@woodenshoe: Thank you for your help. I've had alpha 4 running with the 3.6.11+ kernel for a while now and it's going reasonably well.
For anyone who is interested, here is some feedback on what I've been seeing.
What works?
Let's start with the good stuff. Within 3 hours of first boot I was satisfied that there was enough functionality that simply worked 'out of the box' to make it worth trying to develop the system. Specifically, e-mail, web browsing (+ ad blocking), bit-torrent, playing audio (music) and streaming internet radio all worked at the first attempt. There are blemishes, odd bits of functionality that don't quite work as they should, but the mainline functionality is present and correct.
Since I've run both Debian and Fedora on the RPi, I can happily confirm that (as you would expect) Puppy is an order of magnitude faster than those systems. That's not to say Puppy is fast, but it delivers fairly acceptable response times rather than being forever painfully slow.
What doesn't work
Looking at the system I soon realised I was missing an image viewer. Viewnior wasn't in the system. The package manager listed a Viewnior pet package as being available but could not download it. So I went to the
repository and downloaded it manually. It's been omitted for a simple reason. It does not work.
While looking at the repository I noticed the
ntfs_3g-20111121-static-armv6.pet package and wondered if it was in the build. I've needed to add it manually on other Puppy systems. It's the same for alpha 4. Fortunately the ntfs_3g package does work and after installing it I could write to my NTFS formatted drives.
Clock
The RPi does not have a hardware clock so the functionality to set the hardware clock from an NTP server (which is in the build) seems a little superflous. Unfortunately the 'set date and time' function also seems to be faulty. I can set the date but not the time. Changing the date resets the time to 00:00. There is no other option. If I change the date at midnight I can have the correct date and time for as long as I keep the RPi powered up. But of course after a power-down the time is wrong once more.
Network and optical drives
If I plug a disc into the back of my router I can access it via NAS on most of the systems I use (including Lucid Puppy 525) but it does not seem to work on alpha 4.
I have a couple of old optical drives with their own power supplies. I tried them with alpha 4. When I inserted a CD or DVD nothing happened. However opening a console and mounting the disc from the command line does work (although there is no icon on the Pinboard). Nevertheless, you can make the data available to an application that needs it.
Package Manager
edit -- this paragraph is only half correct, see two posts further.
The Puppy package manager in alpha 4 isn't a great deal of help. The one useful thing it will do is uninstall any unwanted packages you may have tried out as an experiment. I asked the package manager to download database information for the repositories it knew about. It did that quite successfully and then threw up a syntax error for each entry in the databases. That took about 90 minutes. In other words, downloading from the Debian squeeze armel
repository via the package manager is off the menu.
Adding applications
Installing Debian applications manually is tedious. Made worse by Debian's habit of splitting everything up into large numbers of tiny packages. But so far I've not found any other option. So I browsed the repository looking for something both small and useful. An image viewer to replace Viewnior seemed the obvious choice. GeeQie is two packages with 9 dependencies. Pfind was able to tell me that three of the dependencies were already resolved. The remaining six dependencies have a further five dependencies of their own (none resolved). So I downloaded the 13 packeges and installed them in more or less bottom up order. I'm happy to say the GeeQie viewer runs very nicely on alpha 4 (and it's a much more capable viewer than Viewnior). I used Geany to edit the 'defaultimageveiwer' script so as to launch 'geeqie-standard' and all is working well.
A real bug?
The various bugs and blemishes I have encountered have been benign. Various little things that don't work as they should, but don't to any damage to the system either. There is one exception. I did once loose the system and need to do a complete re-install. There is something wrong with the functionality that allows the user to make cosmetic changes to the Pinboard. For example, if you select an alternative icon theme, Puppy thereafter shows all drives as unmounted. On the occasion I lost the system the sequence that led up to the crash was: I changed the icon theme, and then edited one of the icons so that it launched a different application. I then noticed that all the drives were being shown as unmounted and decided to switch back to the standard icon theme. A few seconds later X died and took the system down permanently. It was back to the dd command.
To GPU or not to GPU?
The hardware information function tells me that Puppy can see all of the RAM but apparently can't see the GPU. This becomes immediately obvious if you ask Gnome Media Player to play a video. It's clearly trying to render video using the rather slow main processor rather than using the super-fast GPU. I'm also running openELEC on the RPi and have been impressed by the RPi's ability to play h.264 encoded HD video. Even 1920x1080 BD rips play smoothly most of the time. So Puppy seems to be ignoring the RPi's main asset. Then again, I guess that's OK. It's easy enough to swap SD cards and boot the RPi up in openELEC when I want to watch video. What I need from Puppy is a system that will do normal everyday computing tasks on the RPi and in that respect, alpha 4 looks quite promising.