Confessions of a Distro Hopping Junkie!

[drbongo]

I want to explain how I came to be using Puppy Linux, and would like to hear other peoples 'Pupographys'!

Having been house trained on an Amstrad WPC, and then force fed different flavours of Windoze for many years I decided to give Linux a try after a recommendation from a relative about 4 years ago!

Knowing absolutely nothing about Linux I naively went to PC world and picked out a boxed copy of Suse 9.2 (£29.99) It came with a live demo CD and after some tinkering I managed to do dual install with Windoze ME. I found it difficult to get used to the new interface, apps and looks, but the only thing that didn't work was my winmodem. It took a few days of very frustrating internet searching to find a solution (because I had to reboot everytime wanted to try something).

I then bought the new Suse 9.3 (£79.99 <wince>), but I could never get the winmodem to work no matter what I did, and it would not connect to the network or printers at work. So I dumped Linux and went crawling back to my ex!

Several months later I happened to see a copy of Linux Format in a newsagents with a free copy of Mepis on the cover. Within hours I had installed it onto an old PC and it connected to the Internet through the winmodem out of the box! The affair was rekindled.

I then began trying out lots of distros including Knoppix, DSL, Fedora and Mandriva and finally settled on Ubuntu (edgy Eft) as all of the hardware just worked out of the box and it gave me easy access to lots of extra apps. I pretty much stuck to Ubuntu until they released the Gutsy Gibbon. Disaster! I could simply not get it to work with my ATI video cards (Xorg7.3) and the fact that a simple 3D desktop was enabled by default caused all sorts of problems with my older machines.

This sent me into months of a very distressing distro identity crisis. I tried nearly all of the major distros and just couldn't find one that matched Ubuntu in terms of hardware compatibility and ease of use. No matter which distro I tried there was always some essential function that I could not get to work: Sabayon couldn't print on my work printer, Fedora had no multimedia codecs, Knoppix doesn't work very well as a hard drive installation, Suse had a very limited range of apps available etc etc. I eventually settled for a month or two on PCLinuxOS, the key feature that attracted me to this was the fact that you could remaster it very easily to create a live/installable CD containing all the tools you needed. However, it is primarily a KDE distro, Gnome is available but not as well supported.

I had spent at least six months now jumping from distro to distro. Spending every evening and weekends installing and setting up a new distro on all of my PC's and laptops, and then found something essential didn't work and starting all over again. This became even more serious when my last hope of redemption Hardy Heron didn't work with any of my graphics cards either.

I had spent over six months now running like a headless chicken from one distro to the next and I began to realise that this could potentially continue for months/years. In the meantime I was making no progress with my development projects and it was beginning to have a negative effect on my mental health! I need to settle on a distro and stick to it!

I had looked a many mini-distos in the past, and although they where useful live tools I had never considered any of the them to be a serious desktop operating system. For example DSL was very fast and reliable, but it had a very limited range of apps and was stuck on the 2.4 series kernel.

Then just by chance on one of my daily visits to Distrowatch I noticed Puppy 4 with a shiny new logo. I had tried Puppy before and although it had a lot more apps than DSL I had never really taken it seriously. I think this is partly because of the tendancy of Linux users and magazines etc to favour the large established distros and see the small independant distros as amusing little toys, and partly because of the way puppy linux looked! No offence to Barry et al, but I really thought that the old colour schemes and TCL/TK gui's looked childish, old fashioned and amateurish (I am very embarrassed to admit this) it was pure aesthetic snobbery!

However Puppy 4 looked very slick with its shiny new GTK looks and it worked right out of the box with all of my PC's and laptops, which I think is a first. None of the major distros have ever worked on all of my machines.

The only weakness from my point of view was the lack of a few essential apps, but these where easy to add, and remastering the CD was childsplay. I also discovered that there were plenty of third party packages available, a very active/helpful online community and that puppy provided a very wide and flexible range of boot options.

You could do a traditional hard drive install, run from the live CD and save your sessions on a hard drive , usb pen or the cd itself! It boots from CD's USB pens, internal SSD drives, SD cards (via usb) etc. Perhaps the most flexible option is the frugal install which allows you to install it on a computer without touching the original installation.

The most useful option for me is the frugral install, which means I can install lots of different versions of Puppy side by side, experiment with them and if it all goes wrong I can simple boot from another installation and repair it. I am also now starting to explore different puplets and have been most impressed with Muppy and Pupeee (for the eeepc)!.

I hope my days as a lost linux soul are over as I see so much potential in the core Puppy distro, that it seems to be able to meet all of my needs and it is very small and very fast into the Bargain. Its size means it is easy to download and very quick to install etc. Is this what Donny Osmond meant by 'Puppy Love'?

I would be very interested to read about how other users came to settle on Puppy Linux and what features they think makes it stand out from the pack?

drbongo

[bugman]

puppy was the first distro that did not frustrate me to the point of tears

it is still the only one that leaves me dry-eyed

[occasional tears of joy]

[KF6SNJ]

For me puppy saved me from being without a computer for a period of several months. I had downloaded and burned both puppy 0.7 and dsl 0.8 at the same time. The dsl disc didn't work so I presumed that puppy wouldn't. Both got thrown into a box. Move forward six months. We moved from our apartment to a trailer. About a week later my hard drive crashed. Thankfully all my most current files had been saved to cd. I started digging through my box of linux discs to see if there was anything that might work so I could continue using my computer. I found the puppy disc I had burned, skeptical, I tried it. Certainly I had to configure everything everytime I booted up my machine, but I was able to continue doing the things I was doing before the machine quit. I have been using puppy ever since. I am presently using derivative ChurchPup 3.01 and the only thing I have to configure is sound and that is due to a buggy hard drive (I plan on buying a brand new out of the box 300Gb IDE drive soon). That should solve my sound problem. Puppy doesn't seem to like my external hard drive, but I can access it using PCLinuxOS and that works just fine for me. Puppy is my primary operating system and I am quite happy with it.

[puppyluvr]

Hello!!

Well, my Puppy history is pretty short. Up until April of 2007, I was a Win98se man all the way. I was a true believer man, to the core!! I was never gonna give it up, I was gonna use 98se forever..Spent years cutting out the useless crap and tuning it up to a lean, mean, (or so I thought) machine.
Regrettably, the world outran my 98se, it just couldnt keep up. The new drivers wouldnt work, the new hardware wouldnt work....it was upgrade or die...
Around this time two things happened. One was my discovery of Solaris, a very nice Open Source plarform, with a ton of hardware issues.( Although Ive read somewhere that it runs well on Macs, and on SPARK, whatever that is...) Solaris was my first venture into Open Source software, and I was interested, but could never get it to work well enough for everyday use..
The other was finding other (unofficial) versions of WinXP on the Internet. I D/L the April 2007 Performance Edition. Around 363 MB.. Windows pared to the bone..Works good. If you must use Windows, its the way to go..
But I had gotten the FOSS bug now..Around November I found Knoppix...WOW, was
this cool!!! But no good for full install..Then came PCLinuxOS...(next to Puppy, probably the best Distro out there), Sabayon, (also way cool), DSL (has potential), and a neat little
Distro called Luitlinux...(very fast).and about 20 other "OK" distros, .and finally Pupppy..( the search ended there..)
Puppy works...on everything...finds my hardware, including usb wireless, which no other distro could.. Fast, low resource use, incredible configurability, simple to remaster, will run any Window Manager you want. (Even Compiz/Beryl), runs smoother and more consistant than any other OS, and has the best support in the Linux world.
Started with 215ce and never looked back..Cant hardly operate my doze anymore, {Oh yea, Double click LOL). Have at least one Puppy on every machine in the house, some have 3 or 4.. BTW, Dingo rocks....

[nitehawk]

Oh yeah,...win98se. Used it for years. Did the very same thing of tweaking it (and tweaking it,..etc. etc.) Couldn't shell out for WinXP,...(deleted win2000, 'cause I hated it). Started fooling with Ubuntu (hey, the CD came free). But couldn't get on my cheap little dial-up. (I since have learned how)...but it staid for months on a shelf,...while I went thru about a dozen other distros and PC-Bsd. I really liked the "exclusiveness" of PC-Bsd (as in: this isn't Linux,..!) But my printer wasn't supported,...couldn't get some of the apps to download and install right from their "PBI" package manager. (It's nice,..I just couldn't get it to work for me....DesktopBSD the same). Suse 10.3 hates my old graphic card,...Gentoo mocked at me,....Mepis said I didn't have any such thing called a USRobotics external modem, no matter what I tried to tell it. Vector Linux said my computer is too old to download and build their packages in a timely manner. And so forth,.....
And I discovered Puppy 3.01. (I now use Puppy4). But everything worked right away,...been using it ever since. (Fooling with Ubuntu on my 40g hard drive,)...but have Puppy4 on other 8gig,..and other old computer in back room. All I need.

[raffy]

Your story is similar to mine, trying out every Linux that came out since year 2000. In late 2004, when Puppy began including Firefox, I gave it a try and never looked back.

My interest is in distributing to teachers a very light OS that can play Firefox (as it was the only browser that supports wysiwyg editing at the time, other than Internet Explorer).

Puppy saves a lot of your time downloading and testing the OS, and you can tweak it to special purposes, such as PXE-booting the OS using old PCs.

[WhoDo]

These are all great stories of Puppy success! Why don't you guys post them on the web site at www.puppylinux.org in your respective blogs?

Alternatively, perhaps our editors could be persuaded to add a How I Found Puppy page to the wiki, so these great Puppy tails ... err ... tales don't get lost in the forum noise over time?

Just a suggestion!

[WhoDo]

I came to Puppy out of necessity, too. I was supervising a Work for the Dole project - an opportunity for unemployed Australians to spend their time productively for the community benefit - that aimed to recycle old "useless" PC's for charity. We started out loading them with Win95 licences people had discarded, but those ran out. We couldn't afford WinXP, which was all you could buy at the time, and being government supported we couldn't be seen to be doing anything suspect with software.

The son of a friend suggested I try Ubuntu - version 4.10 at the time. It was difficult to load and simply wouldn't work on some machines but we had no choice and they supplied the software on CD for free! It was made for us, so I ordered a batch of CD's. When they arrived they were version 5.04 and worked better, but were still slow.

I started haunting Distrowatch, looking for anything we could use. We tried Mandrake/Mandriva, DSL, Mepis, XandrosCE, Slax, etc, etc. Some were ok for a few machines and not much good for others. DSL was fast enough, but it had that funny Fluxbox interface and our users simply wouldn't/couldn't get it. Then I found Puppy 2.00! Wow!

Suddenly old PC's that we didn't have a hope of resurrecting were working at light speed! We could make it look like Windows 95 or even Windows XP (sort of), and our users were happy. We didn't look back! We could load it on a 1Gb hard drive attached to a Pentium 120MHz with 48Mb RAM, provided we had a swap partition, and it still ran fine. We progressively used 2.02CE, 2.10, 2.11, 2.12, 2.13, 2.14 and were using 2.16 when I left the project. 2.15CE wasn't built for the boat anchors we were reviving, though a few PII's and PIII's did get a taste of it!

Now I multiboot Puppy 2.16.1, 3.01 and 4.00 alongside PCLinuxOS.2008 on an old laptop that I have to hold a certain way or the "dry" joints between the motherboard and hdd won't let it boot properly! It barely misses a beat, except when rebooting of course.

Puppy has become my passion. I started out "giving back" by coordinating the Puppy 2.15CE community edition. I wanted a Puppy that the community could be proud to show off. I was going to create my own puplet next, but settled for creating EZpup instead, allowing others to pimp their Puppies to taste. EZpup ran from v1 through 2.16, 2.17, 2.17R2, 3.01 and now 4.0, each version (except for 1.0) being aligned to the release of a new Puppy.

I debated long and hard about adding anything to Puppy 4.00 as I believe it really is fine the way Barry created it, from an aesthetics view point. EZpup 4.00 was really just icing on the tasty cake. I can't thank Barry, the developers (especially MU, NathanF and Pizzasgood in the early days and now Zigbert, Dougal, tempestuous, and all the others I haven't mentioned) and the Puppy community (especially Lobster) for welcoming me to the kennels and supporting my efforts to give back a tiny portion of what I have received from this remarkable piece of software and the people who support and use it.

[oblivious]

I've got a terrible headache so I don't feel like cataloguing my sad tale of distro hopping at the moment.

as I believe it really is fine the way Barry created it, from an aesthetics view point.

Yes, it's fine. The only thing I'd have preferred differently is the default wallpaper. Instead of a picture like Knoppix' and which looks European to me, I'd have liked an Aussie picture - some geological formation (wave rock, the 3 sisters), a building (one of Monsigneur Hawes' maybe - I see he built the church in Perenjori), the beach, red dust, somebody's back paddock, the rabbit-proof fence.

I know Puppy's success is now due to international input, but he started his run in Oz. Puppy marches to the beat of his own drum and I think that a more off-beat picture would have reflected that.

But, who cares - it can easily be changed. That's what I like about Puppy - it doesn't tell me what to do. "Root logins are not permitted", indeed!

[Lobster]

"My first experience of Linux was a Slackware distribution double CD set. My computer friends had never even heard of Linux and could not understand my interest. They thought I was mad. Five weeks of suffering ensued. I used a 9600 modem dial up for questions about graphic cards to anyone who would help. I eventually got the X window terminal and "Midnight Commander" and then eventually Netscape running in low-res. Frankly it was dire. Crazy as eating tar. This was not a desktop alternative. Not yet anyway. Maybe that would come later."

Read more in my two part distro-ography (quite long)
How I became a penguin
http://tmxxine.com/wik/wikka.php?wakka=BetterVista

[Billwho?]

I'd have liked an Aussie picture - some geological formation (wave rock, the 3 sisters), a building (one of Monsigneur Hawes' maybe - I see he built the church in Perenjori), the beach, red dust, somebody's back paddock, the rabbit-proof fence.

How about "The Rock" with either the original Puppy or Vincent in the foreground?

[oblivious]

How about "The Rock" with either the original Puppy or Vincent in the foreground?

How about Vincent cocking his leg on it? That's what my boy dog would do if he got anywhere near it! (only joking)

[Jaybekay]

Maybe something like this for default wallpaper?

For me, Puppy was the only distro I kept coming back to. Well, I still take a look at Ubuntu every now and then, but Puppy really improves with each release. I still root for Ubuntu, I think it is the distro most likely to get Linux on the map, but I use Puppy.

[alienjeff]

How about "The Rock" with either the original Puppy or Vincent in the foreground?

How about Vincent cocking his leg on it? That's what my boy dog would do if he got anywhere near it! (only joking)

I doubt the Abos would find much humor in such virtual desecration of their Uluru ...

[WhoDo]

Another view of Uluru which is quite symbolic, and not just for our Koori brothers. It stands rock solid rising out of the surrounding bulldust like a guiding beacon and changes colour with the viewer's perspective. I once posted a version of this with Puppy sitting in the right foreground blissfully chewing his flower.

[Billwho?]

Hi Jaybekay
I like the "watermark" in the sky. Almost gives the impression that Puppy has been around since "The time of The Dreaming".
Come to think of it we could probably get a fairly impressive set of included backgrounds without going very far east of Alice Springs.
The Olgas
The Rock (Uluru)
The Devils Marbles
Wave Rock
Wolf Creek Crater
Kings Canyon
The Kinberleys
Kakadu

[oblivious]

@ alienjeff, I was talking about Wave Rock, not Uluru, which as you point out, has particular significance to indigenous Australians. I was joking about the behaviour of dogs, not about any landmark of significance to other Australians, and I'd never do the latter. And we don't refer to indigenous Australians as you have done - can you edit your post, please?

[alienjeff]

And we don't refer to indigenous Australians as you have done

ORLY?

Let me abos go loose, Lew
Let me abos go loose
They're of no further use, Lew
So let me abos go loose
Altogether now!

References:
http://www.digitaldreamdoor.com/pages/l ... angar.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Harris

...can you edit your post, please?

I can ... as soon as you display your Pejorative Police badge.

[HairyWill]

Tie Me Kangaroo was first recorded in 1957 around the same time that the BBC started the Black and White Minstrels Show [1]. I'm sure there are plenty of racist and other discriminatory references in high quality historical works of art. We have the choice of censoring history or accepting that the work reflected views of the time. I don't believe this should be used to justify offensive behavior now.

It is ironic that AJ has copped flac for trying to defend someone else's religious sensibilities. I don't even know if a dog pissing on Uluru would be offensive. I don't have enough understanding of aboriginal culture. I'm sure there is a belief system somewhere that says something like man was created by some animal weeing on something.

Where, in public, would you stand up and call someone you didn't know a nigger? I believe in freedom of speech but I also believe in avoiding causing unnecessary offense. I'm not convinced that retrospective censorship achieves very much.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_white_minstrel

[WhoDo]

It is ironic that AJ has copped flac for trying to defend someone else's religious sensibilities. I don't even know if a dog pissing on Uluru would be offensive. I don't have enough understanding of aboriginal culture.

I did try and "gently" correct AJ's terminology in my subsequent post, but obviously others were more offended than I.

As for "dog pissing", it wouldn't surprise me if it was a daily occurrence! Uluru is surrounded by a healthy population of dingos!

My limited understanding of Austalian indigenous culture leads me to suspect that anything done by an ancestor (who now has taken the form of a dog) is perfectly ok. It might even be construed as a blessing, for all I know.

That said, IMHO the giving and receiving of offense is one of those rare cases when it is definitely more "bless-ed" to receive than to give.