Personal Desktop Setup with Puppy 3.01

Brief intro

These are just a brief notes on how to install Puppy Linux on older hardware and have decent use from it. These are mainly for my personal use, but someone might find these notes useful or even be encouraged to try to put some new life into old laptop or desktop. The process is very simple in general. If more details are needed let me know I will provide them.

Simple install - Putting Puppy to Work

1. Partitioning of the hard disk:

• boot PC from Puppy Live CD and use Gparted to partition the hard disk
• two partitions are needed: one as ext3 for root /, and another one for swap.
• make swap partition two times size the available RAM or at least the size of the RAM.

2. If needed, after partitioning reboot the PC (recommended).

3. Run Puppy Universal Installer from the menu

• follow the instructions there
• select the internal hard drive setup
• select from CD
• select Full option

4. Grub install:

• select default options
• MBR install

5. First boot (X setup):

• once installed, reboot Puppy from hard drive
• carefully follow instructions for X setup. Check refresh rates, tweak if needed.

6. Additional Software:

• use PET package manager to install OpenOffice, MC (Midnight Commander), GIMP, Firefox, Thunderbird, and other packages.

7. Install MS core fonts:

• download fonts file from http://avi.alkalay.net/software/webcore-fonts/
• unpack and copy TTF fonts into /usr/C11R7/lib/X11/fonts/TTF

8. Java JDK (or JRE)

• download Java JRE or JDK install file (.bin for Linux) from http://java.sun.com
• chmod u+x that jdk*.bin file
• run the bin to extract the Java folder structure (i.e. jdk1.6.0_02), please note that on Puppy you are root (administrator) all the time.

• move the extracted folder to /usr/local/java
• add/create symbolic folder link to /usr/local/java/latest
• modify /etc/profile file to have the following at the end:
  export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/java/latest
  export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/java/latest/bin
  

9. Configure Java plugin in Mozilla

• ln -s /usr/local/java/latest/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so

After this all the needed plugins should be active. In SeaMonkey o Firefox browser this can be checked by opening page "about:plugins".

Comments

I was pretty impressed by the performance with web browsing, email, and especially OpenOffice (here I am using Pentium III, 866MHz, 256MB). I also managed to install NetBeans 6.0 on it with some gymnastics with scripts. However, I would not suggest such an old hardware for NetBeans IDE platform.

References

http://www.puppylinux.org