puppy linux 4 on the eee pc
The new puppy linux breed got released yesterday, and we’d like to share our first impressions about puppy on the Asus eee pc.
Puppy Linux is a live tiny distribution, containing lightweight tools for immediate productivity.
how to install puppy on a usb pendrive
At the official page, you can download your puppy linux. I choose the one with the latest 2.6.25 kernel, the download is only 88MB in size.
You have to burn the iso file, and boot your production computer from the CD-ROM.
Once the puppy linux live desktop loaded, you can find a very useful USB installer under Menu/Setup/Puppy universal installer, here is a screenshot:
You have to choose USB flash drive, and then select your usb pendrive. Mine was not detected at first, but you can find a mount icon on the desktop, and mount your usb easily.
You will be asked for the bootloading method. After a few other step, such as selecting to try puppy without installing to RAM, the process of writing files to the usb will only try one minute!
If the bootloader doesn’t work for you, you can edit your menu.lst like described in this article, except you may add the following lines:
title Puppy Linux
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz quiet rw irqpoll root=/dev/sdb1
initrd /initrd.gz
Puppy linux
The 800×480 at 24bit eee pc’s resolution was recognized, and the puppy desktop fits the eee pc’s screen well.
The taskbar includes a digital battery indicator, as well as Free RAM and CPU usage indications. Having loaded only the desktop, I had still 353MB out of 512MB of RAM.
Software
DiVX and MP3 multimedia files work out of the box on puppy linux, with the gxine player. The sound levels are loud enough, but the Fn+F8/9 combinations did not effect sound volumes.
I didn’t have that much luck with networking, the wifi and ethernet were not recognized, and I didn’t manage to get the good modules loaded.
Seamonkey is the default internet browser, which shares the same core with mozilla firefox, but has email and editing software integrated, as a continuation of the Mozilla Application Suite project.
You will find the Abi word processor, Gnumeric spreadsheet, as well as many personal management tools (expense tracker, Osmo, bank account manager,and much more).
A few scientific calculators are also bundled, which could be useful to students with an eee pc.
GtKam camera manager is present, as well as mtPaint for basic image manipulation.
Puppy linux is fast, lightweight and doesn’t need much resources. I just wish the networking had worked out of the box with the eee pc.
May 6th, 2008 at 7:34 am
You might want to try the 2.6.21.7 kernel, it should be more compatible, but I must admit, that I don’t have an Eee, so haven’t tried it myself.
May 6th, 2008 at 7:42 am
Hello No1,
I will try out that version, puppy is a very nice live os and it will be worth a look.
Welcome
May 6th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
I had a quick look at the version with a stable kernel, without luck.
Now, it seems there is a project of a customized puppy for the eee, breeezy: http://minipc.org/safepup/index.php?file=Breeezy%20for%20the%20eee.htm
May 7th, 2008 at 4:59 am
There is also one called pupeee http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?search_id=1743416936&t=25896 in which wireless should work, but I don’t know when/if it will be updated to 4.00, but someone in that thread might know how to get it working.
May 9th, 2008 at 4:49 am
Thank you! I will test it and report back
Edit: I get an error while loading kernel modules (my laptop hangs), so I can’t test it right now. I guess I’ll have to make an external dvd soon…
May 9th, 2008 at 11:13 am
i actually planned to replace my ubuntu eee with this since it started to work strangely, but since you mentioned that networking does not work ootb, i changed my mind.
i’ll start looking for another.
May 9th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Hello Aldrin!
You could try the tiny iso no1 referred to from http://puppylinux.ca/members/Pupeee/index.php?dir=2008-3-16%2F
My normal laptop is behaving a bit strange lately and I can’t get the os to boot, but if you have an external drive you could try it on the eee pc
It’s only 142MB in size btw
My sincere greetings, and I’m looking forward to read you blog
PS: Did you know there is an open source project with your name?
trac.zeitherrschaft.org/aldrin/