Here's my latest experiment - Enlightened Dpup, the blend of three wonderful worlds: Puppy, Debian and E17. This puplet is built from rock-solid Debian Squeeze packages and features a vanilla SVN snapshot of E17.
It's very minimalistic and in early alpha quality. Without E17 and Opera, it's about 80 MB. The only stuff you have are E17 (along with many useful modules), Aterm (a lightweight terminal emulator) and Opera (a fast browser). Funky 3D stuff (and a compositing window manager!) are supported out-of-the-box, since the equivalent of Lucid's Xorg_High is integrated.
There are no applications except those; if you want anything, you'll have to install it. If I update this (read the notes below), I might throw in a couple of basic applications such as Geany and LXTask, but I want it to be minimalistic and small.
The kernel is 2.6.32.42 at the moment. It's patched with BFS (a scheduler, if you know what this means), some Puppy customizations and generally, it's the fastest kernel I've ever tried on my weak hardware.
I also made a 64-bit version of this awesome kernel and it works perfectly on my hardware, but I find it useless to make a "hybrid" build with it at the moment.
Performance is very good on my netbook - the compositor works perfectly, while Macpup's doesn't - it shows some OpenGL-related error and drops to software mode. All my E17 builds under Lucid had this problem. Overall, I find it nicer to have E17 on dpup instead of Lucid.
General Notes
It was quite hard to get dpup working and even harder to make it truly barebones. I had to fix X (in other words, to get the desktop working) and some things may not work, since this is an early alpha.
There are no desktop icons for partitions; to mount partitions, you'll have to run Pmount. That's one example of the rough edges this alpha has.
Also, I must emphasize that even though I gave it a version number, there is a possibility that I won't update this, since I have a very busy lifestyle and an adventurous spirit.
Oh, and by the way, something you should know - you can get E17 as small as 6 MB and I think it's a shame nobody except the Macpup guys built a puplet around it. Opera is small too - you can easily stuff it in 9 MB.
If you find any bugs (and you will!), believe me, I know it sucks. But that's how things work in alpha builds.
I built this as a proof-of-concept, to lead the way for dpup and E17 puplets. It's very easy to rebuild this puplet using Woof, since there only 3 files required (except some packages).
E17 Notes
Enlightened Dpup's E17 comes in its vanilla form; you get the original E17 first-run wizard and everything is original, except one thing: the default Enlightenment menu is replaced with a Puppy-like menu I made, so you see the traditional Puppy categories in the applications menu.
Make sure you choose "Enlightenment" (should be the first entry) in the dialog which lets you choose the menu layout, otherwise you'll get a crippled menu.
Also, something you should be aware of - Enlightenment's file manager (which is also responsible for desktop icons) is unstable. You can always disable it by unloading its module.
If you want to reset E17's settings and start over, exit X (through the Enlightenment menu) and run this:
Code: Select all
rm -rf ~/.e
ISO: dpup-0.1.0-SCSI.iso (102 MB)
devx: devx_dpup_0.1.0.sfs (105 MB)
MD5: md5sums.txt