Opinions wanted: Is Puppy only for older/low-power machines?

[happy cricket]

This is a serious question from a very new Linux user who is still in the "all freaky excited phase".

I put Puppy on an old machine for my son - my lovely wife checked it out, and just about peed her pants, she was so excited. My original plan was to put something larger on the computer that I am building for her - but she has pointed out that she'd be perfectly happy with Puppy.

Here's the crux - the computer I am building for her has plenty of power to run something like Ubuntu or PCLOS - I almost feel like if I put a mini-OS on it, I'm doing something wrong.

Is my logic a little bent here? Do any of you run Puppy (or another mini distro) on a "full-strength" machine, as it were? Keep in mind that I'm not talking dual-boot or anything - whatever Linux distro I put on her comp will be the only OS on it.

Thank you for any replies!

[gary101]

Hi Happy cricket & welcome to the kennels!

Your question is a valid one. I run several machines with puppy on from a 400mhz AMD laptop to a 2.4Gb P4 with 2 Gb ram.

The way I look at it is, if you have a more powerful computer why would you want to waste a heck of a load of resources just to drive the operating system instead of using them for tasks you want to do?

Just my opinion though, I fully support everyones right to choice. Even if people want to install wondows! lol

Gary

[jonyo]

I have many big (~700) meg OSs (win & linux) installed to hard drive, mostly newer gear (- xp & even vista capable) but still mostly use pup on all of 'em live cd save file to hd. Very easy to go back & forth that way & do the odd other thing once in awhile.

I've read about some saying that pup is for old low end machines but don't see why. Pretty hard to beat the speed (or go back) once accustomed. Guess it depends though what one's needs might be.

[muggins]

the advantage of a larger debian based OS, like ubuntu, is that you have access to a much bigger pool of applications.

yet i've been using tiny puppy for several years as my only OS, and don't even use 10% of the applications available with it. so, you might have heaps more apps available with ubuntu, but how many will you actually ever use?

i've tried ubuntu, and several other of the bigger linuxes, but always return to puppy, as it seems more thought has been put into making it easier for the user to configure.

another advantage of puppy's frugal mode of installation is that, because backing up is just renaming a file, and installation is of the order of 10 minutes, if you ever do manage to "trash" your system, you can be back where you were within 10 minutes.

[PaulBx1]

When you get a high power machine, you usually end up having a lot of heat generated and loud fan noise. So while there is nothing wrong using Puppy on a box like this, it allows you to use a computer with less heat and noise. I think it's a good idea to take advantage of that!

[raffy]

Save some energy for making the world greener!

Puppy runs in 1 watt processor - go find an AMD LX800 !

[alienjeff]

Know the difference between wants and needs.

[craftybytes]

Hi happy cricket & welcome to the kennels from me as well...

As you can see at the bottom of any of my posts - I run a VIA motherboard with a 1.8Ghz AMD CPU; 768MB RAM; 80GB hdd (MEPIS v3.4-3, + Puppy v2.15CE Frugal); 20GB hdd (Win XP Pro); DVDRW; 17" LCD monitor..

In the last 6 months, I've used Win XP once, MEPIS Linux - maybe 3 or 4 times, Puppy every day - even though my machine maybe classed as reasonably fast "medium-strength" system - BUT - it does for what I currently need..

So in real terms a 'mid' to 'high' end machine can run Puppy just as good as many of the 'lower' spec'd ones - just much much faster (like a bat out of hell - for my system) - so one can get things done much sooner than on a lower spec'd system - but that does not detract from using a lower spec'd one - if it does what one needs, well and good..

Thus I would say - to keep the peace - if your 'lovely wife' likes Puppy and is happy to try it out - then go for it..!!!

You can always load up another much larger distro like MEPIS or PCLOS - if down the track she finds that Puppy is not what she wanted - BUT - I'm certain that this won't be the case...!!

Anyway - if what one reads in the Puppy forums is anything to go by - you all will have fun using Puppy..

Go play with the little pup..

crafty.
.
.

[gerry]

If Puppy does what the user wants, why slow down your computer with bloated software?

[jonyo]

Most folks run bloat (win). Coming over from that & having a go at linux, doesn't necessarily mean being able to drop win, or the gear required to run it. If you have the gear, might as well use it. Not to mention that with a win world out there, often there is no choice but to participate in it.

Folks who are well versed with linux, are a minority but have more options & diff needs or requirements than win folks.

Puppy does what some users want or may require. A vista box (3.3 cel 512 ram) can be bought for 260 bucks, or at least I found some at Tiger direct. I added some ram..

[darrelljon]

If you want multiuser, I'd choose something other than Puppy.

[purple_ghost]

Does Puppy already have the applications you need? If not, applications can be added. Pet Get already has the ones most home users might want. I think there is an easy to use installer for anything Debian. The Debian repository is Huge. What printer are you planning to use? Some printers are easy to configure with Puppy? Some printers can be configured by someone who is knowledgable about Linux and printers.

What kind of Video card is this computer going to have? A few Video drivers are not on the original boot CD. If yours is not on the CD, then you can come to forum and probably some one has already found the answer. Just a bit of tinkering for you.

IMHO, Puppy is great as a web surfing machine. I turn on the firewall. Stay away from some types of sites. As my ISP scans my email for viruses, If I want to go to a quesitonable web site. I can put a persistent pup_save.2fs file on a partition all by itself. Then not mount the other partitions of my hard drive. No one from the Internet is going to easilly get at my hard drive data. I have now installed the Seamonkey plug-in for "No Script." "No Script" allows one selectively allow Java to run by web site or temporarily. After I learned how to use 'No Script", this is great. Java should have been designed with this feature inside it.

Why decide at all now. Let me put that a different way. When I first started using Puppy I used to obsess about installing Puppy to the hard drive. I had this idea in my mind that an operating system should start from the hard drive. Now, I have discovered that I am very happy with booting Puppy as a Live CD. I have a small persistent file for all my personal data like log ins and passwords and personal choice application programs. . That small file is easy to back up. I know each time I boot I get a clean copy of the OS, almost llike a fresh new install. If I want to use the optical drive. I just take the Puppy boot CD out. (I think one can not do that if the computer has less than 128 MB RAM. Your question seems to imply more RAM in the computer you are thinking of using Puppy in.) I now let my hard drive boot Windows 98 SE when the Puppy CD is not in. While there is nearly always a Linux alternative, sometimes it is just easier to install and run an application in Windows.

If you decide to use Puppy Linux from the Live CD. Then you could install any other OS you might want to the hard drive without a GRUB. No extra time worrying about installing GRUB. Then trying to make two OS's play together. (Windows does not play well with others.) Backing up the Puppy persistent file is easy. Upgrading to another version of Puppy is also easy. In fact. It is easy to keep several persistent files for a live CD for different versions of Puppy or different uses. If you have more than one pup_save.2fs persistent file, then at the live CD boot up you are asked which one you want to use.

Still running from hard drive or from the Live CD is a matter of personal choice.

Best wishes.

[Kal]

I started using Puppy as cute little add on a couple years ago. The Pup was not perfect, it had no sound and no printing, at that time on my main computer. I preferred the KDE desktop of the moderately bigger distros, having switched from windows.

I finally got the sound going and Barry fixed it, so it was a no brainer in the next release of Puppy, I was hooked. Rarsa got cups printing working and other members of the forum got KDE cooking on Puppy. I also have a full Samba 3.0.25b for sharing info between computers on my network.

My usage of Puppy went up from a low of 25% to 95% in no time. I am still multi booted, but, wondering why? The computers here, range from a 200MHz to a AMD 64 3400+ and all work well with Puppy 2.17.

Good Luck, Kal

[Wolf Pup]

faster computer = faster puppy
Running puppy on a 1.2ghz celeron make it seem like im running 2.0ghz pentium 4.

[rarsa]

This is a very personal question (along with the refferences of someone peeing her pants. I guess )

1. Mini distro? says who? a Linux is a Linux is a Linux. That puppy does not NEED a big computer does not mean that it cannot use all the power of a big computer.

2. What are the objective requirements: What is the purpose of the computer.
- For browsing the net, facebooking, watching movies, chatting, writing documents, and all the other tasks 99% of users do, Puppy
- For multiuser or using virtualization or requiring to frequently install applications, eyecandy, etc. Then a distro with broader support will be better.

The best thing is that it does not have to be "or". Most of the time I use Puppy but I dual boot into Fedora when I need to use an application that I don't have in Puppy.

[Bluedogruns]

I have only used Puppy for about 2 weeks now and I have to tell you I am hooked. There are several reasons.

1st reason and the best is this forum has good knowledgeable people on Puppy. I have yet to ask a question that did not get answered.

I also tried the other small and large distros. I will not name names here but of the other small systems about the size of Puppy not all of my hardware worked sometimes as bad as a PS2 mouse not running on one boot but fine on the next.

I also found that I am having a problem getting on line with my Ralink Wi-Fi card on the other distros of all sizes. Running the code to install the drivers fails every time. For my Wi-Fi card the Windows drivers are not standard and do not have an INF file so running it on ndiswrapper is out of the question. In Puppy it is simple to run my Ralink Wi-Fi card, took about 1 minute to set it up.

Now I see posts about multi users, well somewhere in the forum I read a post that mentioned how to do multi users. It stated that the pup save file can be renamed, however part of the name has to remain in tact and you can add each users name to the default name. So you could have more than pup save file with various names and when Puppy boots you just choose the pup save file you want to use.

One last thing I do tech support for a network of nearly 100 Windows XPPro/Home and Windows 2000 Pro machines. I have to have a Windows machine at home. I have XP Pro, the machine has a processor 5 times faster, 5 times the memory, 32 times the graphics than what I have on the Puppy machine. Since I have had puppy running the Puppy machine has done 99% of my internet surfing. The only thing Puppy has not done in the past two weeks is my Office Programs. I use Corel and have not found a Free Linux program yet that will open that format.

Blue

[Ian]

As mother boards fail and become outdated ( this is usually a year before they are released on the market) I replace them with the latest offerings, if I cannot source a second-hand board, which means that at times I have to upgrade RAM so sometimes it costs more than at other times.

This means that I have a range of machines from a 486 to an AMD 3000+ with ram from 48M to 1G.

I have run Puppy on all these machines and as I upgrade my personal workstation I just reinstall Puppy or install the old hard drive. Puppy works OK on whatever I use it on so I just keep on moving to the latest release either to test it or to make it my current OS until the next release.

I'm happy

[jonyo]

One last thing I do tech support for a network of nearly 100 Windows XPPro/Home and Windows 2000 Pro machines.

Sounds like an excellent line of (steady) work with plenty of overtime..

[Pizzasgood]

Is Puppy only for older/low-power machines?

I just about fell out of my seat when I read that. I have the exact opposite of what Puppy was intended for:

Omnius
OS: Pizzapup 3.0.1, Frugal-HD Install
3gHz P4, 1-GB RAM
160GB SATA HD
256-MB ATI Radeon on a 17" LCD
64-MB nVidia Geforce MX4 on a 17" CRT
Wacom Graphire4
Nostromo n52 Speedpad
four good speakers plus two cheapies (but they make good tweeters)

So I can confirm that yes, Puppy will work just fine if you go for overkill. But if I were just a casual surfer, I'd be just fine with my other computer:

Erasmus
OS: Pizzapup 3.0.1, Frugal-HD Install
450-mHz PIII, 256-MB RAM
13 and 80 GB IDE drives
Old SoundBlaster something-or-other
WinFast TV-Tuner

That runs Puppy just fine. It used to have the nVidia card that's now in Omnius, and then it ran even better (the mobo has such an ancient onboard video chip that a graphics card speed up everything). Even without it, as long as you didn't look at the box itself, you'd never realize its got less than half a gigahertz. And with Pizzapup, it looks great too. But, it can't handle the heavier stuff, like modern 3d (even with the nVidia, though that helped). And building a .sfs file used to be slow on it back in the 1.x.x days. I don't even want to think about how long it would take with LZMA compression...

[snavely]

My pc is a little dated (Soyo KT600, AthlonXP 2500, I ide and 1 sata hd, BFG Geforce 7800GS and 2 gigs of ram) and every time I boot puppy after running WinXP I almost yell WHEEE!!!!!!!!. Much fun.
Why the 2 gigs of ram you say? For running virtual machines with NO hiccups.