Some thoughts on Puppy Linux

Recently many of the Linux magazines have been doing articles on Puppy Linux. If you have been reading this blog on a regular basis, you already know that I own an ASUS eeePC. One of the main reasons I bought it was so that I could use it when I travel. There was one big flaw with my plans, I still need to carry my Dell 830 to use for work. The more I work with Windows, the more I despise it but I have to use it for work. Normally I would have just partitioned the drive and installed a Linux distro and Windows, but we are not allowed to do that any longer. A friend recommended buying a second drive and just carrying that along. I was preparing to do that when I read all the hype about PL (Puppy Linux). The first thing I did was download it and install it on a USB flash drive from my home PC. It seemed to work great and on that PC I have a standard connection. Then I decided to carry it with me to visit my family. That is when I had my first problem with it, which seems to be related to using WPA on the wireless router. But it wasn’t very important to me at the time, so I just showed off how cool PL was. Now I am on my first trip with PL and am going to share my thoughts.

• Not sure why this is happening, but I can’t get Xorg to work with my laptop. I ended up using Xvesa instead, which for me seems to be fine.
• Pup packages are fast and easy to download and install, but sometimes they don’t show up in the menu. No a problem if you are comfortable with the command line, but for those people coming from a Windows environment it would very discouraging.
• The touchpad is too sensitive. I never use a mouse when I travel and have often had people comment on how efficient I am with the touchpad. But with Puppy, and maybe this is something with all distros, it is very difficult. As a result, I had to go buy a mouse.
• Connecting to the hotel wireless network took a little bit of time to nail down, but once I did it worked great.
• Changing WMs (Window Managers) was very easy. I opted to use IceWM, which has a ton of themes that are fairly easy to apply. Several of the ones available on the pup package site appear to be corrupted, but I was still able to find one I liked.
• Gaim worked great for several days but then after a reboot, it would show the login process and disappear where I could not locate it.
• The UI fairly plain, but completely acceptable as PL was designed to run on very old hardware. See hardware requirements.

Overall PL is very nice and has many uses. I could see value in carrying it around on a small USB flash drive or on a CD in order to recover files from a corrupted OS. If you had an old PC that wasn’t really up to par for running some of the newer OSs that are on the market, it would be a great way to get some use out of it, especially if you wanted to give that PC to someone who couldn’t afford to buy a new PC.