Puppy Linux 3.0.1: One Mean Dog!

Linux vs. Linux
From time to time I love trying small Linux distros. Especially when playing with old hardware. My laptop is turning 5-6 years and it became pretty slow for Windows XP it came with. I used Linux on it for some time (mainly Ubuntu or Mint). The laptop is HP ZT1230. It has Celeron 1.33MHz, 512MB, 20GB disk. I tried all kind of distros on this laptop (Ubuntu, Mint, CentOs, Fedora, OpenSuse) and had pretty good luck being able to install Linux on it. With newer distros I noticed that computer does slow down with websites that utilize Flash and it certainly did not look like a laptop you would use OpenOffice on. It felt really slow. During last few years I tried smaller distros on and was impressed with the performance. I love Vector Linux, speed, and I its out-of-box functionality. However, I kept going back to Ubuntu or Mint probably because I felt at home with these. This laptop also has an issue with overheating (experienced that with Fedora).

Yo Puppy dawg, my man!

These days I decided to give DSL and Puppy a try again. I love unique approaches in both distros. I actually got pretty impressed with Puppy. It seems like a perfect fit for my laptop now. I downloaded Puppy 3.0.1 with Seamonkey. Live CD boots pretty fast. I was impressed with its X setup. It detected the resolution and refresh frequency pretty good. I also tried it on slower 800MHz P3 that has somewhat tricky i810 on it. Puppy installed like a charm on both machines. I was even able to set 1400x900 resolution, which sometimes was a challenge with that old PC. Partitioning required reboot. I did it the simplest way. Made one big partition as ext3 for root and one 1G partition for swap. Install went pretty quickly. Please note that Puppy loads itself in memory so it does run pretty fast even from Live CD.
During first boot I had to setup X again and once completely installed I started enjoying light-speed laptop. I could not believe the difference. It takes little less than 20 seconds to fully boot. Less than 5 seconds to shut down. Wooooohooo, maaan! I think all the other distro makers should look into that.

Applications

My primary goal with the laptop is to be able to surf, email, and run office programs (documents and slides). I usually use Firefox and Thunderbird for web surfing and email. I decided to give Seamonkey a try. Pretty decent application - looks pretty much the same as Netscape in good old days :) I like the fact that flash and video plugins are already there. With Puppy PET package manager it is very easy to install additional applications. Both Firefox and Thunderbird are available. However, I decided to stick with Seamonkey. At least for a while. I downloaded and installed OpenOffice. I also added Midnight Commander and MS core fonts. I have to say that installing PET packages was pretty easy. The main shock came when I started playing with OpenOffice applications. That blue line went from left to right in less than a second. Writer or Impress both start in 3-4 seconds (!). This appears faster than on my Duo Core 2GHz 2GB desktop at work. I could not believe my eyes. Being able to easy install OpenOffice and running it that fast is major plus for Puppy (perfectly matches my needs). I also installed Sun's Java 1.6. I managed to install Netbeans 6.0 (with few tricks though). But the main thing for this laptop is just to add Java plugin to Seamonkey.

Is Puppy up to the challenge?

Oh, yes it is! Puppy 3.0.1. works great on my laptop! I strongly recommend it for people that have older hardware and want to breath some life back into those machines. I actually think that my laptop never worked better. The system uses less than 5% out of 512MB RAM in idle. I did not see it using swap file even with medium sized OpenOffice documents. My battery also takes longer time to discharge.
The major issue is its single-user logged as root concept that allows users who do not know what they are doing to easily "break" Puppy by deleting system or configuration files. As I am someone who has been using Linux for few years now it does not feel right knowing that you are logged as root all the time.

Am I a dog person?

Kind of. I decided to keep Puppy on my Laptop. It was easier to install and and manage than DSL 4.2. The fact that part of the system works from RAM (or whatever other trick this Puppy is using) is making my laptop extremely usable again. I plan on exploring DSL more. I will do that on that old desktop HP (P3, 800MHz, 256MB). As someone in Linux forums wrote - sometimes takes little time to get comfortable with certain distro and learn all the tricks, but it is worth it. If you have an "old" or "slow" PC that you consider throwing away, try Puppy or DSL on it first. You may be able to postpone purchase of a new PC for a year or two.

References

http://www.puppylinux.org
http://www.distrowatch.com