Puppy Linux after a Day Review

My previous post about puppy linux was posted just after I managed to get it working. But now that I have used it for day or two, I've formed a more refined opinion of it.

First of all, I love the apps. There are absolutely loads of them with about two of every type(to give yo some choice!). 100mb! Now that is a good OS fr 100mb! Secondly, it just works. WEP, WPA, WPA2... Games... Bowser... Everything. I admit, it an sometimes take a bit of experimenting, but, if you're a geek, it's what you can't live without!

Third of all(getting to the bad bit now), nobody has written any of the experiments down! How to get you're wireless working... There is some info, but not enough.

So, I created a wiki to help the situation, here it is I hope to be seeing some edits soon!

I'm in puppy right now using Seamonkey Web-browser running the OS of my SD card using about 500mb max(half or less). Now, that is cool!

Puppy Linux, with a how to!

I have been looking into puppy linux, the third smallest graphical linux out there. I downloaded pup-430.iso from the puppy linux website to see if I could install it onto my SD card.

At first I tried the 'Usb Startup disk creator' under Administration in Ubuntu 9.04 but it came up with the error "This is not a desktop install CD and thus cannot be used by this application"(word by word, exactly that!) so I wasn't sure what to do.

Later on I was browsing around and I found a pogram I had tried(not suceeded) to use a while back called 'unetbootin' which I then tried on my PC using it to put pup-430.iso onto a usb. It failed(I was gonna try it again but this 8gb xp died of a blue screen!)

So, I tried the linux version of it on my ubuntu machine(emergency hard disk!), it worked. I ran the wizard onto my 2 gig usb, plugged it into my eeepc 700 and it booted absolutely perfectly!

To be honest, it looked a bit crappy(windows 98) at first but in not long it was fine after I gave it a hair cut!

That's not all. I've been looking at boot speed on OSs lately and I decided to do a comparison of puppy (running of my SD card on my EP700) and xandros(on my EP900).

So, I turned on my ubuntu 9.04 desktop, and using the clock and notepad, I got these survey results:
(The puppy on my 700 EP was on an SD card, so I had to change the boot as fast as I could at startup, this would make puppy's startup speed 3-5 seconds slower. Keep that in mind!):

Xandros Power On to Cursor View: 20 seconds
Puppy Power On to Cursor View: 47 seconds

Xandros Power On to Full Load: 48 seconds
Puppy Power On to Full Load: 53 seconds

Xandros Shut Down to Power Down: 31seconds
Puppy Shut Down to Power Down: 16 seconds

Now, if you ask me, that was a good result for puppy saying as it's running from an SD card on a slower PC!

My conclusion of Puppy is that it's a very good operating system with good apps and a good size. That's all for this post!

I just fixed an eeepc 700 with easy peasy!

Before I had my eee900 I met someone who had the eee700 and i played around with it for a bit liking it a lot. Then, I got my one and mucked around with it tons and I found out a few things.

Anyway, the other day he said that it was busted. He turned it on and the screen flashed untill he turned it off. So, I tried to fix it and I coldn't. So I gave it back and told him it was finished.

So, time went on and yesterday I bumped into him and asked him what he'd done with his netbook. He said that he had left it in a draw the whole time. I asked him if I could have it for parts and he said "sure" giving it to me.

Anyway, I got home and turned it on. I saw the splash screen and then the flashes untill i turned it off. Then I remembered that when I reinstalled xandros on my eee900 I had to use the f9 key and choose a bootable usb from the list that popped up.

So, I downloaded the easy peasy(a brand of ubuntu I had used before) image and after ages of mucking around, I got it onto a USB and plugged it into his netbook while booting and hitting f9.

Well, it wasn't on the list. It said nothing about easy peasy usb. So, I was really confused. Then I tried again, this time pressing the ESC key and guess what, it worked!

I booted using the USB, copied his previous files onto an SD card and installed easy peasy, it all worked smoothly. Then I got the wireless and camera working by getting eee-control and installing it.

By the way, I was very impressed with easy peasy, they had fixed a lot of bugs in. their change from 1.1 to 1.5. Keep going easy peasy (with eeecontrol this time!).

And then... I wrote this post!