Puppy Linux

I've been making a point lately of perusing "The Official Site of the Embedded Development Community," since I consider myself an embedded developer, and well, apparently that's the "Official Site," um, for my, uh, "Community." It seems more like place for vendors and consultants to promote their business by writing promotional pieces thinly veiled as technical articles, but if it's Official who is a young upstart like me to judge. Anyway, that's really beside my point. The reason I'm writing is that there was one article that caught my eye this week about building your own Linux distribution. The main thing I got out of it was to learn of the existence of Puppy Linux.

After the glowing review the author of the article gave of its distribution building tools, I read up a little more on Puppy, and decided to give it a try. Let me just report to you, that it is sweet! I'm typing this on my 7 and a half year-old Thinkpad T20 laptop (yes it really came with Windows 2000) that has been collecting dust on my shelf for the past year or so, running Puppy Linux. It feels nearly as snappy as my desktop Core 2 Duo machine that has two processor cores running more than twice as fast as the 700 MHz speed demon in this baby has 16 times the 128 MB of RAM. The reason Puppy can make this old Stinkpad fly is that the whole OS download was about 90 MB, and when you boot the liveCD, it loads the whole thing into RAM and runs from there. There is no waiting for the hard drive or the CD drive to spin. Well, almost none. I think it could use a little bit more than my 128 MB or RAM to load everything off of the CD, but for the most part my machine is running fast, and eerily quiet. I like it.

To squeeze things into 90 MB they have replaced any app that you might be familiar with from Ubuntu with something else. No Gnome, OpenOffice, Firefox, Nautilus, or even a terminal emulator that you are used to. It's JWM, Gnumeric/Abiword, Seamonkey, ROX-Filer, and rxvt. It's Linux, but not one most Linux users see on a daily basis. Seamonkey, it seems, is good old Mozilla, with the email client and web browser all built into one. It even has the old clunky looking icons and dialogs from the Netscape/Mozilla days. The whole desktop gives me an old-school Linux feel. It's not like these new polished and graphically designed Linux desktops of today. That's pretty fitting for this laptop I'm running on actually. I think I installed Redhat 7.3 on it when I first bought it. Come to think of it, maybe it's not Puppy that looks old-school, but just this washed out, crusty old LCD. Seamonkey is ugly though, no monitor issues there. OK, enough of the time warp back to the summer of 2001. The apps are different, but capable. And did I mention they were fast?

Puppy has some seriously nice ease-of-use features, on top of being really fast. The desktop background has a few paragraphs explaining where you are at, how to get online, and where to go for help. Every directory has a little README.txt file that explains what it's for. I sure could have used that the first time I booted Caldera OpenLinux back in the 20th century! Flash is included (youtube worked!), and it reportedly plays encrypted DVDs and everything.

When I slipped in my PCMCIA wireless card (when was the last time you did that!) and clicked the "Connect" icon on the desktop it found the card and walked me through getting online. I noticed a few other wizard type tools had very verbose and helpful info right there in your face as part of the GUI. I don't mind reading and it made the unfamiliar tools very easy to get going with. I'm like documentation.

I've got more to explore. Puppy Linux is supposed to be really easy to tweak and build your own distribution with. You can make it boot form a USB drive instead of a CD. I'm thinking it would be pretty awesome to run it on the XO. I'll keep you posted.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SystemVerilog Fork Disable "Gotchas"

This is a long post with a lot of SystemVerilog code. The purpose of this entry is to hopefully save you from beating your head against the wall trying to figure out some of the subtleties of SystemVerilog processes (basically, threads). Subtleties like these are commonly referred to in the industry as "Gotchas" which makes them sound so playful and fun, but they really aren't either. I encourage you to run these examples with your simulator (if you have access to one) so that a) you can see the results first hand and better internalize what's going on, and b) you can tell me in the comments if this code works fine for you and I'll know I should go complain to my simulator vendor. OK, I'll start with a warm-up that everyone who writes any Verilog or SystemVerilog at all should be aware of, tasks are static by default. If you do this: module top; task do_stuff ( int wait_time); #wait_time $display ( "waited %0d, then did stuff" , wa...
Read more

'git revert' Is Not Equivalent To 'svn revert'

I just learned that if you have some changes in your working tree that you want to get rid of, you don't type 'git revert' like you might guess. No, that's what cvs, subversion, mercurial, and bazaar (to name a few) use revert to mean, but not git. With git, revert is used to undo actual commits. Thankfully, you can undo your revert with another 'git revert', I just learned. So let me repeat to be clear, if you have changes to your working files that you want to abandon, DO NOT do this: git revert HEAD That will undo your last commit. Do this instead: git reset --hard HEAD I'm glad I have that straightened out now. I'm wondering if /etc was really a good place for me to start out playing with git. UPDATE: Nearly two years later and I'm still getting comments on this. I'm glad I've been able to help people out this way. The discussion in the comments is good, and one thing I'd like to point out is that I now always use...
Read more

SystemVerilog Streaming Operator: Knowing Right from Left

SystemVerilog has this cool feature that is very handy for converting one type of collection of bits into another type of collection of bits.  It's the streaming operator.  Or the streaming concatenation operator.  Or maybe it's the concatenation of streaming expressions (it's also called pack/unpack parenthetically).  Whatever you want to call it, it's nice.  If you have an array of bytes and you want to turn it into an int, or an array of ints that you want to turn into an array of bytes, or if you have a class instance that you want to turn into a stream of bits, then streaming is amazing.  What used to require a mess of nested for-loops can now be done with a concise single line of code. As nice as it is, getting the hang of the streaming operator is tough.  The SystemVerilog 1800-2012 LRM isn't totally clear (at least to me) on the details of how they work.  The statement from the LRM that really got me was this, "The stream_operator <...
Read more