Episode: 249
Title: HPR0249: Puppy 411
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0249/hpr0249.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 14:50:28

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Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio. My name is David Wing. I go by roadrunner in
the IRC channels. I wanted to do a little review slash tutorial on Puppy Linux. Puppy's
the reason that I went back to Linux in 2006. I had with my early experience there with
Linux I first tried Red Hat 9 in 2003 and I managed to get the xorg.com file working
well enough so I could run KDE and I ran GNOME. They had both window managers on the
disk if I remember right. And it looked pretty nice and I liked the idea of having a really
fully featured command line and I basically spent quite a bit of time in the command line
fooling around with all the different things. It kind of impressed me. You could use like
WGET to go and pull down files and whatnot and there wasn't that type of option available
in the Windows command line. So I had a little problem though with the with Red Hat 9 and
that was in my computer I was using dial up internet at the time so I had a win modem
in the computer and basically the firmware that the win modem was dependent on on the
Windows operating system to the point where I couldn't get it running in Linux. So I
went back to my evil xp ways and I ran xp for you know 2003, 2004, 2005 and then 2006
rolled around and I wanted to go and give a computer that I had a Pentium 2233 megahertz
computer with had 64 megabytes of RAM, a 4 gigabyte hard disk and I basically wanted to
give it away to goodwill and I knew enough about Linux that they had some mini distributions.
So I went and tried at the time DSL, I tried feather Linux and I tried Puppy and basically
Puppy ran well enough. I got my graphics card working. I had 1024 by 768 resolution. I
had my printer was working with cups and I was using a cable modem at the time so I was using
Ethernet. So the network card, I got that working without a problem so everything was working
well and I wound up giving the computer away to goodwill and I deleted, I think I used
Derrick's Bootenuke DBAN so I completely and totally wiped out the Windows 98 partition
there and just left Puppy Linux on there so I was pretty happy with how it all turned out.
And so today I want to do a little bit, a little review there of Puppy and for those who don't
know Puppy Linux it comes in an ISO file size under 100 megabytes of RAM there of memory.
So it's very small distribution and it comes with Joe's window manager,
is the window manager it uses, it's got Joe's window manager, it's lighter than say a
gnome or KDE or even an XFC, it's very well suited to older systems and some of the software
that they've included with Puppy, it's got the C-Monkey internet suite so it's got the web browser,
it's got a decent tab to web browser, if you go and hover over the tab you get a little preview
of what window is if you click on the tab what window you're going to get which is kind of neat
and the C-Monkey internet suite they've also got a mail client in there, they've got a news
client in there, they've got an address book in there and they've got Composer which is an HTML,
a GUI HTML editor which is kind of neat. The file manager that Puppy comes with it uses rocks
filer and it's a very fast file manager, I kind of prefer a Nautilus but I've been using my
main system, I use an Ubuntu Intrepid system so I'm used to kind of more used to Nautilus but
rocks is very fast, I've been using it now on and off for quite some time so it's pretty decent,
it's pretty decent system, one of the things I like about the setup they've got in Puppy,
they've got this P mount Unmount Drive utility that they use, so on your desktop, on your
Joe's Window Manager desktop, they've got all of your mountable hard drive petitions, your CD-DVD
drive, your USB drive, it shows them on the bottom there you desktop and different to drive icons
and it gives you a little status light, if it's mounted it's got a green light, if it's currently
being used it's got a yellow light and if it's not mounted it just doesn't have any light at all on
it so it's kind of a kind of neat little utility to go and see what the status you're, what the
status your various partitions are and some of the other stuff that it's got, Puppy is got a lot
of software in it, even with the 100 megabyte ISO file size, it's just got a ton of software in
here, I'll list some of them that they've got here, you've got Xane which is the image scanner,
it's got an empty paint program in there, GTCam if you've got a digital camera you want to hook
to it, ink light, it's a vector editor, it's got Abbey Word is in there, it doesn't use open
office, open office would really really make the ISO file size quite a bit bigger so they use Abbey
Word instead, it's got for expenses, their expense tracker, track expense program, it's got Dumeric,
that's a spreadsheet editor, very small lightweight spreadsheet editor, home bank finance
management, it's got a ditty wiki, that's a personal wiki software program, Figuero's
password manager, it's got no case notes manager, Osmo personal organizer, PP log personal blog,
it's kind of like a WordPress or blogger software that's included on the CD, the founder of Puppy
Linux Barrier caller, he uses PP log on his blogs, if you want to see what PP log looks like,
on a server you can go to his website and you can go and see what it looks like,
and they've got Linux firewall software, so you've got a firewall program in here,
GPTPTPTP VPN client, now that's a long name, that's virtual private networking there,
if you want to go and log on securely to a corporate network, it's got peanut hood,
soma shares, so you can go and view your soma shares here on the Puppy distribution,
pure FTPTP server, so a CD's got a FTP server included with it,
and it's got some, the PUP dial modem dial up program, I should note that Puppy's well known,
I am using a modem in a while, but Puppy, if you know somebody who's got a modem Puppy,
is really touted as being able to get a lot of modems working there with the drivers and what not,
so it's a very, very good distribution for people on dial up, plus the other thing,
it's easy for them to go and download it because of the small size, a small ISO file size,
to go and download something that's 700 megs would be a real burden, and some of the other things
they've got, they've got Axel download accelerator, that's, you can use that from the command line too,
basically if you're going to, if you're going to pull down a file rather than using WGet,
you can use Axel, and it'll make multiple connections to the server to try to speed up the,
speed up the download for you, other things they've gotten here, they've got a PCreate Torrent,
Torrent Creator, and a Torrent Downloader, you also got a voice over IP client in here,
and an instant message client known as PSIP, they've got a Puppy Podcast Grabber,
it's a BASH-based podcast grabbing client, basically I looked at the script, the BASH script,
and the author there of the program in there of the software, he credited, Link Fezden there
at the Lotta Link's Tech Show, who also has a BASH podcast client known as BASH party,
he credited him with using some of his ideas there in the Puppy Podcast client,
and some of the other things they've got GFTP, which is a well-known FTP client,
that's also there on the CD, and for watching movies you've got GZINE media player,
and they have the LibDVD CSS file included in the distribution, so you can go, you've got
decryption, basically Hollywood goes and decrypts their movies with CSS encryption,
if you don't have that decryptor you can't watch the movie, so Puppy has that included
basically out of the box, some of the other things they've got in here, they've got
Burn ISO to CD, Burn ISO file to CD, they've got an ISO, we can burn ISOs to CD,
they've got an ISO master, ISO file editor, and P burn CD, DVD, Blu-ray Burner,
so apparently I guess if you've got a Blu-ray Burner Puppy will work with it or though,
I don't have a Blu-ray Burner, and I have not tried that, so, and speaking of the software,
other things included with the CMUNK internet suite, if you go into the browser,
Flash9 is included as well as you also have MP3 playback, so with the Flash9 you can go to YouTube,
and you can go and get your YouTube videos without a problem, it also has NTFS-3G,
which is what you need if you want to go and read and write NTFS partitions,
that's included with Puppy too, so you can you can mount an NTFS partition, you go right into your
Windows, Windows partition from Puppy, and pretty much do whatever you need to do, it's even got
program called XF-Prot virus scanner, and that's that'll go into your NTFS partition or your
Fat32 partition, and that'll go in scan for Windows viruses, which is a pretty neat little
program, and as far as the package management system goes, it's got its own little package management
system known as .PET, and basically the .PET package management system, you can go and see what
they have, they've got their own little version of Synaptic, if you use Ubuntu, you're familiar with
Synaptic, and it's called the Puppy PET yet package manager, and if you go in there, they have
it's a fair selection of software, it's not it's not going to be 25,000 Debian packages,
you know, when you go into Ubuntu Synaptic there, but they've got like for instance, if you want to,
if you don't like Zine, they've got EmPlayer and EmPlayer with all the different codecs in it,
so they've got they've got open boxes in here, if you don't like the the window manager,
the Joe's window manager, you can go and swap it out and run open box, and they've got a little
little selection here of software, bluefish, if you want to run an HTML editor, black box,
another window manager, so you can check that out and see what you think, and they've got Firefox
2.0.0.7, I'm not sure why they don't have Firefox 3 yet, and also with that Firefox right below it,
they've got Flash Player 9, but they'll be Flash Player from a ZOS, you'd want to grab that,
so that you had Flash Playback in your Firefox browser, and one of the things you need to
with Puppy, because of the, I should mention first with the Package Management, the Rocks
Fire on the File Manager is aware of the dot pet extensions, so if you go online, you can go and
find these pet packages, sometimes they're listed in the in the Puppy forums, sometimes they're
kind of all over the place to be honest with you, but you go and you find the dot pet file,
and you go and download it, and Rocks Fire or you go and click on it, Rocks Fire was aware of that
file, and it'll go and try to install it as a package, but you need to be you need to be aware with
Puppy, you should probably will run into a situation where you're going to want to compile
from source, just because there's not the, that's not the huge range of packages available like
you get in the, in the Debian, Debian repositories, one thing you're going to need if you do
come, choose to compile from source, because they can't compile Puppy 4, can't compile on a source
out of the box, you need to get a file, and it's known as, uh, Devax underscore 411 dot SFS,
the SFS stands for the squashed file system, it's compressed the compressed file system that
Puppy uses, and basically the 411 stands for the version, the current version of Puppy, so you
want to get the version that you're running of Puppy, and you go and you download that Devax
underscore 411 dot SFS file, and what you need to do after that is you go and you put that file
in your slash mount slash home directory, and that's the same directory your personal storage
file is, and I'll, I'll get to that, there's this personal storage file known as Puppy underscore
saved dot 2FS, and I'll get to that in a second, but basically you put your Devax file there
under a mount slash home, and the next time you boot Puppy, you'll get, you'll have your,
basically you'll be able to compile a C programs, it's got Python is included in that too,
so it basically you can start, you can start downloading and building some, some programs from
source there, and I should note, once you, there's an easy way, once you go and, um,
build a package from source, there's an easy little program they have in here that'll,
that'll go in addition to, to making the package, or rather addition to compiling the source,
it'll also go and make you a pet package, that the package management, the Puppy package management
system is aware of, and all you gotta do is you do, just like you normally compile a package,
you do your dot slash configure, then you do your make, which goes and compiles the package,
and then where you normally do the make install, which actually installs the binaries into,
into your, into your Linux box, you do instead, you do a new, the number two, DIR, space make,
space install, and what that'll do for you, that will go and, uh, take the, um, take it,
it'll do the make install like you normally will, but it'll also, this is, right from the site here,
the new two, DIR is a script that'll execute the make install, an addition will create a directory
with all the install files and directories in it, and basically the, the script that he's written
here, it'll, it'll go and ask you some simple questions, and then there's one other step you need
to do, uh, past that, to go and, and actually get your pet package, and that is, uh, after it makes
that, uh, makes that direct with all the binaries and whatnot, you go and do a DIR to pet, space,
and then the directory name, and what that'll do is, that'll go and make the pet package,
it'll ask you a couple questions, it'll ask you like, where's the, uh, the mini icon located for
Joe's window manager, so you got an icon with your install package, it'll ask you what type of
architecture you're going and compiling the, uh, you know, the package, putting the pet package
together for, it'll go and, uh, ask you, uh, for instance with the, uh, with the dependencies,
it'll ask you if you want to go and list any dependencies, so you got to, you got to, you know,
it's profitable to put that in there too, and once you build the pet package, what I would do
is I would try to run it, um, like when you, when you boot off the CD, try to do what they call it,
it's a puppy prefix equals RAM option, what they'll do that'll ignore the save file that you've
got, and I'll get to the save file in a second, that'll ignore your personal save file, and that will
run puppy, just a virgin puppy, basically a standard, standard, uh, install puppy, and you can go
and try to run that pet package that you made on a standard install puppy to make sure that it'll
work on other systems before you go and, you know, uh, upload it to a, a forum or host it yourself
on your own website, so that's just something I thought I'd, uh, I thought I'd let you know about,
and there's, uh, one other thing I should mention about, uh, uh, uh, speaking about the packages,
now puppy, uh, the previous version of puppy, puppy version three, what they did with that is
that was built from Slackware 12 packages, so it's got a, a pretty high degree of, of compatibility
with, uh, Slackware 12 packages, basically, uh, basically you can go and, uh, go and use, uh, use
the packages, they've got a, a program called, uh, a pet package called G-slapped, and that's what
you use for, uh, installing Slackware binary packages, they also have a little, a little utility
called, uh, TGZ2PET, and what that'll do is you just do a TG, TGZ2PET space, and then the name
the Slackware package, um, you know, dot TGZ at the end of that, and that'll go and try to make, uh,
a pet package, a puppy package for you from the Slackware package. Now there is one little caveat
about that, puppy four, they compiled it from source, so it's not really designed to be, you know,
Slackware compatible, they do, and I'm reading from the, uh, the puppylinics.com site,
says however we have a compatibility collection of packages that can be installed, which is,
she's a very high level of compatibility, meaning that you'll be able to download and install a
wide variety of, uh, Slackware 12 binary packages. So pretty much, uh, you're still probably, you know,
you're still probably able to go and use, uh, use your Slackware packages here in, in puppy four,
row. And, uh, some of the other things that I wanted to mention about, uh, about puppylinics is,
you can go, you can go and make your own, uh, custom, uh, version of, of puppylinics. And basically,
uh, a lot of people have gone and done this. They're, they're known as, uh, uh, Publets is the name
of the name of what these community contributed, uh, custom respins of, uh, puppy are known as
Publets. You can go and see, uh, some of the Publets they've got here, uh, at the, uh, site there,
www.puppetlinics.org slash download slash Publets. And some of the interesting things that they've,
they've done here, they've got one Publet in particular here, a Mac Pub 411. This was based on,
on puppy 4.1.1. Uh, it's an ISO file size 101 megabytes. He's got a very nice, uh, blue background
to it. It's, it kind of looks like, uh, I don't want to say a Helix to it, but it, it's a very, uh,
it's a wavy theme to it. It's a very, very sharp looking, uh, very sharp looking background. His
goal here is to try to make, uh, make puppy look like, uh, Mac, Mac OS X basically. And he's got, uh,
he used ice, ice window manager rather than the, uh, Joe's window manager. He used a modified
brush metal theme for ice window managers. It's got a very silver, uh, silver look to it.
He used W bar, which is basically like, uh, it's, it's a launch bar just like Mac OS X has. And
it did, you know, as I say, the distro, the distribution of the purpose of it is to make it,
make the puppy look very much like Mac OS X. And he, he's pretty much, it, it looks very much
like it to me. He's also included Firefox 2 and, uh, X MMS player in the distribution. So you might
want to check that out. Another one is box pop. This is also based on 4.1.1. Uh, it's got a nice
so file size, 94 megabytes. And in this, he went and built it on open box window manager. There's
no taskbar, no icon support for the desktops. It's very, very clean looking desktop. And, uh, you get
access to applications by right clicking on the desktop to get a context menu. And, um, he's using,
W bar, and he, for launching applications, also using Conkey, which gives you a system
information. And he looks like he's got Conkey here on the top, uh, top right and top, uh, excuse me,
top right and, and, and bottom right of the, uh, of the, uh, of the desktop. He's got a very,
very nice, uh, very nice purple background to it. Very, very interesting. There he's using, uh,
Thunar for the, uh, the file manager, rather than, uh, rather than the rocks filer. Uh, another one
here, uh, just go over two more here is Budapap Dingo. Dingo is, is Puppy 4.0. And, uh, it's 168 megabytes
ISO file size. And the reason this is interesting is because he went and used the Enlightenment, uh,
E17 window manager, which is kind of, um, it's kind of like a, uh, comp is, uh, comp is effects,
but it's, it's meant to run on much lighter heart, uh, much lighter and older hardware. And it's
been the Enlightenment project's been around a lot longer than, than comp is or barrel or anything
like that. And you can see here he's got the, on the bottom there, he's got the fire effect there.
And, uh, he's gone and, uh, he's gone and added, uh, opera 9.5 icecat gizmo and a lot of E17
mods and, and, and backgrounds to this distribution. And it looks, it looks pretty sharp if you're an
Enlightenment fan. There you can, basically can get a, uh, version of Puppy where it's, uh, where it's
running right out of the box. And another thing that I wanted to mention was, um, a Dingo Plus.
And this is a, uh, a public 255 megabytes in size. And the reason I mentioned this is because,
nowadays everybody has brothers buying a triple EPC. And, um, Dingo Plus is a straightforward
remastered Dingo customized for the ASUS triple EPC. Includes plenty of extra packages as well
as all the required triple EPC drivers. The wireless works straight out of the box. Although you
will have to load the AL, uh, ATL2 module if you want to use the wired Ethernet, uh, it says brightness
and wireless functions keys work. But the volume and muted function keys don't, but you can
troll the volume using the icon, the taskbar, and I have included X-Bine keys if you want to set them
up. I use included open office remote desktop client, Python slash Pi GTK programming facility. So
he's included some, some software with it there. And, um, basically if you want to try Puppy out
on a triple EPC, uh, they've got a, uh, they've got a Puppy, Puppy, uh,
public ISO, uh, already made for you. The other advantage with Puppy is they say with the, uh,
you know, with the netbooks with the, with the flash drives that they have. They don't,
they don't use a regular hard disk there with the, you know, motor and spindle and all the stuff
that, um, because they're using the flash drives, they save on battery life. That's one of the big
things with, uh, with the, uh, the new, uh, the new netbooks. But with Puppy, you can load the system
to RAM. So you're not, you know, you're, the operating system is not constantly accessing the hard
drive. So you're saving a lot of, a lot of, uh, a power that way. So that's one of the, the big
features with, with the Puppy distribution that's in, and it's ability to load itself entirely to
RAM that you're really, uh, if you're looking for, to maximize your, your battery life on your, uh,
on your little netbook there. It's, it's definitely got, uh, it's definitely got some merit to it.
And I wanted to mention with, uh, with when you run Puppy, uh, you're going to, you know,
it's a live CD the first time you run it, you go and, uh, you run the, uh, the live CD, you go
into the distribution, you go and make whatever changes, you know, window manager, you want to,
if you want to change the window manager, whatever programs you want to add, whatever, you know,
customization you want to do to the theme, your documents, all this other stuff. When you exit
out of Puppy, it's going to ask you where you want to save this file, they call it pup underscore
save dot 2fs is the name of the file. And that file is all your changes that you've made. And
basically when you go, when you go and make, uh, when you go and, uh, make that file, you have a
choice, you can either not use encryption, you can use light encryption or you can use heavy
encryption. And if you go and choose to use, uh, either lighter heavy encryption, the next time
you boot up Puppy, it's going to ask you for a password. So one of the, I should preface this by
saying one of the knocks on Puppy is that it, it runs this route. You're running as root all the time
and Puppy. It's not like, you know, Debian or Fedora or something like that where you're using a
multi user operating system. Puppy, you're root all the time. So this obviously is a big problem
if you've, you know, you got a family or something like that and you've got multiple users using
the same, the same computer. If you're running Puppy, everybody can see what everybody else is doing.
But with this pup underscore save dot 2fs file with this encryption ability added in, I think it
was added in Puppy 4.0. You can go and have multiple instances of this pup underscore save dot 2fs file.
You know, you name them differently. So you might add the user name afterwards, after the pup dot,
after the pup underscore save part, you'd add the user name. And that way you might have five or six
users on the system. They all have their different dot 2fs files and Puppy, when you start up Puppy,
it goes and looks on your hard drive. It looks on all the partitions. You can put the underscore,
the pup underscore save dot 2fs file. You can put on an TFS partition. You can put on USB drive.
Basically Puppy, when it runs, it's going to look for where that file is. And it gives you a little
option, you know, which one you want to pick if you've got three or four, just numbers them. And you
pick which, which file you want, which personal save file you want to use for that, for that session
of Puppy. So with the encryption, they've kind of certainly diminished the problem with the
root business. I'm not a security expert. So there's a lot of flames going back and forth in
the forum about the root thing. So I'm just going to mention that it's root and you can make your
you can make your own decisions based on the encryption of the personal save file and what not.
And that's pretty much pretty much all I want to mention concerning
concerning Puppy Linux. I think I covered covered just about anything. I would go and give it
give it a try. Certainly if you have older, older hardware, it's definitely got quite a bit
quite a bit of merit. It uses a modern Linux kernel. It uses 2.6, not 21.7 and it uses
XORG 7.3. And so you've got, you know, as far as support for devices and whatnot,
you're using a very modern kernel. And it's also got, if you do have an older system,
something you can't get to working with XORG, they have XVessor included in it. You know,
and that's that's basically supposed to work with just about just about everything under the sun.
So they have that as a backup. So it's got the project got a lot of merit to it and I would give
it, you know, I'd give it a try and and see how you feel about it. And with that, that's the end
of the episode. I hope you enjoyed listening. Thank you very much and good day.
Thank you for listening to Hack with Public Radio.
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