Puppy Linux 5.0
Where To Get Help
Please take a moment to register for the DLR forum (registration takes less than a minute and you can login with your Facebook account if you want); everybody is welcome. You are welcome to post a message in the Linux Help section and we’ll do our best to point you in the right direction. The forum contains discussions about Linux, but also many other topics. Please stop by and say hello when you have a chance.
Drop by the forum to get help, talk about Linux or just hang out.
You might also want to check out the Puppy Linux forums, install instructions, and the Puppy Linux technical and developer page.
Final Thoughts & Who Should Use It
Puppy Linux 5.0 was a real treat for me to review. I love this distro’s personality and humor. Everything from the lingo, to the logo, to the wallpaper radiates fun. You can’t help but smile when the Puppy Linux desktop pops up.
Puppy Linux 5.0 is perfect for intermediate and advanced Linux users. However, I worry about recommending Puppy Linux 5.0 to beginners. The network configuration might throw some Linux newbies off and the application menus in Puppy teem with applications. It might be overwhelming to someone who is new to Linux. But if you’re an adventuresome Linux newbie, feel free to give Puppy Linux 5.0 a shot.
Puppy Linux 5.0 is well worth a download, and it deserves a chance to become your preferred portable distro. Check it out.
What’s your take on this distro? Tell me in the comments below. Visit the DLR forum for more discussions. Visit JimLynch.com for opinion columns.
Summary Table:
| Product: | Puppy Linux 5.0 |
| Web Site: | http://www.puppylinux.com/ |
| Price: | Free |
| Pros: | Quickpet makes it easy to add applications, drivers and updates with one-click. Boots right to the desktop. Good selection of bundled software. Tiny file download size. |
| Cons: | YouTube videos seemed to lock up Puppy Linux 5.0 twice. Internet connection requires some configuration. |
| Suitable For: | Intermediate and advanced Linux users. Adventuresome beginners might also want to play with it and see if it’s right for them. |
| Summary: | Puppy Linux 5.0 is a terrific lightweight, portable distro. It’s well worth putting on a USB key chain or other portable device. Puppy Linux 5.0 is tiny but it packs a powerful bite. |
| Rating: | 4/5 |
(15 votes, average: 3.53 out of 5)
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Puppy Linux is a very good system for running Live, physically loading everything into RAM and running straight from RAM. Now that Barry Kauler has made good progress on the Woof infrastructure that he’s been wanting to complete for the past two years, we can have systems based on Ubuntu, or for that matter, whatever packaging style the creator decides to use. For Lucid Puppy, that means we get the Lucid repository from the Ubuntu project. Puppy has used the Slackware repositories in the past, and there is a possibility that a future project using the Woof technology could, once again, use Slackware packages. They’d certainly be light and fast.
Jim, I don’t know which browser and plugins you were using when you ran into problems. I ran Quirky last week and did not encounter any specific problems but I did not really beat on it.
I find no value at all to installing Puppy on a hard drive. Used in that way, I find Puppy, at least past releases, to be at a disadvantage compared to full featured distributions. When loaded directly into memory, however, Puppy is one of the most nimble and useful distributions available for routine tasks.
Now that the Woof infrastructure has been tied to a readily upgradable packaging structure, Puppy makes an interesting alternative to antiX, which I’ve felt has been a better, more complete system in terms of flexibility. I still feel that antiX is more stable and has a rich set of tools, but Puppy provides a strong alternative. If you want something smaller, Puppy wins. If you want something more initially complete, antiX wins. Both are flexible when it comes to installing onto a stick or removable device.
Many of the programs I use are written by myself in Python. Puppy 5.0 claims that Python can be installed by pet, but this is not true. The pet package is much too small for Python. DistroWatch states that Python 2.6.5 is already contained in Puppy Linux 5.0. Try “python” in a console and you will see what happens.
Jim, what is the situation with account/user management? In the past Puppy has not bothered at all with the concept of a “root” user. The entire system is open at all times. If we assume Puppy simply runs off its CD (or entirely in RAM) that is one scenario. If it is loaded on a hard drive that is another.
I tracked Puppy for a while and wrote several reviews. It impressed me as very clever with some very nice considerations for users who still had to use dial-up connections, for example. Is that still true?
BTW, Puppy also had just about the clumsiest tool I have seen for wireless configuration. I surely hope that is improved!
In the end I left it because I just could not get comfortable with the lack of a root user, which seemed to me essential for protecting the integrity of the system. But there is a lengthy discussion of this on the Puppy website. Barry Kauler does make a good case for his approach.
The ability to use the ubuntu repos is a huge step forward. I always found the old pupget system to be clumsy and limited. I haven’t tried my acid test which is installing a Netgear wifi dongle that needs ndiswrapper and two u$oft drivers. 5.0 came up quicker than previous versions and the video detection seemed better on my main box. Burning the iso was critical and I made two coasters before I reverted to my old HP CD burner that will work at 4x. Finding the right drive settings to load it on the thumb drive was a major pain but once loaded, runs great. It is ultra-secure used that way, despite the root issue mentioned above.
That said, I recently tried TinyMe 2010 on my ancient compaq laptop (K6-2 433 with 192M ram) and it rocks! Same headache on the Netgear dongle and worse, had to compile a fresh copy of ndiswrapper to make it work. The Midori browser in TimyMe is very light and fast with the best rendering I have seen yet in a lite browser.
Forced to restart puppy 5 after lockup. Does ctl alt bsp and type xwin not work anymore.
@mike lee: It still works, but Lucid Puppy seems to rerun the X configuration wizard when you do it, where older Puppy releases just restarted X with the existing settings (and the wizard was another command entirely).
I have to agree that the review did not address the key issues I had with Puppy (which I do love BTW) which was wireless configuration, the lack of user/superuser/root separation and a lower degree of hardware compatibility.
@ Konrad Koller python is part of devx sfs module which contains compiling and programming enviroment for puppy
ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-5.0/lupu_devx_500.sfs ;)
Puppy is great for working from a removable media source, and using that removable source to save both the ISO image and any modifiable content. In that context, either as a Live CD or SSD style system, loading it completely into RAM and writing to a writable media to save information (you can mount a hard drive, too, if you want to save information there) it is great. But to install this on a hard drive, you then run into comparisons with other more full featured systems and that’s where Puppy might be found lacking.
Constrain the Pup to its leash and use it where it wanders the best – staying in RAM and saving its context on a removable device, and this is one of the best, if not THE BEST, system of its type. Use it out of that context, though, and Puppy, in other contexts, can show up looking incomplete, broken, inappropriate, and more. That’s not fair.
Ubuntu, to carry the analogy further, to me makes a terrible Live CD. It boots up error free, but from CD I find it as slow as maple syrup in Maine in January, and that is slow. Install Ubuntu and configure it with the software that its consumer base uses, though, and it’s great. Give Puppy the same opportunity, and use it the way that most of its followers use it, and Puppy is great too.
I rate Puppy near the top when used in its proper context.
For my purposes, I do tend to prefer antiX. It is a bit larger, so it loads somewhat slower live than Puppy, but it can do much more, plus it can run from memory like Puppy. I use Puppy when I am definitely going to be doing mostly Internet based browsing activity. I use antiX when I am looking for speed and access to my information, generally running from an installed image. Both are great at what they do best, and flexible enough that they can be modified and used in environments that are not the sweet spot of their original design intent. That speaks well for both Puppy and antiX, so for me I give Puppy a thumbs up.
“Puppy Linux 5.0 is perfect for intermediate and advanced Linux users. However, I worry about recommending Puppy Linux 5.0 to beginners. The network configuration might throw some Linux newbies off…”
That’s sort of the crux of a problem: cute and simple usually are not what intermediate and advanced users want and complexity is not what casual users need. Puppy should decide what it wants to be.