puppy linux the AA1 best friend

Nice to see people are trying and enjoying Puppy.

A fellow has remastered Puppy 4.1.1 for the AA1 and made it available to the public. I hope to try it out soon. This is not an experimental release. It is based on the rock solid 4.1.1 release.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 834a39a3e3

I am hoping for a Muppy(Puppy derivative) release soon based on the 2.6.27 kernel. This should be a real winner for the AA1. Muppy has been described as "Puppy on steroids". I've been using Muppy on a desktop and cannot believe the quality of this relatively unknown operating system.
http://minisys-linux.de/EN/index.htm

 

Yes, the PET list only has Firefox 2. But getfirefox.com always has the latest version (currently 3.03). I just extracted it to the home directory (which is actually the /root directory), made a shortcut on the desktop and it works perfectly. Now I could really get to love Puppy if only I could get over this run-as-root-phobia.

 

Yes. The "root" thing does bother some people. How many run windows as administrator? I do mainly because the user/admin setup in Xp is troublesome to me. One is at much more risk in windows than linux in a "root' running scenerio.

Puppy was primarily designed to run from short term memory - ram. The idea is when you are finished a session all traces of your Puppy activity are gone as nothing is left on your hard drive. Of course, the option to save data to various devices exists including hard drive. Encrypting your save files is important if you think there is risk.

Where the most risk exists is the full hard drive install. Root access is given to the entire machine and files therein. My Puppy installs are "full" but I am careful to encrypt anything I do not want to share with the world. I make sure the Puppy firewall is setup and running. I can password protect my Puppy install if I choose. I am comfortable with this setup.

I really enjoy the freedom running as root gives me. No struggling with permissions, fstab, and entering passwords everytime I want to do some mundane task or access files in another partition.

Because of Puppy's small size and simplicity, it runs very fast, boots fast, and is ideal for computers with limited power and resources including most of the netbooks.

I have not tried another distro on my AA1 although I have been following the Mandriva 009 gnome thread. I have Mandriva gnome installed(I multiboot several distros) on my desktop and it is quite good. I suspect it would be fairly slow and cumbersome on the AA1 much like Xp. Maybe the Xfce edition, when it arrives, will be better suited to netbooks.

 

I should have also mentioned available software. Everything is very up-to-date and submitted by members as "pet" packages. Pet packages are much the same as windows exe. Click on them and away they go. Its best to check the forum for newest stuff.

My fave extras are Picasa, Frostwire, Opera, D4x, Skype, Aqualung, Realplayer 11, Peazip, Privoxy, and Tor. Java and flash are available as pets.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/index. ... c7dc6121e1

 

I looked up the murga link and tried to download Craig's latest ISO but the hosting site he's chosen wouldn't let me register... has anyone else got a pointer to a fully working puppy ISO please?
Thanks.

 

ftp://puppy[email protected]/ ... py-411.iso

Perry
www.kidpub.com

 

I am testing the puppy 4.1.1 for the AA1 (acer2-puppy-411.iso). Wireless WPA2 goes OK out of the box.

But I noticed something. If I boot with a SD card in the left slot (Storage Expansion), then the process stops when loading some modules. I have to power off by pressing the power button (on top right) for some seconds. It boots OK without the SD card.

This behaviour is not specific of this version of Puppy. It happens the same with stock versions of Puppy.

 

The kernel 2.6.27 version of Puppy boots fine with SD card in the left slot. It doesn't do storage expansion like Linpus, but everything else (that I've tried) seems to work, including wireless.

 

Installed the remastered Puppy to USB (the version intended for the Aspire). For some reason it insists on placing the file to save settings etc on the SSD of the Aspire One - the USB drive does not appear to be an option. Is this intentional? Also setting up the wireless gives me 2 connection icons in the task bar (whfi0 and ath0) - is this normal?

 

I'm running Mandriva 2009 at the moment, but still shopping around. I have some questions about Puppy Linux:

How is the sound on speakers in AA1 Puppy? I have to crank my volume to 100% to get faint sound right now.
How is the screen brightness adjustment? I can't adjust mine at all.
Does it wake up and find wireless after hibernating? Sometimes my compy won't wake up properly and I have to restart.
Does it include the acerfand daemon? I haven't been able to get this to work on either Ubuntu or Mandriva 2009.

Thanks!

 

I tried Craig's re-master iso last night. First thing to say is it's amazing how much you get in the way of apps in such a small amount of memory. It could indeed be a fantastic distro for the AAO...

...but, there are some big issues. Firstly the not working with the expansion SD card in situ - for a lot of people, me included, this will make it a complete non-starter.

Also, even though I enabled the appropriate tick-box, I couldn't get the double-tap clicking on the track-pad to work. It's surprising how irritating this is once you're used to it.

And I couldn't connect to the internet, even though I'd apparently successfully connected to the wifi network.

I hope people persist with either Puppy or Kuki - the glimpse I've had of a decent Linux distro has really enthused me about the AAO's potential.

I'm surprised that Linpus haven't noted reaction from the public and released a full desktop version for those that want it but don't want to spend hours typing in terminal.

 

The Linux versions, on almost all netbooks, seem to be the poor stepchild.
They give a lower spec machine, usually with a somewhat crippled version of Linux (there are exceptions, for example, the Sylvania meso) and then say, "Linux doesn't sell."

When I see two notebooks, one with an 8GB SSD, that a little googling shows to be a lowend, very slow one, 512 MBs of RAM, for $330 USD and the same thing but with a 120 GB hard drive and a gig of RAM, and also know that a RAM upgrade is non-trivial, and that is selling for $350, the chances are I'll buy the one for $350.
When one has used LInux or BSD for awhile, one gets used to dual booting, and more and more frequently, as Linux advances, simply wiping Windows off the machine entirely, so even though you're paying the Microsoft Tax, it's not a big deal--especially with such a minimal price difference.

So, when they stack the deck that way, they'll then see that the Windows one far outsells the Linux one and figure why bother with Linux. It seems that most, if not all, of the netbook manufacturers really don't understand their Linux market.

 

Actually, I think Acer already knows that the XP version outsells the Linux one... that's obvious. But still, they need to sell units without the MS logo. And since it's kinda dumb(although I don't mind) to sell laptops with no OS at all. I myself, prefer buying laptops and build my own desktops without any included OS. So that I have the freedom to install anything I want on it. Just like what I did with my AAO. I played with the Linpus Lite for a few minutes, just to see what it is... but I already had in mind that I'm gonna install XP on it. But later on decided on Mandriva Linux since it's boring to install XP when I got other PC's already running XP and Vista.

But I do agree that Acer should at least get all the bugs out of their crippled version of Linux before distribution.... knowing fully well that linux is NOT as user friendly as Windows. But hey... that's ACER guys. Always have been like that, hehe. On almost all Acer products I've helped setup, the 1st thing I do.... FORMAT, and reinstall XP or Vista my way....

 

@ grwkak: the reason why you can not save the files to the usb drive is that puppy is using it as if it was a cd not a usb drive.
What I have done to have a fully contained 2gb usb drive with puppy, (that is, one I can use to boot and save the session) is to create a small partition on the usb (300mb) to install puppy (using netbootin). and then create a bigger partition for the puppy files. In this way you can use the same usb to save the sessions. I don't know how experience you are with linux, if that it sounds like something you'd like to do but you don't know how to, let me know and I'll take you through it. (is a very easy process using an application called gparted).
However you could save the sessions to the AA1 hard disk, is easy, safe (it won't mesh up anything on your machine), and you can choose how much space you want to alocate to puppy (up to 1.25gb). Take care
@ spaceholiday:
How is the sound on speakers in AA1 Puppy? on mine is as good as you can get from the tiny/crapy speakers on the AA1.
How is the screen brightness adjustment? cool, it works
Does it wake up and find wireless after hibernating? I have not try to do that
Does it include the acerfand daemon? as far as I know the acerfand daemon is not included in any distro, you have to create and edit a couple of files (basically copy and paste) as per the instructions here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Aspir ... %20/%20Fix. and after that it works like a charm. did you have it working with the default Linpus, if you didn't it may be due to your BIOS version. Cheers

 

Jimyjazz

Thanks for the reply. I did some more playing with Puppy - discovered you needed to use MUT to detect the drives (its an option in the drive mounting utility on the desktop). When you do that the USB drive becomes visible and you can save changes to it.

Still not sure why there is 2 wireless connection icons though. Wifi0 and Ath0. I wonder if 2 drivers are being loaded?

Guy

 

Thanks grwkak for the tip about MUT, I never would have figured that out.

 

Thanks - as regards the extra connection icon, I just used the option to hide!

Guy

 

It's a madwifi (ath_pci) thing. You don't see it when using the ath5k driver.

 

Okay, I'm gonna do it. I updated my BIOS and never had Linpus; when I got my machine the first thing I did was wipe windows and put ubuntu on it.

Anyway, here goes...

 

OK I'm impressed with Puppy One, after having tortured myself trying just about every other Linux derivative in the known universe. I was so frustrated I actually gave my One away a few months ago but just got it back I really like Linux (sortof familiar with Ubuntu, learned to live with Linpus ) but I'm not a Linux genius and don't have time to search forums and type in a terminal all day, so I have a seemingly simple question I haven't been able to work out:

There are dozens of applications in Puppy I will never use. How do I uninstall? Nothing shows up in the installed applications menu (sorry I don't remember what it's called, I'm not on Puppy right now...the package manager?)

And just one comment: the left card reader works but not the right. I can live with that but just thought I'd mention it!

And a huge thanks to people like the Puppy developers.

BD