Playing with a puppy

[hazel]

Well, I finally decided to spend some money on getting my main cdrom drive fixed and now I can do installations again. Out of curiosity I went to the Puppy Linux site and, on finding that the whole thing is only 88MB, I downloaded it and burned a disc. Imagine my surprise when, instead of the rather spartan GUI that I was expecting, I found a fully featured desktop environment. Wow, it's like the Tardis, bigger inside than out.

What I like:
1) The fast boot (only one minute from the hard drive as promised on the website; live boot takes longer).
2) Single-click icon activation by default.
3) The graphical mount tool - makes mounting partitions easy for newbies but educates them at the same time about Linux partition management and terminology (automounting as in Gnome doesn't teach anybody anything!)

What I don't like:
1) No login; you're root all the time. I find this terrifying, especially as you can mount partitions belonging to another distro and totally wreck them.
2) All the documentation is online. No bloody use if you can't get connected and I've had no luck with that so far.

I also found a filesystem bug: two files (/etc/resolv.conf and /etc/ppp/resolv.conf) which are links pointing at each other. Why am I surprised? Puppies are famous for chasing their tails.

I could really get fond of this os.

[elija]

Puppy is kind of cute isn't it...

As well as your positive points above, I would have to add that it is the only distro to correctly identify and configure the Broadcom Wireless card straight after install.

The root thing puts me off a bit too, but you must be able to manually create a user and add it to the appropriate groups.

[hazel]

Puppy is kind of cute isn't it...


The root thing puts me off a bit too, but you must be able to manually create a user and add it to the appropriate groups.

Yes, I thought of that too. I suppose I could use su to become that user.

By the way, I did finally get online. But you'll never guess how in a million years! When I connect, I get all the indications of a successful connection (local and remote IP addresses, dns addresses, etc) but the router remains my default route and I can't get out. Can't even ping my dns server. But when I disconnect, I'm told the link is down, route shows only local addresses but it works!

Computers are so illogical!

[elija]

Yeah, when I used the connection icon on the desktop, it only worked when it told me I failed to connect

An interesting thread on the puppy linux forums