Puppy Linux 4.3
One of the nicest things about Linux is its sheer versatility. There are so many different versions of Linux that serve different purposes including being able to take it with you wherever you go. No, I’m not talking about on a laptop or even on a netbook. I’m talking about being able to stick it on a USB device and stick it in your pocket.
Puppy Linux is one of the better known distributions when it comes to Linux portability. Puppy has been around for a long time and version 4.3 was recently released. Compared to some of the desktop distributions, Puppy is incredibly lightweight and weighs in at a tiny 105MB when you go to download it. Yep, that’s it. 105MB.
But don’t let the file size of the Puppy Linux download fool you. There’s a lot of value packed into Puppy Linux as you’ll find out in this review.
What’s New In This Release
There’s quite a bit of new stuff in this version of Puppy Linux including a new system for building Puppy called Woof and a new package manager called, appropriately enough, Puppy Package Manager.
Here’s a sample of some of the other stuff that’s new in this release.
2.6.30.4 Linux Kernel
Dialup Modem Drivers
Pstreamvid
CPU Scaling
JWM Theme Maker
Psync
Mscw
pCD
QUISP
SQLiteManager
Hiawatha
Linux-dvb-apps
Screenshot Utility
Aqualung
Crop Background for Widescreen
NicoEdit
Ext4 Support
There’s quite a bit more so be sure to review the full list at the release announcement link above.
Puppy Linux has a cute (albeit a bit bland) desktop wallpaper.
(16 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
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I love Puppy. I have several versions that I run as live discs and have used it to rescue files from a XP box that wouldn’t boot. I’m currently in love with a remix called BrowserLinux. It’s under downloads–> puplets.
http://www.puppylinux.org/downloads/puplets/browserlinux-67mb-with-firefox-352
It’s super fast and comes with a fairly updated version of Firefox (3.5.2). I’ll have to download the newest version of Puppy and try it out.
As far as multimedia goes I’ve had mixed results. I have Puppy installed on a spare computer set up basically as a DVD player in front of my bike. It plays store bought DVDs but rarely plays burned DVDs. The screen is sometime very pale. Sound works great though.
Hello. I like your blog, and your reviews, but I do have to say, this one seems a bit unfair. I’ve used everything from Damn Small Linux to Slax (on the small distro side) and countless other Debian based and Red Hat based distros over the years. I started using Puppy at version 2.15CE, and even then, while it wasn’t what I would call a complete (or very secure) operating system, I would say that it’s quite nice. It was also quite capable of multimedia, gaming, etc – quite a bit faster (I’d estimate a good 20-30%) over my Debian setup (or even AntiX when I was using that – that’s an interesting, very nice alternative too – small Debian distro that’s kinda based on Sid. Low Sys Requirements, good range of programs, but a bit unstable, I found…) – full openGL, multimedia codecs, (though Youtube doesn’t like going fullscreen on Seamonkey), full DRI/3d acceleration – of course, your mileage may vary, but I’ve run Puppies 2.15CE through 4.2 – and countless other “puplets” as they’re called, all based on different versions of Puppy and customized to certain wants/needs, say gaming, video editing/image editing, music, or even a few security-oriented versions of Puppy (though I personally haven’t tested the security-oriented ones) – and run them on everything from completely “junk” systems, PII’s with 64MB RAM and a Swap File (in the case of older Puppies, 3.XX based ones need a PII with at least 128MB RAM and a Swap File is suggested) – you can really do just about anything with Puppy Linux that you can with any version/distro if you’re patient, and most of the time, when you get things up and running, you end up with an overall faster system/program/experience – at least by my experience. You just need to give it a proper installation to an ext3 partition on your hard drive, play around with it a bit, and you’ll see – it’s quite fast and extensible. It IS somewhat ugly here and there, I’ll give you that, but is it not functional? Is the distro not based on low resource usage? Eye candy isn’t quite all it’s cracked up to be when it comes to having low CPU and RAM specs – but even so, there are puplets (like VestaPup, wNop, a few others) that mimic different OSes almost perfectly in terms of looks, say MacOSX or Windows Vista. The only severely glaring problem with this distro, as I and many others are concerned, is you can’t seem to do anything about running in Root all the time – even if you do, your personal files and stuff are still at risk. However, there is a “woof” Puppy, that allows you to create the Puppy core and all from any distro – I’m hankering to try Debian out, I bet it’d be fairly beastly – if only you can run as non-root.
I hope I don’t sound like one of the typical slathering raving idiotic puppy zealots, as their community, to quote another person, is quite toxic for the most part – however, I do believe that there is QUITE a lot to love about this OS, if nothing else, the sheer speed and simplicity of everything, while still retaining the ability to dig in and change things, take away, add, even upgrade parts of the system to do virtually anything you want…essentially the core foundation of *nix without so much pain…
…except no true multi-user. Lol.
But hey, aside from all my bitching, I would say that the review wasn’t too bad – I’d say this much – a VMWare/QEmu/any other Virtualization installation doesn’t give a fair representation for ANY operating system, not really – sure, the emulator may be designed to emulate the x86/ppc/alpha/whatever architecture you’re into running, but the fact of it is, it’s just not real hardware. I’d say give it another go on a clunker with like a 10GB hard drive and a PIII or something – you just might be quite pleasantly surprised if you look a little deeper. Maybe if we all keep bitching enough, Barry (the original project developer/maintainer) might find a way to implement/allow the implementation of a true Root account.
The past few versions of Puppy, in particular, Versions 4.1.2 and 4.2 had a few issues with some, but not all of the pre-packaged wireless firmware drivers. They finally got that fixed with 4.2. I worked around it and got ‘em all working by grafting in drivers!
Version 4.2.1 was better, and Version 4.3 is the first version with Barry Kauler’s new approach, and marks his return to leading the distribution once again after a hiatus that did not work out particularly well for the community.
Now to read the review and see if I have any other thoughts or comments. I can usually count on a good review; let’s see if I agree with the thoughts and conclusions on this one.
BTW, the Puppy has been steadily gaining weight; no big surprise, software grows. Seems to me that Puppy used to weigh in a few releases ago in the 70 MB range. The earlier Version 4 releases were just over 90 MB and now we are at 105 MB!
I’m sorry to comment again, but I would like to mention this – there is a version of Puppy that is made by a member of the community (who I might add is pretty talented, I would say) – it’s based on 3.01, so you get partial slackware compatibility and better hardware detection than the 2.xx series – it’s meant to be installed to a hard drive, with stability, usability, speed, and the amount of built-in applications (that are full-featured, pre-installed, and usable – such as Wine) as top priorities. PCPuppyOS 3.01 RC6 – it’s about a 600MB d/l, but it can be run as LiveCD as well – and as stated earlier, comes bundled with a bunch of very nice apps and even a bit slicker look (I think) than the standard 2/3 series puppies. I’ve run it for a good week or two at least with no downtime, reboots, etc – and stable as a rock, used it as my main OS for about a year – I still can’t really part with Debian, but perhaps if they’d only fix that damned multi-user issue…just my opinion though, really. Again, sorry if it seems like I’m trying to shove Puppy down your throat as so many others will vehemently and violently try to – I just really have used this thing (and its derivatives) for MANY useful applications, including a Rescue CD, a temporary OS while a computer was down (for myself and friends/relatives), and even a full-fledged gaming platform with Wine/Cedega compatibility (and I might add, insane framerates for a 2.8ghz Pentium IV with a Radeon 9600 AIW PRO/1GB DDR333) – and if you can stomach the bit of extra paranoia over less security (like I was later unable to, as my main OS) then it’s just fantastic once you get all the kinks worked out.
Just so you know, my Windows partition is hosed, and I’m on Puppy 4.2 right now – in Seamonkey, listening to Shoutcast through Streamtuner – built in – and also scanning my backup drive with XFProtect and ClamAV – all at once, from the LiveCD – approx Ram usage = 3-400MB, no swap file.
I just don’t want to have anyone pass this opportunity to at least try it and get the same usability, speed, and enjoyment out of it – it was a great starter Linux system for me, way back at 2.15CE, and taught me a lot – without making me bang my head against walls (at least not as long as most others, say, Debian, Slackware…). Anyway, enough of my gushing and shameless plugging – I still say Debian is a better system when it’s all said and done, but be damned if Puppy isn’t capable, speedy, and just plain tops as far as the small Linuxes go – or once again, would be, IF ONLY for the multi-user issue.
Thanks for reading and writing the review,
Steve
I have not noticed, one way or the other, how well video works with Puppy. Jim, like you, I would be highly unlikely to use Puppy for that purpose. Instead, I use it predominantly when I am planning to be almost exclusively using the Web. Then I load it into memory and run Seamonkey, and it runs better than it typically does elsewhere, especially if I am using an older system, such as my Dell Dimension 4100 that is frequently prone to swap. I get less of a gain on my newer hardware since most stuff loads and remains in memory.
Setting up wireless, while almost certainly can be made to work, can be confusing, one, because Puppy has so many alternatives, and two, because the way the tools are set up is, at least to me, less than intuitive, especially when you run the distro five or six times a year like I usually do. It all works, it is just less than optimal. I have fewer problems, either using a command based network manager like ceni or a command or GUI based tool like wicd.
Puppy is a pretty fast distro. I find it to load from CD faster than most, but it does not necessarily RUN faster – I tend to have good results with my antiX, unlike Steve, who noted that Puppy outpaces antiX. Puppy does load from CD faster, being 1/4 the size, and Puppy is absolutely the smallest general purpose mini Live CD – to me, DSL, SliTAZ, Tiny Core, and whatever else is real small are handy, but as is, they don’t do anywhere near as much as Puppy can do. I prefer antiX, but mostly because I tend to use it in many ways – it is superior when installed, whereas one could argue that Puppy is superior to run live.
It is similar to comparing openSUSE to Mandriva – some people will always prefer openSUSE – I tend to prefer Mandriva.
I give a thumbs up to Puppy. It is tops if what you want is a Live CD or USB based system. I rate it less highly for other purposes, but it is flexible enough to use even as a primary system; you just have to do more to make it do such things well.
Pathetic of me to keep f5ing the comments, but I had to one more time – and I guess I’d really have to say that there’s nothing I can disagree with in Brian’s previous post – that’s about the most accurate description, lol. Basically everything WORKS – it just may be less than optimal and you may have to do more with it to get it that way.
King of the small *nixes? Perhaps. Not so much on the Desktop? Yeah…I can agree with that. Like I said, Debian is about the best for me, in terms of overall speed and stability, usability mixed – and AntiX does fit the bill quite nicely, I would say that it IS superior from a HD-install standpoint compared to Puppy on a HD-Install – but that’s because of the HUGE amount of apps and the Debian base, I think. Just found it a little too unstable for every day use, and decided that if I want a Debian system with that much functionality, I need to add a lot of those packages in there myself so I can understand what’s going on and have more control over my system – apps and misc. things you don’t need generally just open potential security holes and cause problems in most cases, I’ve found. Who knows, perhaps I’ll give AntiX another whirl – but I need to know more about Linux, and I think we can all agree that generally installing a more bare-bones distro is the way to go on that. Anyway, I think I’m done ranting and stuff here – take it easy, thanks for not making me don the asbestos armor. :D
[...] The New #Puppy #GNU #Linux (4.3) Gets Moderate Marks http://desktoplinuxreviews.com/2009/09/21/puppy-linux-4-3/ [...]
Well, Steve clearly knows more about Puppy than I do, but my 5 cents worth:
Running as Root simply is unacceptable to me. Until and unless this changes I would not run Puppy. And that is too bad, because Puppy is attractive.
The better alternative is antiX. I have the newest release installed on a usb-jumpdrive from which it boots and runs very nicely. The various applications and utilities are much better (e.g., wicd and ceni are both present) and the entire system with my personal files fits on an 8 gig drive.
And I have access to Debian repositories and smxi scripts for system maintenance. A bit better than the Puppy offerings.
So if my little system gets fat I’ll move it over to a big 16 gig drive.
Given the capacity and low cost of these little drives I don’t see the problem to running a somewhat larger and more capable distribution for those times when I must travel in a very light mode.
Ah but I learned something – beware the Parrot!
I too was a bit disappointed in the new theme. It seems a huge step backwards from the previous version which I still use.
I also think it is high time that Puppy automatically configure the network, including Wifi.
As to the install issue, I discovered that installing to hard disk, virtual or otherwise, is simply a matter of preformatting. You need at lease a / partition, and a swap partition. After that, it will install without issue.
Regarding the run as root issue, this is not an issue with me as I run Puppy strictly from a LiveCD as a utility distro. I have found nothing better at this point.
Last winter, I had the misfortune of messing up the boot partition on my dual-boot desktop. (WinXP and Mint Linux) It was at this time that my father fell ill and passed away, so I didn’t have time to mess with getting the computer back up and running properly. I put Puppy (whatever version was current in early February of this year) on a 256MB USB stick that I had lying around, and ran with that for about 6 weeks. The only thing I tried that I wasn’t able to do with it during that time was editing some video clips. This includes the re-touching and clean-up of over 400 digital photos from a wedding job that I had in the middle of all this. I didn’t have any trouble playing a couple of DVDs, for that matter.
One catch I had – I have an Epson RS595 all in one unit, and the scannign software didn’t recognize it. I got around this by using the RX to scan the pictures to an SD card placed in the printer’s card reader, then Puppy could see the file on the card.