum at http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/ and most questions that you may have should have been already answered there.  A good place for a browse and to participate.

Another great resource is http://puppylinuxfaq.org/ where you can find answers to questions you hadn’t even thought about asking!

http://puppylinux.org/news/index.php is full of decent information and well worth a visit.

And finally, there is Barry Kauler’s website at http://www.puppylinux.com/ Barry created Puppy and deserves a visit.

Overall, the Puppy community is helpful and friendly.  There seems to be little or no snobby behaviour and even when certifiably stupid people like me ask silly questions, a friendly hand points them in the right direction.

Puppy fans tend to be very enthusiastic about their choice of operating system.  And, although I don’t use Puppy for my main operating system, I am happy to consider myself part of the Puppy community.

9). Simplicity :

In that it just works without any faffing around, Puppy is simplicity itself.

The few queries that I’ve had have been easy to resolve.

That my clients never have to ask me “how do I do this?” type questions says it all!

10). Fun :

I’ve got to admit that I always have a smile on my face when I use Puppy.

It’s partly because of the default desktop background with its large friendly icons but also because I know that everything is just going to work.

Puppy even comes with some games!  I’m not sure that this is a good idea (my copy of Mint 8.0 doesn’t have games pre-installed and I think I like this?)

I suppose that it is the lack of pretentiousness that’s part of the reason for that big smile on my face?

Summary

Looking back at what I’ve writting it does, I have to say, sound a little bit gushing.

But, I can’t apologise for that!

Puppy does exactly what it says on the tin; it is a simple, extraordinarily fast operating system that works perfectly as a live CD but is also quite happy to be installed onto your hard disk.

The standard installed applications do pretty much what most people need.

Should AbiWord not be man enough, Open Office Writer can be installed. Should you not like Sypheed as an email client, it is simplicity to install Thunderbird in its place.

So, you have a rock sold operating system that asks little in the way of hardware specifications; you have a system with an interface so simple that your Great Aunt Edna will be able to use it and with enough power that you’ll be able to catch up on work when you go and spend a weekend with the aforementioned great aunt!

Personally, I think that if Puppy were packaged in  an austere manner with confusingly named icons, us geeks would probably love it even more!

Perhaps that’s why Puppy isn’t installed on as many machines as it should be?

The people who don’t read the techie sites don’t know about it and the people who  are geeky enough to know about Puppy are probably put off by its simplicity and ease of use?

After all, what’s the point of being a geek if the operating system works fine, out of the box, and there’s no need to be geeky about anything?

All the best

Reddit Twitter Digg Share on Facebook Stumble Bookmark Email this page to a friend