puppy linux v 2.12, 2.14

curious john · Joined: 16 Jun 2003 Posts: 1252

Puppy is up to 2.14 regular developer's edition and there is a 2.15CE (community edition) with spiffed up eye candy and firefox instead of Seamonkey, and so on.

I havent tried it since I'm on dialup and just recently upgraded to 2.14 (takes me six or seven hours on dialup to download it). For somebody with good broadband connection, Puppy is a trivial download.

Early 2.16 beta regular edition already out for testers. Puppy seems to get developed so fast that its hard to keep track of all the changes. I tend to only upgrade if a significant improvement for my needs has been made.

msp · Joined: 19 Jan 2001 Posts: 277

Curious John I tried Puppy Linux 2.12 as a live CD from the Bible. What if any differences are there in 2.14?
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curious john · Joined: 16 Jun 2003 Posts: 1252

I was using 2.10 before upgrading so many improvements for me. Two big things for me were that burner support in 2.10 sucked in comparison to earlier and later versions. Also I wanted to try wifi card on my laptop and much better support in 2.14.

So you ask what upgrades since 2.12? (and if you want to "read more" here is index to actual release notes and links: http://www.puppyos.com/news.htm )

Developer Barry Kauler release notes for 2.13:

* Ndiswrapper, which allows Windows XP wireless network drivers to be used in Linux, was broken in Puppy 2.12. I have upgraded to Ndiswrapper v1.33, which fixes the problem. Read more
* Jason (plinej in Forum) has created a great little frontend for sox and ffmpeg, Soxgui, which can perform various operations on audio files, including file format conversion. Read more
* Jason has updated PBrename batch file renamer to v0.4 and Pupdvdtool DVD ripper tool to v0.5B. Read more
* Ian (Ian in Forum!) has upgraded Xwget GUI frontend for wget to v0.5. Read more
* Geany text editor upgraded to v0.10. Read more
* Isomaster ISO file editor tool upgraded to v0.6. Read more
* Sigmund (zigbert on the Forum) has created a couple of little GUI gems: PuppyBackup v0.6.3 for backing up to CD/DVD/HD and PuppyMirror v0.1 for syncing directories. Read more
* SeaMonkey upgraded to v1.0.6. The 'profile roaming' extension and an extension for editing Cascading StyleSheets in Composer have been added. Read more
* At first shutdown the user chooses to save personal settings and data in a file, that we call 'pup_save.3fs'. This file internally had a ext3 filesystem, however for various technical reasons we have changed to a ext2 filesystem. New personal storage files will now be called 'pup_save.2fs', where the '2' indicates ext2. Read more
* The Puppy live-CD is created from a pool of packages that we call the Unleashed suite. Individual packages from this pool that are not in the live-CD can be installed later. We used to call the installer the PupGet package manager and the packages PupGet packages. The individual Unleashed packages are available for download and are 'tarballs' (compressed files) with the '.tar.gz' extension. These packages are now called PET packages, the package manager is called PETget and the files have the extension '.pet'. Read more
* PET packages can now be installed from ROX-Filer. Download a PET package, click on it, and it will be installed. Currently only 'official' PET packages from the Unleashed suite are available, but it is expected that 'unofficial' PETs will soon become available.
* PETget now has more powerful dependency checking. The idea is, you install a PET package and any missing dependency is determined and installed.
* Omair (Dougal on the Forum) has done a lot of debugging of the GTK2 version of Xdialog and it now works well. This is based on the v2.3.1 source. Read more
* The Xorg Video Wizard now has hardware profiling. For the end-user it is extremely simple. At bootup if there is new video hardware the Xorg Wizard will automatically run. But, if you change the video hardware back to something that you had used earlier, Puppy will remember and automatically use the correct profile. So, Puppy booting off a USB Flash stick can be used on several different PCs and the Video Wizard only runs once each time. Read more
* The Rutilt wireless configuration GUI application is now upgraded to version 0.13. Thanks to Romain Bondue for his continued work on Rutilt. Read more
* This is a very interesting project, a web browser called HV3, written in Tcl/Tk. This is not a "Puppy project" as such, but we are working closely with the developer Daniel (danielk1977 in the Forum) as Puppy specialises in Tcl/Tk apps. I have made the 'alpha13' release into a PET package. HV3 isn't in the 'standard' live-CD, but it is feasible to use Unleashed to build a very small live-CD with HV3 as the only browser. Read more
* Paul (pakt in the Forum) has developed better detection for USB keyboard and mice. Read more
* Omair (Dougal in the Forum) has improved the keyboard configuration in Xorg and has developed a configuration GUI, named XkbConfigurationManager. Read more
* Klh informed me about Zmixer, a nice ALSA sound mixer. I have now made Zmixer the default mixer in the live-CD, replacing Xtmix. Read more
* Rarsa has upgraded the Network Wizard script to v2.12.3. Read more
* ROX-Filer, our main file manager and also the manager of the icons on the desktop, has been upgraded from v1.2.2 to v2.5. This is a major upgrade and required a lot of work. GuestToo and NathanF had considerable input to this. Read more
* I have rewritten most of the Video Wizard script to be faster and easier to use. At first bootup, you may only get two dialog windows, one to ask about keyboard layout, the second to choose desired screen resolution. That's it, then Xorg should be up and running (fingers crossed). Read more
* At first shutdown, the dialog windows have been simplified and made easier to use. Read more
* In Puppy 2.12, the 'modprobe' binary executable was renamed to 'modprobe.bin' and 'modprobe' is now a script. This script will transparently fetch kernel modules, firmware and associated executables from a separate file called 'zdrv_xxx.sfs'. I have fixed some bugs in the 'modprobe' script and improved the speed of loading modules. Read more
* The venerable Gimp-Print v4.2.7 has been upgraded to GutenPrint v5.0.0. This gives support for over 300 printers. Read more
* Puppy is going international! I have replaced the Bitstream Vera fonts with the DejaVu sans-serif fonts. DejaVu is based upon Bitstream but with greatly expanded international language support. Read more
* Plus lots of small bug fixes and improvements.

Developer Barry Kauler release notes for 2.14:

# This is the first release of Puppy that uses the XDG menu system. This has many advantages. Read more
# We have a new package system, called PET (Puppy's Extra Treats), that combines the best of the previous DotPup and PupGet package systems. Read more
# PET tools is a suite of commandline tools for creating PET packages and converting PupGet, DotPup, Slackware tarballs and directories to PET. There are also tools to semi-automatically create a PET package from a source package. For further details see above link. Read more
# Zigbert has developed Pfind a new simple file finder, v0.5. A new applet for Puppy! Read more
# Plinej has developed Pupctorrent v0.4, a torrent downloader client, a GUI for ctorrent version dnh2.2. Another new applet! Read more
# NathanF has created Grafburn CD/DVD burner, v0.9. This is yet another newcomer, very exciting development. Read more
# Rarsa has upgraded the mini-volume taskbar applet to v0.4. Read more
# Rarsa has upgraded the Network Wizard to version 2.14.9. Read more
# Plinej has upgraded the PBcdripper audio CD song ripper to version 2.1. Read more
# Zigbert is working intensely on PuppyBackup. Everytime I go to the forum there's a new version! Upgrade to 1.0.0. Read more
# Rarsa has upgraded Remotedesktopclient RDP GUI to version 2.14.1. Read more
# Plinej has updated Soxgui audio conversion and "Swiss army knife" of audio utilities to v0.5. Read more
# mtPaint has been upgraded to version 3.10. Now supports gradients.
# There was a missing file that caused printing not to work. /usr/share/gutenprint/5.0.0/xml/dither-matrix-1x1.xml added. Read more
# GuestToo has made the shutdown of Turma a bit nicer. Read more
# Jesse fixed a bug in elspci, his little PCI detection program. Now at version 0.0.6.
# John Doe provided a fix for the 'alsaconf' script to handle usb sound.
# MU applied a bugfix for Puppybackground. Read more
# DejaVu fonts did not render correctly in Mozilla Firefox and SeaMonkey. Fixed, and I also upgraded to the latest version, 2.13. Read more
# The init script improved. Partition scanning during bootup is in the process of being improved. Currently booting Puppy from USB Flash, IDE Flash and hard drive has the new scan code. This improves locating of the various Puppy files and also supports a new boot parameter, PDEV1, which can specify the partition in which Puppy is installed. Read more
# Various bugfixes in PETget, the package manager.

curious john · Joined: 16 Jun 2003 Posts: 1252

Puppy is necessarily limited to keep things small. CUPS can be added and will support any printer supported under any other linux distro. If you need all desktop bells and whistles, KDE or Gnome can be added also, though ICE is probably a better option though less bells and whistles than the bigger two. I personally am quite happy with JWM that comes standard. Its small and fast.

No idea about usb dsl modem though I've heard an ethernet card is much better for such. I imagine if its doable somebody on Puppy forum has shared their knowlege. Or would be happy to do so if you post there.

For dialup Puppy comes with 3 or 4 softmodem drivers built in. There are more downloadable as dotpup packages. The connexant driver was available free for the 1.x.x versions of Puppy with the 2.4 linux kernel. The driver for 2.6 kernel isnt free except for a demo version very limited in speed. The people who developed the driver sell it. So no longer a dotpup pkg for it, you have to go buy it from the company selling it and compile it yourself. Personally think it would be cheaper to just go buy another modem unless its built in to a laptop or something.

curious john · Joined: 16 Jun 2003 Posts: 1252

Yesterday finally got to public library with my $27 laptop and $15 brand spankin new wifi card (rt2500 clone). Library offers free wifi though you have to log in via your library card plus being a library they block certain sites they consider obscene or illegal.

Anyway having never used wifi to connect, I was wondering how it would work. I clicked on Puppy's unique networking wizard script, it found my card, installed correct driver module, then found the library connection and voila, I was installed and connected in under 5 min. I was very impressed. I then clicked on the RutilT wireless gadget utility and it confirmed I was connected. Then brought up browser and library logon page appeared. Gave error when I tried to log on with Opera (grrr...) but logged on right away with Seamonkey(Mozilla). Once logged on I could use any browser and Opera has a much better downloader.

Just to test things, I downloaded Puppy 2.15CE iso (kinda of a bloated version of Puppy at 131mb) and download speed fluctuated considerably but only took an hour for completion compared to 10+ hours it would take with my slow home dialup connection. Yep I know there are much faster broadband connections, but this is very fast compared to what I am used to and cant complain cause its free. Plus I could surf at full speed while also downloading, wow!

By way I wasnt super impressed with 2.15CE, its just a prettied up version of 2.14 which is ok if pretty is important to you, personally I think the future 2.16 developers edition will much more be worth the effort. It'll have lot real improvements plus nearly as pretty as 2.15CE (somebody posted the desktop from the 2.16 alpha thats already out for developers). I should mention that 2.15CE doesnt have Firefox as I stated it did in earlier post, it has Seamonkey just like regular editions of Puppy. The 1.09CE Puppy did have Firefox. Firefox can be added to any Puppy of course as can Opera.

R Vijay · ๑۞๑ Joined: 12 Jun 2001 Posts: 4541 Location: Canada

This seems to be the higher end of Puppy Linux:
http://www.puppylinux.org/wikka/TeenPup
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curious john · Joined: 16 Jun 2003 Posts: 1252

TeenPup, PizzaPup, Grafpup, Muppy, and several other Puppy Linux related releases are not official releases by Puppy founder and developer, Barry Kauler, but derivatives produced by Puppy fans and community. They range from OneBone which is super minimalist commandline only upto some releases that include nearly every piece of linux software known to man. There is even a modified version of 3.01 somebody adapted to fully support all the hardware in the Asus eeepc.

The latest offical release of Puppy is 3.01 though expect an official Puppy 4.00 in near future. Right now both the 3.xx and 4.xx series of Puppy are being developed simultaneously.

techie · Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 13:17 pm Post subject:

It seems that John's favorite version Puppy Linux, could as well be one of Windows save your system or files programs as well. Read the article here

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,145038-p...tml#rescue

curious john · Joined: 16 Jun 2003 Posts: 1252

Just about any linux live cd can mount windows to save or modify unencrypted files. Puppy however is small and ROX file manager makes life easy. On current Puppies you do want to pick option of running entirely in ram without creating a save file on hardrive. This lets you mount and read/write to any partition during that session.

Interestingly there are now couple third party programs that let windows mount a linux filesystem. This is very useful if like me you mainly use linux and just occasionally run windows to use a particular piece of software. Lets me then save any created files to a linux partition from windows. I'd give links but not on computer with windows partition right now. Just do a google.

techie · Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 20:06 pm Post subject:

I share pictures and music, actually anything I have in my Data partition, from Windows without any additional software, and use in Ubuntu. Linux will not mount my Windows operating system, and Windows will not mount my Linux/Ubuntu, but that's not what I wanted.

So basically Vista/Ubuntu dual boot, both systems can access my data files.

I realized that any Linux system could mount, figured that puppy was the smallest download for live CD.

curious john · Joined: 16 Jun 2003 Posts: 1252

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