Choosing a new Puppy

[John99]

I tend to use Puppy as a backup OS and generally use Debian, but keeping Puppy in reserve for whenever the main OS is problematic. Or on very old machines - I still have a 32bit Windows Laptop where I tend to use Puppy instead of the outdated insecure Windows.
Its not long ago that I threw out an old machine with less than 1GB Ram available.

I have tended until now to keep passwords on password protected Libre Office documents but recently have been using Keepass2 instead so it will be useful to be able to use this on Puppy. (I was having problems with that { Keepass2 not working in tahrpup 6 )

I will probably try reinstalling the latest official version of Puppy 64 & 32 bit depending on the machine, but thought it worth asking for any tips or advice first.

CD/DVD install with persistence?
I do not have any spare USB sticks at present but I do have CDs/DVDs and machines that will boot from them, so I could try installing Puppy on optical media as well as using multi-boot installs.

Multi-boot with Grub2 - Full or Frugal install?
I have tended to go for full installs as I know how to do that and multi-boot them. I do read about the advantages of frugal installs unless on a very low power machine, but do not know how or if they will multi-boot with grub2.

Could you please advise and point me to any relevant help article if frugal installs will multiboot from Grub2?
[UPDATE]
I seem to have found a suitable solution to this a tutorial: https://puppylinux.org/wikka/Grub2

System Requirements?
I do see 32 64bit & PAE versions, but have not yet stumbled across any listing of System Requirements. I have tended to work on the assumption that if any Linux will run it is more likely to be Puppy than heavier-weight distros with fancy graphics.

Are System Requirements listed?
e.g. for Bionic pup from http://puppylinux.com/index.html

Any tips or advice appreciated. Thanks in advance. John

[s243a]

I recommend dpup stretch but there are more recent pups if that is what you are looking for.

[John99]

Thanks for the reply.

I seem to recall mention somewhere that there must have been about 5k puppy related projects, so it is easy for me to get rather confused with my decisions on choosing one.

Following your link I note it is a project section with over 1k topics and the dpup topic has 1/2k posts. I wonder if in a few words you could say what is good and an advantage of dpup stretch, and the major differences between that and the ordinary official versions?

Also the top post in the thread is "Dpup Stretch 7.5 CE (RC-4)"
I am presuming RC-4 denotes Release Candidate 4
Is that effectively stable or still in development ?

If so which actual version would you recommend?


Anyone with advice about

• running from optical media with persistence ?
• finding System requirements for Puppy versions
  • UPDATE I did find this but it is rather dated it seems to be from 2013 https://www.puppylinux.org/wikka/Minimu ... quirements

[mikeslr]

Hi John99,

I'd also recommend dpup-stretch. Don't make too much of the RC4 designation. Dpup was stable when it was first published. radky is just a perfectionist. The revisions have been his response to minor issues.

Regarding its system requirements, this post by jamesbond about his experiments may be of interest: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 98#1020898

[bigpup]

For any Puppy version, 512MB of RAM is minimum to run and boot to a working desktop.

What program you want to run determines how much more RAM may be needed.
A lot of the Puppy specific programs use little RAM.
But something like the latest browsers are RAM hogs.
1 GB of RAM is a good usable amount, but more is better.
A lot can be done with low RAM amounts, if you understand only one program at a time.

The newest official Puppy versions will work OK on a lot of older hardware. But no way of knowing until you try one.
The Puppy hardware support testers are we the users!!
You may be the only one that has that specific computer.

Actually, the biggest problem is will this version of Puppy support this new hardware.
The newest Puppies try to have support for the newest hardware, but they still support the old stuff.
I have a very new laptop that only some of the newer Puppy version will run the hardware.
Some older Puppies will not even boot.

There are some old computers that do not have features that some software programs now need.
Like SSE2.
Puppy will work OK, but not that software program.

JUST TRY SOME PUPPY VERSIONS.
http://puppylinux.com/

[s243a]

For any Puppy version, 512MB of RAM is minimum to run and boot to a working desktop.

Surely, you are leaving out important caveats here. Jamesbond was able to use dpup strech and stream youtube with only 256MB of RAM,
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 98#1020898

This was of course a simulated system and he used the nocopy boot option. Anyway sure I see why someone might say that 512MB, 1GB, or 2GB are all reasonable low specs for what someone might enjoy running a newer puppy at but that doesn't mean that these are the lower limit. It is more a statement about how resource demanding web browsing has become these days.

Anyway, if one doesn't need to stream youtube then one can use something like Dillo or netsurf and in this case I'm sure we can go with even lower system specs then jamesbond's simulations. This is especially true if one is using and older version of puppy.

[s243a]

Thanks for the reply.

I seem to recall mention somewhere that there must have been about 5k puppy related projects, so it is easy for me to get rather confused with my decisions on choosing one.

Following your link I note it is a project section with over 1k topics and the dpup topic has 1/2k posts. I wonder if in a few words you could say what is good and an advantage of dpup stretch, and the major differences between that and the ordinary official versions?

Also the top post in the thread is "Dpup Stretch 7.5 CE (RC-4)"
I am presuming RC-4 denotes Release Candidate 4
Is that effectively stable or still in development ?

If so which actual version would you recommend?


Anyone with advice about

• running from optical media with persistence ?
• finding System requirements for Puppy versions
  • UPDATE I did find this but it is rather dated it seems to be from 2013 https://www.puppylinux.org/wikka/Minimu ... quirements

Use his his newest release. I recommend Dpup Strech because it supports a wide variety of hardware and runs swifter than many newer pups. This doesn't mean that it is the best puppy for everyone but it is one that most people will have a high probability of liking.

[bigpup]

Jamesbond was able to use dpup strech and stream youtube with only 256MB of RAM.
he used the nocopy boot option.

That is not a normal boot.
Nocopy keeps Puppy main SFS from loading into RAM.
With a normal boot.
512MB of RAM will allow Puppy to load into RAM and have around 200 to 300MB of free RAM.
This does depend on the Puppy version.

Example:
Bionicpup64 8.0 normal boot with Pale Moon browser running.
Actual Used RAM: 348 MB

There is other RAM set for being used for buffers + cached.
But that self adjusts, as needed, or if normal RAM is needed.
At present, it is not being used, so it is still free RAM.

A swap partition or swap file, would be a big help, with 512MB RAM.

[tallboy]

I run Dpup Stretch-7.5 in my old P4 stationary PC with 768Mb RAM, and a 2Gb swap partition. Not a racer, but it works very well.

nic007 also have a recipe in his thread The perfect puppy for older machines.

[oui]

I also often use Dpup Stretch but I have to say that it crashes regularly (probably a memory management problem). BionicPup64 (I continue to use 7.9.4 because of the tests of RSH!) works without some apparent problem (and I did not follow the evolution of the tests rel. 8.0!).

Depending of the activities I would not say that the memory size is so important as Puppy can compense it loading only a part into the RAM. As the files are on the HD, it is for a lot of activities fast enough, this is one of the most important advantage of a frugal install on the HD... A frugal installation is faster as pure full installation else if a part of file have to be read from HD and not from RAM!

[Mike Walsh]

Personally, I came to Puppy years ago to get away from

'sudo apt-get install'

and all that Debian/Ubuntu-related crap. If you guys like the DPups so much, I never understand why you don't just run 'pure' Debian and be done with it. I believe if you start off with the minimal, 'net-install', and just add what you actually need, size ought to be comparable.....?

Don't castigate me. It's just a personal viewpoint, FWIW. I spent enough years 'winding-up' the Ubuntu community, and questioning the wisdom of the established 'NEVER run as root!' mantra that was constantly being poked into me by every other member of the herd of 'sheep' who blindly follow the dictates of their 'Great Leader'.....

It's astonishing the 'vitriol' some of 'em posted in response..!

------------------------------

@ John99:-

There's LastPass, too. I've used it for years in all my browsers; never given me a moment's trouble. It's 'platform-agnostic', too; anywhere there's a (relatively) modern browser that supports extensions, it'll run.

Let's be honest; the only scenarios where you'll need passwords is with anything 'internet-related'.....


Mike.

[foxpup]

Personally, I came to Puppy years ago to get away from

'sudo apt-get install'

and all that Debian/Ubuntu-related crap. If you guys like the DPups so much, I never understand why you don't just run 'pure' Debian and be done with it. I believe if you start off with the minimal, 'net-install', and just add what you actually need, size ought to be comparable.....?

Mike, Dpup Stretch from radky or OscarTalks or any other, runs as root, it does not have apt-get . It is not a Dog. It's a Puppy built in woofCE.

Have you not tried it yet? For some time now first RC3 and now RC4 from radky is my top list Puppy, the one I maintain/treat best for every day use. A real Puppy!

Just not to have some misunderstanding here.

[rufwoof]

If you guys like the DPups so much, I never understand why you don't just run 'pure' Debian and be done with it. I believe if you start off with the minimal, 'net-install', and just add what you actually need

A good choice IMO is to start by doing a full HDD install of a minimal Debian, then add live-boot to that and set the full HDD install to be your 'save partition' (rather than using a save file or save folder). In effect the main sfs is pretty much empty, its all in the save area. And leaves you with the option to either boot as a full install or boot live-boot style, either saving - or not - changes.

Relatively easy to set up, i.e. from a full install add live-boot package to that (apt-get update;apt-get install live-boot), create a empty /live/01-filesystem.squashfs file (mkdir aaa; mksquashfs aaa /live/01-filesystem.squashfs), and use gparted or whatever to change the partition name to 'persistence'. Only other thing is you need a persistence.conf file in the root of that partition, that you create using ...
echo / union >persistence.conf;echo >>persistence.conf
... and of course a bootloader (such as grub4dos) set to boot the alternative choices (full, live with no saving, live with saving ... whatever). I used to have it so it booted grub4dos menu.lst which had a entry to chainload the Debian grub2 boot menu as one of the options. Once set up mostly I booted with no saving after having set things up as I liked; Or a simple save from a live-booted if the changes were minor (didn't include kernel updates/changes); Or boot the full installed and apply updates (apt-get update;apt-get upgrade) for more major updates.

You can of course add additional repo's to that, which adds in additional tools/programs/scripts, but breaks the Debian philosophy - i.e. don't expect any support/assistance from the extensive Debian crew if/when you get cracked or things don't work.

[tallboy]

Anyone with advice about running from optical media with persistence

See http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 42#1024242

[John99]

Thanks everyone for the replies.

There seems to have been a consensus that Dpup is a good choice so I am trying that.

I have not yet got it on to a cd/dvd with persistence. I seem to remember when trying it from a CD-R that it gave an indication that saving may be experimental, and so I suspect maybe persistence on a CD/DVD RW will not work.

I have got Dpup up and running as a full install which is probably the best option on this particular laptop as when browsing in Debian it often gets low on RAM and starts using the swap partition, and so I imagine a frugal install of Dpup would run in to that problem even earlier because of Dpup taking up some of the RAM.

I still would like to try a frugal install of Puppy and am trying to do that from the Windows partition, but have not yet figured out how to configure Grub2 to boot the frugal install, despite looking at a few threads and tutorials.

[tallboy]

I also often use Dpup Stretch but I have to say that it crashes regularly

Is it the Dpup that crashes, or just the browser? There is a bug in Palemoon 28.4.1, see the PM forum.

[John99]

Thanks tallboy.

Our posts crossed. I will follow up the link you posted regarding Dpup and persistence on optical media.

[John99]

@ Mike Walsh

... Let's be honest; the only scenarios where you'll need passwords is with anything 'internet-related'.....

There is some other confidential info that I store in Keepass2.
Keepass2 has a notes section so it is not limited to just storing Password/URL/Username.
Details for telephone banking/utility payments, entry codes for doors or combination locks and use of ATMs requiring pins for example are not internet related but still may be necessities.

Keepass being compatible with mobile phones means I am able to carry such info around with me in an easily accessible but normally encrypted form.

[tallboy]

John, I am these days experimenting with my first frugal installs, using Lick to install them alongside Win 10, which was already installed on the laptop I recently got. (I have never had a Windoze installation before...)
But, for the last ~10 years, I have been using only CD-Rs with a live Puppy, because I have had a lot of old PCs with a CD reader. I have been looking for a modern replacement for my ageing Lucid Puppy, which could run off a multisession CD-R. The old Puppys was designed to run off a live CD, and save to the same CD on shutdown. When running your live Puppy again, you could also use the Save button that magically appeared on the desktop after that first save, at any time during your session if you needed to save some document, or you could wait until shutdown, and then choose to save from the dialog, if you wanted to. Or, as I usually have done, just press the power button!
To use those possibilities, the CD have to be burnt as multisession, and the best way to achieve that is using the Pburn or Burn-iso-to-cd programs that you'll find in any Puppy. I have found that manually setting the burn speed for a new .iso to 4, always give a good result. Also very important: When saving back to the CD, you often have a text in blue on your screen, saying something like: If this text remain on the screen for a long time, press Enter. NEVER, NEVER, DO THAT! That causes the burn to fail. Just let it take the time it needs to burn a new session to the CD, the text will disappear, eventually! All the above is of course valid for a DVD as well.
A full install is not what Puppy primarily is designed for, the best is to run live from some removable media, og do a frugal install.
You should read this brilliant explanation by mikeslr: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 89#1023489

Also see this thread: Using a live distro for security-sensitive tasks

[tallboy]

I might add that I usually remaster a Puppy, to avoid to have too many saved sessions on a CD/DVD, simply because it slow down the boot process. I usually do all saves of docs to the harddisk or a flash stick. The harddisk contain only a swap partition, and partition(s) for storage only, mounted only when necessary.
Any program which is saved as an .sfs or a .pet to the harddisk, installs in a few seconds to a live Puppy, if needed. Great for offline use. When you shut down without saving - or just power off as I do, the Puppy is 'clean' again for next time.

Here is a modern Puppy running from a live multisession CD-R