Friday, December 19, 2014

Picture of my new puppy

Avimark running in puppy

Puppy Linux.. is now fully house trained.

I was playing with various versions of linux on memory sticks as a simple way to instantly upgrade xp stations.  Pre config, clone that sort of thing.

I loaded a nice ubuntu 14.04 on a modest 16 gb pny memory stick, and it ran quite well.  would pause occasionally for large disk writes because of the slowness of writing to the stick, but running remmina to a rdp desktop was slick and quick.  Also could run wine and avimark native.

Cloned to another slightly different pny stick, and the performance was dismal.  Moral to the story.. they don't always put the same memory in their sticks.. widely varying performance.

So I took another look at puppy.  For those of you who don't know, puppy loads from a cd or memory stick and runs almost entirely in the host computers ram with no install or alteration of the host's drive.

It has really matured in the last few years, and I can load wine, remmina, etc etc relatively painlessly, and this little bugger runs fast even on old legacy stuff.

The video drivers can be a little fussy on really old equipment, Press the space bar at boot up to go plain vanilla and choose the right one after booting.  but I can plug a 4 gig memory stick into practically any machine that can boot from usb, and have a workstation that can run Avimark via rdp or natively in wine instantly with zero install on the host.    

1 edit of the fstab to connect to the workgroup "server" and I am off and running.

or plug in the login info to remmina for rdp and off we go.

Puppy's desktop was pretty ugly a few years ago, but they now have some nice icons and themes that are simple to install, along with a whole host of email calc paint write web browser and other utilities.  It didn't take me long at all to have a very good looking desktop.  the interface is very intuitive..  works more or less like windows.. start button down in the lower left.

Windows shared Printers were found and installed automagically.. even the dymos

You have access to the whole ubuntu repository for just about any function you care to add, and the install process will strip it down to the essential.  Like not loading 50 language/keyboard options and not loading the non compiled libraries etc.

When you log out, any changes are saved to a file on the stick and loaded at next boot.

Best of all, you can save your configuration as a remastered install cd, so that creating new identical sticks is an absolute no brainer... or you could provide the world with pre configured puppy clones.

Staff won't stay off the interwebs?  plug in a puppy stick, boot the workstation from that, and so what if they hurt the install (unlikely in linux anyhow)