Question:
Have just spent several hours wrestling with the newly released Puppy
Linux 2.14 and came away pretty frustrated.
First the good news: the memory management problems I encountered with
ver 2.13 and reported here, seem to have improved.
After booting 2.13, the task bar free memory flag shows purple
(nearing the red danger mark), with 7.5MB "free" out of 512MB of
physical RAM.
Answer:
I have been using Puppy in various versions for about eight months
now, and my experience is quite different from Achim's. I did install
2.13 into a Pentium II machine, but I have deleted the installation
since the live cd is so fast and so efficient.
The bootup of Version 2.14 takes a little over a minute. Internet
access, word processing, and all the other services I require are
easily available. I am wired to another computer, a P-IV machine with
Windows XP, where I keep all my documents. Even my USB ports, which
were limited to 1.0 on Windows 98, work fine as 2.0 ports.
My only grief has been an inability to connect my Epson printer
remotely, so I have to walk into the next room to print anything.
This, I'm sure, comes from my lack of skill with the CUPS system.
I would enthusiastically recommend Puppy as a first Linux to anyone
who would rather use a computer than fool around with one.
I ran Puppy 214 on my second desktop today, the one with the LS-120
drive, and ran into some more problems.
A minor glitch at the start, when the monitor refresh frequency was
set too high (90Hz) and had to be tweaked.
I booted with a serial mouse attached, and then tried adding a USB
mouse. In fact, I tried four USB mice, all wheel mice, one of them
wireless infrared. Puppy detected all to varying degrees, but wasn't
able to configure any. One was shown as a USB wheel mouse, another as
a USB mouse, a third as "unknown device", and the fourth as IR mouse.
None worked.
When I rebooted and left one of them on, Puppy was able to make it
work, but then the serial mouse no longer worked.
I next tried mounting the LS-120 drive with the two mounting
utilities. MUT showed an icon for the drive, but reported "no disk"
when I tried to mount it. The other utility ran the drive endlessly
without success, and I had to restart X-windows to shut it down. The
utility would only work if I removed the LS-120 disk from the drive.
I then tried to install Puppy on the LS-120 using the LS-120/Zip
install function of the Puppy Universal Installer.
The installer recognized the LS-120 and I chose the "superfloppy"
install option (no MBR, no partitions). The installer started to write
to the disk, then gave an "out of space" message, but kept accessing
the disk endlessly. I had to close the window and remove the disk.
Apparently the installer can't overwrite existing data, or check
before starting whether there's enough space.
So, I had to reboot into Win2K and format the LS-120.
I then booted Puppy from CD once more, and this time made a WakePup2
boot floppy and tried the "Install to CF for later move to IDE" option
of the Universal Installer. I was hoping with the boot floppy and the
CF card in my laptop's PCMCIA adapter, I could load Puppy onto my
laptop from CF. But no joy. The WakePup2 routine didn't read my PCMCIA
adapter and couldn't find Puppy on the CF card.
