CrunchBang - Code, Design & GNU/Linux

9 Responses to “Puppy Linux 4.00 Released”

1. Stas wrote, Monday, May 5th, 2008

   I would really like a small review on this release of PuppyLinux, any chance you bring up some updates? :)

2. arpbook wrote, Monday, May 5th, 2008

   hi :) good news about this puppy release!
   as i look around distrowatch to find more details on puppy, i discover slitaz, a free independant distro like slax. it is not based on ubuntu . just like you, they like light, grey&black stuff. so you could take a look to it?? link : http://www.slitaz.org/en/ hope you like this "tiny distro"
   arp

3. Philip wrote, Monday, May 5th, 2008

   @Stas: I am hoping to give Puppy a test drive tonight. I have already given it a quick run within a virtual machine, and first impressions are good; the new GTK2 improvements make the system look much more polished.

   @arpbook: Thank you for the link. I have already stumbled upon SliTaz, if I remember correctly, I found it via Motho ke motho ka botho. SliTaz is quite amazing really, it baffles me how they managed to make it so small, yet usable?!

4. madcrow wrote, Monday, May 5th, 2008

   Hi!

   I test Slitaz since a month. Stable version use jwm et cooking version use openbox…You can make your own system with a tool in slitaz…31 Mo for my live cd with firefox, sylpheed, pidgin ,xine-ui,testdisk, transmission, gqview, gparted……….

   It' s not the same usage that #!

   @+

5. Philip wrote, Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

   Well, I have spent the majority of the night writing some new spam filters and watching Diary of the Dead. This did not leave much time to give Puppy 4.00 a proper test :( Hopefully I will find time soon.

6. David wrote, Friday, May 9th, 2008

   I'm very impressed with this, despite the totally cringeworthy name of the project.

7. Philip wrote, Friday, May 9th, 2008

   @David: I guess the name is like Marmite, you either love it or hate it :) Personally, I quite like it. Having said that, I think Puppy Linux is definitely an enthusiasts distribution; I would probably have chosen a different name if it was aimed at any other market :)

   Regarding where the name originated from, see About Puppy.

   Yes, there was a real little puppy, named "Puppy", who was the inspiration for the naming of Puppy Linux.

   Cute?

8. David Smith wrote, Sunday, June 8th, 2008

   I just installed puppy 4.0 on an older pc (K6-2) and discovered some fairly major rough edges to this distro:

   1. It is having difficulties with multiple partitions on a hard drive, reporting them as having errors. I originally partitioned the drive using gparted from the latest parted magic live cd, and rebooted from that to check the drive. It reported some errors (possibly stemming from an attempt to recreate the partitions from puppy/gparted), so I deleted the partitions and recreated them (two ext3, and a swap, at the end of an 80G drive that has acouple of ntfs, fat32, and other ext3's (one of which has puppy istalled to it). When I boot up puppy it fails to recognize the swap partition, leading to a one-minute pause (in an all ready slow boot), but then complete the boot successfully.

   2. The other main problem, and I frankly regard this one as a show-stopper, is that puppy does not support multiuser, and the author (apparently) has no intention of providing it. It boots into a user mode with root priviliges — no password required, or even a warning, when you launch the terminal and start merrily typing in commands, or launch gparted to fiddle with your partitions (for example). Since I installed it specifically so my wife could familiarize herself with a windows alternative (and she really likes the puppy desktop), as I said, just not on…

   This is not to criticize the intentions or practices of puppy's author, but a warning to others who may be lulled by a very attractive interface, that this is something suitable for linux beginners.

9. Philip wrote, Sunday, June 8th, 2008

   @David Smith: Thank you for your comments. While I really like Puppy Linux, I have to agree that it is more of a hobbyist distribution and is probably not best suited to new or novice users.