[Techtalk] Basic Q, can't find answers elsewhere

[mgmonza at iceland.freeshell.org]

Thank you for answering, and so thoroughly.

One reason I wanted to know was that sheer peer-presssure got me to first 
explore Debian, even after I'd become comfortable with RedHat.  So many in 
the IT community at the time seemed to consider it THE nerdware, I had to 
add it or feel I'd always be considered just another stray from 
Windows-land.

Now that I've coasted comfortably in a Debian/Ubuntu and derivatives rut 
for years, I'd like to look at other options but am not in the same 
community. So knowing what people are using now really helps point me in a 
new direction.

I did try Puppy several years ago, but didn't give it the time needed to 
make it work. Knowing it can be used in embedded devices is one more 
reason to give a more thorough try (also - snob alert! - a lot of 
informed people seem to use it)

Kathleen

On Wed, 5 Jul 2017, Miriam English wrote:

> Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2017 12:58:35 +1000
> From: Miriam English <mim at miriam-english.org>
> To: mgmonza at iceland.freeshell.org
> Cc: LinuchChix - techtalk <techtalk at linuxchix.org>
> Subject: Re: [Techtalk] Basic Q, can't find answers elsewhere
> 
> Good luck on your adventures. :)
>
> I use Puppy Linux because it is tiny and very fast and can make old, slow 
> computers usable again. It is also great as a rescue system. I've used it to 
> help a lot of friends with dead or damaged computers. If you boot it from CD 
> (or flash drive) it lives in RAM and doesn't touch the hard drive(s) unless 
> specifically told to. In fact it can run on a computer without a hard drive. 
> Many people install it to the hard drive to work like a standard operating 
> system. I have 4 versions of Puppy on my desktop computer and can choose to 
> boot into any of them. Because they are so small doing so takes negligible 
> space on today's hard drives. They don't even need separate partitions. I've 
> come to prefer running Puppy from CD as it runs faster (because it is loaded 
> into RAM) and the core operating system is safe from corruption because it is 
> on the CD. Also settings and OS changes sit in a small file on the hard drive 
> that is easy to backup. (I have dozens of backed up copies of my system 
> taking up very little room on the hard drive.)
>
> Even though Puppy is usually only about 100MB in size that gives you a 
> complete operating system, with most standard Linux commands as well as some 
> text editors, a wordprocessor (Abiword), spreadsheet (Gnumeric), video player 
> (with all the codecs likely needed), web browser, email client, vector 
> graphics editor, a simple pixel-graphics editor (mtpaint), and lots of other 
> higher-level tools. I always add GIMP, and a local version of dictd for 
> offline use when writing, as well as a heap of other software (Calibre, 
> ImageMagick, SOX, and so on).
>
> There is a fairly large set of Puppy software repositories, and in addition 
> each flavor of Puppy is able to "inherit" repositories from other, larger 
> Linuxes. For example the version of Puppy I prefer, Puppy Lupu 528, is able 
> to use Ubuntu Lucid Lynx software, though since that's been retired to the 
> Ubuntu archives I don't recommend it to anyone else. Some other versions of 
> Puppy are able to use Slackware repositories. I think early Puppies used Red 
> Hat repositories.
>
> If you like to compile programs then your version of Puppy has a devx file 
> available as an additional download. The devx also adds python. I like to 
> also compile a number of full Linux commands because some of the standard 
> ones are substituted with busybox versions which tend to have more limited 
> functionality.
>
> Puppy's small size also lets you put Linux on tiny embedded machines, giving 
> that hardware much greater capability than any other version of Linux that I 
> know of. There are also a couple of versions of Puppy being developed for the 
> ARM processor.
>
> Oops. I didn't intend to write so much about it. :)
>
> Cheers,
>
>    - Miriam