Puppy Linux on a P4 @ 2.80GHz

Intro

I usually played with Puppy on slower PCs (i.e. P3 at 800MHz). The other day I got an Insignia PC D400a with a dead hard drive. This machine is a P4 at 2.8GHz with 512MB RAM. I always wondered how would Puppy or DSL worked on a faster PCs. This is a quick story about Speedy Gonzales.

Puppy on steroids

I put my spare HDD that had Puppy 3.01 installed on it. What a pleasant surprise that was. First, the Puppy booted as it was installed on that machine (beauty of Linux and Kernel 2.6). Kids do not try that with Windows, especially if you are alone at home. This is not plug and pray. I got Puppy desktop in like 15-20 seconds. I configured LAN with Puppy network wizard and I was surfing net. I am still picking up my jaw from the floor from looking at OpenOffice at the speed of light. I could not stop smiling.

What's next

I am not sure. I am still not at the stage to recommend Puppy especially not to beginners. I am not feeling comfortable with auto-login as root. I am definitively impressed with speed and I find Puppy as a demo how the things should work. I have seen too many computers being thrown away just because Windows got so bloated that it cannot run. Even P4 2.8GHz machines after fresh Win XP install and all the updates starts running slow without anything on it.

I shut down Puppy. Three seconds! Wow... I am impressed with its compatibility and speed...