Download
It's now at the 061127 edition, built upon Puppy Linux 2.12. For me, it's the "Skies edition" for the several skies photos I have been shooting recently, and included here as background images. The default background is a clear and sunny sky and sea view I took from near my workplace, at the addiction medicine service of Augusta (Italy). Some other skies come from Catania and some other are borrowed by a set of Croatian photos from my brother-in-law.
But now, done with backgrounds, and let's try to see what's there in those almost 500 megabytes, other than the best OS at all, that is the plain 2.12 Puppy, of course!
The default parameters for boot are
acpi=strict acpi=noirq pci=biosirq pci=nosort irqpoll routeirq. These are known to help acpi function on buggy machines like my hp pavilion notebook, but should not harm for general use. The symptoms of need for this cure are plain crashes or, more subtly, in my hands, unexpected stalls of wi-fi connectivity, at least with every kernel I happened to try, both in Puppy and Ubuntu.
After choosing keyboard layout, if you go for xvesa, you will be in 640x480 plain vga without autostarting the xvesa wizard. This is due to some problems that showed after my elaboration of 2.12: while the plain 2.12 correctly opens xvesa wizard, after all my fiddling this was not the case any more and the wizard stalled in console mode, needing to stop and run manually xwin. Since I didn't feel like finding the culprit, I hardcoded /etc/videomode in my iso and the console bug disappeared, at the price of not autostarting the xvesa wizard (but you can always call it from the menu).
In addition to stuff that was already there in previous versions, you have now a "Science" menu, which at present includes:
1) the statistical interpreted language "R" at the last version (2.4.0 - 2006/10/3) and its full docs in pdf, plus some other free books on R for beginners I took from its site (
http://cran.r-project.org/ );
1) a simple but complete gui statistical program for windows, Stats4U, running under Wine (
http://www.statpages.org/miller/openstat/ );
1) Easychem 0.6, a basic, tiny, nice molecular drawing program for X (
http://easychem.sourceforge.net/ ) - this exports EPS graphics, and in order to include them in other documents I added the eps2png utility which can be invoked from the console;
1) a link to MedASq, my own text-only but feature-enriched interface to the Pubmed/Medline databases of the National Library of Medicine (
http://www.debernardis.it/medasq.php ).
1) and as in the last version, Rlplot 1.2, a slick and powerful editor for scientific graphics (
http://rlplot.sourceforge.net/ ).
We still have Openoffice.org 2.04, Firefox 2.0 and a collection of rescue utilities. I have abandoned scite (geany is enough), pup_save encryption (until it gets into the official puppy, but if you need it it's here
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... highlight=), nano (I was not doing so much editing in console), gentoo file manager (didn't like it). Instead, now there is CUPS, Gslapt in addition to Debian installer, editsfs and xgammon: all dotpups from those generous and prolific fellows hanging on Puppy's forums...
The iso contains also an "options" directory, sporting the devx_212.pup, the synaptic.pup (modified to default in tap_and_drag mode, which I prefer), and the dotpups for XFCE and Gnome I took from the forum; I think it's handy to have them available on your live cd when needed without loading at boot.
Tip: audio volume goes up/down with CTRL-up/down arrows; CTRL-left arrow mutes the speakers (then you have to CTRL-up to gradually restore).
For some obscure reasons I still have to investigate (eheheh), this last iso happens to be HUGE! Most of the space is taken by Openoffice and R. But it is still quick and slick on my 1gig ram machine... could not test on other computers, so please let me know.
Also, I'd like to get some feedback on the impressions of those who happen to test it and possibly decide to use it, and the bugs they are going to find.
Making puplets is half of the fun, but the other half of the fun is making them better
.
This runs as a script on a live linux cd, and I hope I can extract that and incorporate into puppy. (Have a look at 
