I like the ideas here.
My summary of observation thus far, we need two (or more) flavours of Puppy, one for old and one for new hardware.
Old would have support for, obviously, older hardware, but offer the newest, best and safest software. This would probably also still work on newer hardware, but probably not as optimised.
New would have support for newer hardware with the same newest, best and safest software. Probably won't work on old hardware, but, that's not the intention.
I think it would be ideal to have, if possible, two puppies that are virtually identical, but with differing kernels to suit different hardware. Something like Jemimah did with puppeee and fluppy.
The older puppy would be similar to what we have now, or perhaps more along the lines of Wary, with an older, more stable and mature kernel with support for as much legacy stuff as possible. Maybe the extra drivers for things like dialup etc could be in a zdrv to keep it the same as the newer.
The newer puppy would have the same software but with a kernel optimised for the latest stuff. What would be a cut off point for newest? i686? Or a little older? Would it be worth jumping forth with 64bit? That leads to needing different software to utilise all 64 bits. As discussed, PAE has similar benefits, but uses 32 bit software. Not as good, but an easier solution that *should* work on just about all NEW hardware. Maybe there is a need for 3 in the kennel??
Maybe a 4th, but ARM is a big leap for a little puppy.... Do we just argue that puppies have 4 legs and no ARMs?
I see samba get mentioned all the time, rcrsn51's samba-tng package is tiny compared to full samba at only a couple of mb, and offers almost perfect file sharing with other machines of the other OS. I think it should be included in future puppies, or at the very least, in an official repository.
There is a lot of push in other threads for slack compatibility, and it is mentioned here as well, is this the direction to go in? Does this affect the number / naming of Puppy? Do we really care about that??
My personal observation of Puppy and its binary compatibility stuff is that its a negative for Puppy as a selling point, but positive as a feature. So many times have I read reviews, and forum help requests, that state for a fact that Puppy is now an Ubuntu derivative. Now its going to be a Slack derivative too? To sell it to new users, maybe tone down the compatibility talk, and talk up the puppy talk. I'm still not 100% sure how to get this one across.
Size is always an issue with Puppy. Akash_rawal, how did you go with your size idea? Does it work? If that works when compiling, we've got 30 or 40 meg to play with, if not, we're full already..! Is 128 still the maximum goal? If we're aiming for higher hardware, can that slip upwards? if we're aiming for the same OS with different kernels, we are limited by older hardware. Are there things in puppy, that aren't used? I haven't used most of the things in the network menu for example..
Rough summary anyway. Is that about right?
Are any of the devs working on the stuff in this thread?
Is it up to that yet?
Is anyone volunteering to make a start?
I hope so, things are looking bright.