puppy linux the AA1 best friend

Hi all, after reading this post viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5522&p=36612&hilit=puppy#p36612 from hayagix. I thought that it'd be cool to try puppy 4.1 on my AA1, and I have to say that so far I'm really impress with it, at 93mb puppy is a light but full featured distro which is really fast (everything opens in the blink of an eye), you can read a good review here http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/puppy-revisited.html.
One of the good things about puppy is that you don't even need to touch your hard disk to use it, it will happily install itself on a usb driver and then load itself to ram on your computer (which makes it lighting fast). When you finish your session it'd give you the chance to save your work and settings into the same usb, so you can take your whole desktop in your pocket.
The puppy repositories (http://www.puppylinux.org/node/9) have a great selection of applications to cover all the everyday needs.
To install puppy the best way is to create a bootable usb drive with unetbooting. Unetbootin is very easy to use and it works in both linux and windows get it form here http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/.
Once you have unetbootin in your computer download puppy 4.1 http://puppylinux.com/download/index.html, plug your usd drive and start unetbootin which will guide you through the easy steps to create your bootable usb hd.
Set you AA1 to boot from usb hd (press F12 after switching the AA1 on and place usd hd at the top of the bootin list). After that puppy will do its thing and in a short while you'll be on the desktop.
Pretty much everything works out of the box (mounting usb drives and sd cards, sound, wired internet..). to get the wireless going you only need to get and install the drivers from here http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 740#237740, reboot and you are ready to go (remember to safe your session when you reboot).
Setting up puppy is fairly easy, the menus are quite self explanatory so you shouldn't have much trouble getting things as you want them (please drop a line if you need any help).
If you don't like the default desktop you can download others (including xfce4, e16, icewm, fluxbox)from the puppy repositories in an easy click and install way.
Ah! I forgot to say, at this point you can take the usb drive out to free the slot if you need it since puppy is running from RAM. When you want to finish plug the usb drive in again select poweroff from the shutdown menu and you'll be ask if you want to save your session.
Have fun!

 

One problem I saw is that it doesn't support the wireless card. I know that if I installed it I could get it to work, (although I see it doesn't have the make command either).

I'm sure this could be solved with a little bit of searching their forums, and I seem to recollect someone had even made an AA1 image.

However, the above being said, as you say, it's quite fast, especially for something that isn't actually installed to the hard drive.
If I have some more time, I'll play with it a bit more, but they should consider having support for that wireless card, especially as it's a good netbook choice and most of the netbooks (though I'm not sure about the latest generation--I know that the EEE PC from the 901 on are using something else) use that card.

 

Sorry, I'm using mental shorthand here, and I apologize. I know that you specifically mentioned that wireless doesn't work and is easily fixed. What I meant is that due to its nature, as a good distribution for netbooks, Puppy should include that driver in its default download.

Sorry for not being clear, and let me reiterate, it does seem a good distro for a netbook. It runs extremely well from RAM. I'm probably going to put it on a partition somewhere, and it's another, where if I still had the 8 GB SSD version, I'd seriously consider making it the default.

I see though, that Barry is no longer planning to head up the project. Hopefully, that won't mess things up--sometimes it does, but often, of course, it doesn't--for example, I think Arch is still doing a good job even though Judd has left and Aaron was an excellent choice as replacement.

Anyway, once again, apologies for the mental shorthand. Hopefully, this post clarifies what I meant to say.

 

Hi scottro, to get wireless working you only need to download the drivers from the link I provided on the post; it is a link to a post in another forum, if you scroll down the page you will see a post with a link to download the drivers, not compiling needed just click download install, reboot and wireless will be up (go to the puppy network assistant and chose the wireless card there). Below is an screenshot of my puppy desktop running the e16 window manager.
Let me know how you get on with the wireless. Cheers

 

Thanks for the quick response, and hopefully, my second post clarified what I meant about the wireless. That doesn't worry me, I don't see it giving me a problem.

It's more a thought of it working well for people new to Linux. I hadn't used puppy in a year or more, and I'm glad I read your post.

I was really quite impressed with it, generally speaking. I'm still not crazy about their default running as root. I see their point, but I simply don't agree with it.

(Yes, I looked at that long thread on their forums--it seems they got sidetracked into whether running as root is moral or evil, which sort of evades the issue.)

Anyway, once again, many thanks for your post, and for some of you, who are getting frustrated with Linpus, you certainly may prefer puppy. As Jimmyjazz says, it's amazingly fast, possibly the fastest thing I've run on this machine (the 160 gig version). Also to reiterate what he's already said, installing wireless is a piece of cake, he's even given you all the links.

 

You can get Puppy with the 2.6.27 kernel, which should support wifi.

ftp://ks301128.kimsufi.com/testing/puppy4.1-k2.6.27/

I wasn't able to test it on my One because none of my USB drives are bootable any more. I tried it with both Unetbootin and the Puppy installer while running from CD. I have four USB drives and they all show various GRUB errors when I try to boot off them.

 

@ scottro, the beauty of puppy is that you don't need to install it as it runs really well from the use drive, so you can play with it whenever you want without fearing to break anything on your machine. Yes the default root login thing gets some people a bit funny, and they probably have their reasons (only login as root when needed is a long standing *unix code of good practice and one of the reasons why linux is more secure than other OS), for me and what I use my AA1 for is not a big deal, I think that it is all about informing people how things are and then let them choose whatever the wanna do. Take care

@ JimK. JimK a couple of things I can suggest is to make sure that the usb drives are formated on fat 32, and/or try reformatting them using gparted or a similar app. Another thing is not to use the unetbootin download option but download puppy directly from their site and them use netbootin to transfer the iso to the usb drive.

 

@jimyjazz, thanks for the suggestions. I had already tried them and they didn't work, but the Puppy installer does have alternate bootloaders and I was able to get a bootable USB Puppy with 2.267 kernel on the second try. Unfortunately, not only did the wifi not work, my USB mouse didn't work properly either. The cursor movement was choppy and difficult to control. But it worked fine with the USB mouse on my desktop computer. Go figure.

 

Hi,
Puppy sounds really interesting so I have few questions
1. How much time does it need to boot?
2. I have a150, can I use left card reader (storage) to put inside sd card and boot puppy from it?
3. what about battery life time?

Tnx in advance

 

Hi prokka:
1- it is definitely slower to boot than linpus , but I have only used from a usb drive I have not installed on the hard disk (I don't see the need because it performs very well from usb drive). probably it'd be faster if it was installed on hard disk.
2- form what I have gather reading around forums bootin from an sd card is not an easy task to accomplish, this is true for everything not only for puppy (if somebody has had any success bootin from an sd card please let me know ) . Another thing about using sd cards to run on is that they need to have a quite high write speed (=expenssive) otherwise everything goes ssssssllllllooooowwwww. they are good for storage tho.
3- good question I have to test it to check how the battery life compares with the default linpus.
As I said before I'd probably recommend to install it on a usb drive and play around with it for a while and see what you think. Take care.

 

thats weird with the mouse, you could try to run the tool to configure Xorg, it is quite straight forward and it may configure the mouse properly. I have not try the 2.26.7 kernel, the theory is that it should have wireless working out of the box but I guess it is not quite there yet. Let my know if you are able to find a solution for it. Cheers

 

Thank you very much for fast answer
I will try it anyway, just thinking about making it my primary OS for easy tasks.

 

Yes, it is weird about the mouse. It's been 10 years since I've seen a mouse jump around like that. And I've never had a USB mouse not work before except when the batteries were dying. I tried reconfiguring Xorg, and I even tried using Xvesa, but it still wouldn't work.

As for the wireless, it seems to configure correctly -- the device is correctly recognized and you can configure the IP address or use DHCP, but when it scans it can't find any networks.

This version s supposed to be experimental, so maybe they'll get it fixed mañana.

 

i,m liking this puppy o/s , it,s running in my ram atm, it tried to hook upto next door,s encrypted wireless, so i had to click on our modem (in the configure thingy).
youtube and bbc i-player working fine, usb mouse too , gonna see if i can get my printer working now

cheers, frank

 

OK, you've convinced me. I'll go back and try the official release and spend the 5 minutes it takes to install the wireless drivers instead of screwing around all day with the experimental release.

 

jimk

i downloaded it from the link that you posted , then burnt the iso to an external drive (with the acer site cd burner app, installed previously) then booted off it (but did,nt need any wireless drivers)

frank

 

Congrats, Frank! I can't get the damn thing to find any wireless networks. Guess I'll have to try again. I'll start with a new download, maybe mine was an earlier version. Have you tried a mouse?

 

jimk

yeh, on this 2nd bootup, i just clicked on xautoconnect and it scanned our router, (i did,nt save my settings when i shut down before).
usb mouse work,s fine
puppy load,s various forum pic,s that linpus would,nt show btw (even with the extra media player,s installed)

frank

 

I got the mouse working and wireless works ootb. Before, I was running puppy from a USB thumb drive, and mouse wireless didn't work right. But after I installed it to the SSD, everything works fine! BTW, I used pwireless wireless scanner to get wireless working. Now I'll just have to install Firefox 3.

 

jimk

nice one , i only saw ff 2 in the package list, good luck.
i,m missing the opera browser that i installed on linpus tho (it was proper fast )

frank