Poll: Is Puppy your first Linux?

[fitzhugh]

[quote=oldguy]I thought the documentation with Puppy, included on the CD, was great but the forum was amazing. Asked some dumb newbie questions and got courteous answers quickly.[/quote]
I agree here. The forum is fantastic, and then there is the irc channel, the developer's forum, all the people adding to puppy...
It helps that our benevolent dictator seems to have always paid great attention to what people need, including those with old computers and those without any experience.

The one thing I didn't like as much as other distros [at first] was the choice of window manager... kinda looked too much like windows.... only each time I tried another I came back. Because it looks like window In other words, I know where to find things. At some point I'll add one that makes it as slick as all those screenshots, really liked enlightenment when I tried it - beautiful . But it was very smart to go this route and the effort put in shows.

[SnowDog]

I know you asked about linux...but, it got me membering stuff...
My first O.S was Basic on a Vic 20 & then a C-64
Then something else on a cassette tape, running on ColecoVision Computer System, somewhere during these years, I used something called GEM.
Then DOS 5.x, Then a linux, First one was RedHat 4, I think.
Then a long bout with various Windoze's. 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, NT4 or 5(don't recall) & various DOS's - MS & IBM.
AT some point, I found a (linux?) on a floppy that I could get online with from bootup & browse, that was cool but I don't remeber what it was called.
Then IPCop to run a router for whatever kind of box I wanted to hook into it (does that count)?
Then XP...very happy to have missed out on ME, but wish in a way I'd also missed out on XP.
Then Puppy, then DSL, Knoppix, Mepis, K/Ubuntu, Fedora Core, SUSE10, Mandriva 2006, Debian, then I finally tried Win2k, then Libranet, PCLinux, Yoper, More Ubuntu's, More Knoppix, whew! I probably missed a few, but I have yet to find anything that can compete with puppy for speed AND usabilty. One or the other, yes, but never both.
I even made my own (lame) puppy (sort of...remastered & added lots of my own goodies), but decided that was a ridiculous waste of time, because I could be way more useful to the effort by continually screwing up things in the already made puppy's and asking for help to fix them.

The thing that most impresses me about puppy, is that no matter what I screw up, it's never screwed up to the point where rebooting my machine won't fix it. That is such a relief after all those other operating systems, because many of them had to be re-installed from scratch after my playing with them.

But it's not for everyone. Some folks just can't get it somehow.
Case in Point... My niece runs an XP box and just called me wanting to buy a laptop for her daughter to use, so the daughter won't get any viruses & stuff onto her XP machine...(snicker snicker) I tried to give her a free puppy cd instead. Nope, she's still scared that her daughter might screw up that XP machine. Offered her a removeable Hard Drive Tray & a Puppy CD. Nope, too complicated. Oh well, says I, guess I'll have to sell her a laptop. Of course, she thinks it's a great idea to put Puppy on the laptop. Maybe I'll convert her yet.
Sorry for rambling...but thanks for the memory.

[Sage]

Are you confessin' to missing out on the Nascom experience?! Amongst the various BASICs, the cognoscenti generally agree that BBCBASIC was, and still is, pre-eminent. AMSTRAD BASIC was brutally pared down to make it fast and useable for the masses, but he soon changed to the superior GEM when the PC arrived. In the early days post-Bletchley Park, Brits were the only significant players in the software arena, but that soon changed. These days, seems that the best stuff comes from Germany and Oz, Finland's wonderboy notwithstyanding. Takes a particular kind of mindset!

[SnowDog]

Yep, i missed out on lots a goodies. see, i grew up in the bush, where we didn't have stuff like plumbing or tv. The extent of my early technological experiences (besides tearing apart every piece of machinery that got too close to me) was listening to a radio, so I never knew about anything tech till after I left the bush at 15 & moved straight to the middle of the biggest city in Canada.
Then of course, I had to earn a livin, which isn't that simple when you are un-educated & in a strange big overwhelming place...but eventually, I got it all figgured out, then straight to the computer store with all my extra pennies. But at least I got into it in time to experience the internet before it was one.

[never_stop_learning]

This is my first post.....

I am not a programmer - nor do I play one on TV.

As part of a project my Lion's club has undertaken - getting refurbished computers to kids who can't otherwise afford one - I have tried to use just about every live Linux CD out there. Puppy is, by far, the easiest to use, most complete (for our purpose) and the easiest to get working.

Of almost equal importance, Puppy allows us to recover PCs much older than many other distros which allows us to get computers to more kids.

I also complement this community on the courteous manner that you address questions and issues. Hopefully, I won't ask too many dumb questions as we get to know each other and I get to know Puppy better.

Thank you for a wonderful OS that will enable some very deserving children to experience the wonders of the Internet on a level playing field with their more affluent peers.

[SnowDog]

Welcome to the forums. Glad to meet you.
Nowhere will you find the old adage more truful than here, that the only dumb question, is the one you didn't ask.

Take it from me... I've asked some pretty outlandish ones and it seems that someone always takes the time to reposnd.

We've got crabs here, so I guess a Lion is okay in the kennel, long as he plays nice with the puppies.

[kdulcimer]

Puppy's not my first Linux, nor is it my primary Linux. But it is a solid #2 for me.

My number 1 distro is PCLinuxOS. I absolutely love this thing. There are many things about PCLOS which mean I would never give it up. .94 will blow your socks off with its beauty. But that's enough. I don't want to seem like a drive-by fanboy jerk.

I had an old 233Mhz IBM box and PCLOS struggled on that. OpenOffice took 2 minutes to start. Booting to KDE took about 4.5 minutes, if I remember right. Using the PCLOS Control Center took forever. Don't get me started on Menudrake. I hate that thing to this day. I had looked at Puppy 1.0.6, but didn't care much for it because I couldn't set the refresh rate on the monitor to something decent. Then I saw Puppy 2.00 was out. I downloaded it and gave it a whirl. Soon the 40 second boot time meant I was booting up to Puppy the majority of the time on that box.

It wasn't too long, however, that I got a decent box (1Ghz P3, 512MB RAM) and now I boot up to PCLOS 98% of the time. But you can better bet I have an install of Puppy on that box too, and I do use it. If anything happens to my PCLOS partitions, I still have Puppy to get my data.

I also had an addiction to trying out other distros. One day I finally got a level head and deleted a bunch of my partitions and combined my ~15 partitions into 6. But there was 1 "extra" distro I couldn't bear to remove. You know what that one was? Puppy. Now I just use PCLOS, Puppy, and WinMe.

Furthermore, when I boot up a Linux at work, I rarely use anything but Puppy because of the ability to save my settings to my USB drive.

Puppy is an excellent and superb distro. I've thought more than once that between PCLOS and Puppy, there isn't any need for other distros! (Although I am working on TinyMe, an effort to create a child of PCLOS that has many of Puppy's good points.)

[MU]

according to these screenshots:
http://www.pclinuxos.de/portal/index.ph ... 30&catid=1
PCLinuxOS uses KDE.
You can install KDE in Puppy, too:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=11876

Mark

[Pizzasgood]

I was on vacation when this thread was started. Anyway, Puppy was not my first Linux, but it was the first one I actually used. The true first one was named something like BasicLin3, and was far smaller than Puppy. Basically, it got into X, displayed a clock, and that was it. No windowmanager that I remember. It was probably more capable, but I didn't know squat diddly at the time.

While learning Puppy I played with Zipslack and Vector, but I always gravitated back into Puppy, mainly due to the speed.

One of the things I especially like with Puppy is that I don't worry about borking my system with all the experimenting I do. If I toast it, I just rename my save-file, load up a new Puppy, and copy over some old settings. I'm generally too lazy to update when Barry releases a new version, so those occasions also serve as a chance to get the newest Puppy.

The process is even easier now that I have Pizzapup 3.0, since it includes most of the things I'd normally do.

And the whole deal is fast. I can start a new Puppy, manually import most important stuff, and connect to the network in under ten minutes.

[profolio]

I tried my first Linux about 6 years ago. A Debian "Potato" ported to a Mac that took a lot of patience to install with a Gnome GUI that well, deserved more work.
In the last year I've tried SUSE, RedHat, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, YDL (Mac) Elive, Wolvix, Vector, Grafpup and that led me to Puppy. Puppy is on my PC HD forever. It turned my old PC into a fast and furious bug free machine. I'm just waiting for someone to port it to the Mac PPC with a glitch free emulator that will run Photoshop. Then it will be pure bliss.
Michel

[daemon]

I have used RedHat Enterprise 4AS, and i am using it now, before that i used Red Hat linux 9.0 for 2 years.
But all this is useless for my old laptop without HDD. Puppy is ideal here.

[PaulBx1]

My first computer work was done on an antique military air control system that did not even have a computer language (not even assembler). You programmed by entering a word of data in binary, with a row of switches and lights, one word at a time. I don't think it was even a von Neuman machine. That was back in 1969.

Did a lot of work with Dec machines, RT-11, RSX-11, VMS. And of course, on PC's - DOS and the various Windows. My first 'nix experience was Dynix-ptx on large multiprocessor Sequent machines, at work. I'd been trying to get away from Microsoft for a while (e.g. OS-2) on my personal machines but never really could. Didn't have much use for standard linux distros, too much invested in old Windows apps, and no good transition path away from Windows.

Then I tried Knoppix, and really liked the Live-CD concept. Shortly after, found Puppy, which I've settled on happily. Reminds me in some ways of the good old days of DOS or RT-11, where you feel like you can at least have a chance of grasping what the computer is doing and have some control over it. Really did not care for feeling like everybody but myself is in control of my computer, like you get with XP.

Thanks, Barry and associates!

[Billwho?]

After rebuilding myself an old P1 system I installed Peanut and Vector Linux from an old 1998-2000 approx Computer magazine CD out of curiosity. While I managed to get them both to install at different times and the GUI looked good I was unable to do anything except play the included games (mostly due to lack of documentation and the fact that I had never played with anything except Win 95/98) So I started looking for information online, tripped over Puppy's home page liked what I read especially the fact that it was window$ refugee friendly and everything was supposed to work "straight from the box" I downloaded 1.0.5 and haven't used anything else since. May have another play with the other two one day now I know more about Linux but I doubt it.

[john biles]

I started with Debian 3.1 as that was what was on offer on the first Linux Magazine I brought 1 year ago.
While I was amazed that it came with 15490 packages, there weren't any LT modem drivers included, encryted DVD's would play and couldn't get my Printer to work.
I think if I went back to it, I'd have more luck with getting Hardware working now I know a little more about Linux.
It was at this time that I decided to go on the big long search to find a distro that would work.
I was put onto Linux by my brother and was up until that time a pretty happy Windows user.
I think I had at least 5 anti-spyware programs, the usual firewall, antivirus and other programs to protect me.
So I ordered a mixture of different Linux versions from Slackware to Yoper and received 7 distro's.
The most Important requirement I has was Dial-Up support, if I couldn't get on the net then Linux was of no use to me.
Luckily 2 out of the 7 distro's had Winmodem drivers and they were Linspire and Mepis.
I chose those 2 because they were $4.95 each.
I think if I chosen different distro's with no modem support, Linux would be a distant memory.
To cut a long story short, I must have tried 40 distro's and in the end settled on Mepis 3.4
I used that for 6 months and found it easy to break if you downloaded the wrong package from the debian etch repository. This would force me to do a full reinstall and then I would spend many hours re-downloading the extra packages I wanted.

Then One day I read about Puppy 2.10 and its Dial-Up support. As it was a small download, I thought I'd try it not expecting much and I found myself on the net.
This started my addiction and I am now hooked !
I love Puppy for the fact I can save Dotpups and reinstall them when doing a fresh reinstall just Like Windows.
Its boot time, This amazing Forum, Live CD remastering. The list just goes on and on.

At this time Puppy is the closest Linux version I have come across that could replace Windows on my computer.
I have XP on my computer as well as SuSe 10.2 and Mepis 3.4 but I don't use them and would be lucky to boot Windows 1% of the time.
Puppy 2.10 is booted at least 99% of the time when I need to use my computer.

The only downs side to Puppy is its Looks, but I am slowly making it look better.

[mdisaster2]

I had Coherent (still have the floppies actually), but even after I managed to obtain the required Cherry keyboard it didn't do much for me. Too bad the company went down the drain though, it had potential.

My first Linux was Slackware, whatever version came with kernel 1.09. Worked fine enough, but I got bored with tracking the configuration files and figuring out which one of a zillion of duplicate programs I should have used. I still install slackware now and then out of nostalgia, but it doesn't "stick" to my hd - configuration is too much of a hassle.

Suse 6.1 worked perfectly for me, however it was commercial and I didn't upgrade it (no broadband at the time). Years later I tried one of the free versions and it was nowhere as slick as 6.1, also it didn't have all the bundled software.

Vector Linux worked (and looked) great too, but it didn't like my motherboard (DMA issues), and the version I tried was eminently breakable - when the installer stopped to answer to mouse clicks I decided I had fun enough.
(some months ago I did run a Vector 5.0 based web server at work, and it performed admirably though. Too bad I couldn't use Puppy, because the machine only had a SCSI hd)

Then I found Puppy (1.04, iirc), and it had all the features I was looking for in a small distro, and then some more. I still check out other distros now and then (next one is PC-BSD), but Puppy is definitely here to stay.

[jonyo]

Yes!

wifi at least..

Bought a Linspire rig (awhile ago) & couldn't figure out the wifi..

Hada get wifi goin..

Figured out puppy wifi..
--------------------------------------

"Since this is such a great distribution for newbies like me I'm wondering what percent of Puppy adoptors are using linux for the first time."

Fitzhugh

[Torymon]

fitzhugh,
this is my first linux distro! I AM a convert/M$ refugee that had wanted to
try linux for a long time but "was scared" because of the complexity etc.
I'm an older user who also grew up with command lines and birth of the
Internet but, not having the "apparent" programs that were easily installed
(such as Windows) I hesitated. I came across an easily downloaded file
to create a "PuppyLinux Live CD" 2.01 I think...
being as my Windows XP Pro had to be RE-INSTALLED!!! I said the hell with it and ran puppy off of cd.
A little work (and a lot of help!) I got it installed to hd and never looked back!
To summarize...
puppylinux was the first linux distro I tried and will probably be the last!
Thank you Barry!
woof woof!
tory

[Colonel Panic]

Paid good money for Mandrake when it first appeared many years ago and it kinda worked for me, although I knew nothin' about Linux (and still don't).
Then tried Corel with WP (because I like WP) - didn't work.
RH - didn't work.
Rekindled interest when Knoppix appeared - it works. Then Kanotix - even better.
Then long list of distro diarrhea, of which Flonix impressed. SuSE seemed to do things that others couldn't but they were greedy and wanted real money.
Only got serious when DSL came along and still use it, along with Austrumi and Puppy, which I prefer and it suits my fiddling with small and older HW.
Otherwise, for full distros, presently have Mandriva 2006, SuSE 10.1 and FC5 loaded, of which the latter two work well. Constantly review Ubuntu and its derivatives; although it's getting a lot better, hate Gnome and it seems too bloated. Mepis was the dark horse, along with PCLinux - easy and they work. Zenwalk might be more appealing if it used a rational installer: suspect it's a product of unbending academics?! Gento? = apoplexy! Others seem to have faded into dim memories.
Sticking with LinEx for gaming.
What next?

I like the phrase "distro diarrhoea":)

For me, the choice of distro is dictated by which one enables my dialup modem to work with my ISP, and so far I've only found two that do; Puppy and Vector 5.8.

Though Vector's fast, Puppy's a bit faster and there's nothing I really need that it doesn't do; however, I'm used to the Slackware way of doing things and want the freedom to download and compile odd bits of software from the web, so I don't think I'll be ditching Vector (unless I'm brave and try Slack itself)..

[G4MJW]

1999 - Red Hat - it found my graphics card but nothing much else
2000 - Sussie - found my graphics & sound but nothing else
2005 - Xandros-2 - even found my Printer and the network but no support for my scanner or webcam

2007 - Puppy2.13 WOW . . on Internet in 5 mins, upload pictures from my digital camera in 7 mins . . . 15 mins installed and boots from CF Card!

Even have GPS Navigation for my miniature Yacht (GpsDrive)

http://www.microyacht.com look on the GEAR page

[jonyo]

Hi,
Wanted to look at the video..not happenin..

Might you know how to setup?

I have pup 2.13 live cd with seamonkey, firefox 2 & opera.

For firefox, need a plugin..(think quicktime)

In opera, up comes a box that sez I need a 'gxine browser plugin'